[lug] New here, Favorite Distros?

[Collins Richey]

On 9/7/06, Ferdinand Schmid <fschmid at archenergy.com> wrote:
> I see a surprising number of Fedora responses.  Below article contains
> the results of a 2006 "most popular desktop linux" study.  It wasn't
> very scientific - but the ranking as I remember it was: Ubuntu first,
> debian distant second, OpenSUSE close third, Gentoo 4th, Fedora on place
> 5.
>
> http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2010003,00.asp
>

I'm not at all surprised by that ranking. Ubuntu is just so damn easy
to install and run. Debian Etch/Testing is good but requires more
effort. See below for SuSE. Gentoo is always good if you can handle
lots of compiles. Fedora (in my experience) is a PITA.

If you were to rank the distros in terms of user community (as opposed
to geek community), forums, lists, etc. I'm sure Ubuntu and Gentoo
would finish in a dead heat for first, and Debian would be dead last.
The last time I tried getting involved with Fedora, the list was such
a firehose (all those types who believe that RedHat == Linux) that I
lost interest pretty quickly.

> It appears that the SuSE folks are the quiet ones on this list ;)  Well,
> I am one of them - but I also keep trying other distros for fun.

The last time I ran SuSE was at least 4-5 years ago in the age of
YAST-1 when you couldn't make any configuration changes without
altering a mongo-huge file, and after you made changes you couldn't
figure out what actual real normal expected Unix/Linux config files
YAST had mangled.It left a bad taste, and I've never returned. Now
that Novell have determined that you can have any desktop you want as
long as it's GNOME, I wonder how long SuSE will last.

-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.