Which is your Favourite Linux?

@DutchDaemon I'm compiling once in a while with the help of ccache on one machine and distribute it to the laptop etc.
 
I run several Debian 4.0 boxes at work. Apt-get is a good package management system. At home I run Slackware 12.1 and FreeBSD 7.0.
 
braveduck said:
Gentoo rocks - portage is very much like FreeBSD's ports

Oh, no gentoo doesn't rock. I have used gentoo for about 1 year. At time i did like it. mostly because i learned many nix things using it. But otherwise it's a nightmare.

Compiling ports(ebuild or whatever, don't remember gentoo's name), sux bigtime. Upgrading ports mostly will fail ever few days.

If you build from sources. it's like russian roulette. you can never be sure that you will be able to successfully compile system.

From point of view of documentation gentoo rocks, but from usability it greatly sux.


I like arch, even if it's not ready yet.

also for new ppl, i recommend Mandriva (well, when i used it it was good, for newcomers)
 
Weinter said:
OK OK I know ALL of us LOVE BSD
But I am sure you all played with Linux before conversion?
So which is your favourite?

Not necessarily, I know at least one person that got started with FreeBSD ;)

That said, I've been giving kubuntu 8.10 (desktop) a chance lately. All I'm going to say about it is that it's not ready for the masses (my opinion, of course), as some claim.

I managed to fix most of the problems, and some others I'm sure are KDE4's fault and not ubuntu or linux, so I'm willing to live with them for now. Wouldn't say it has been a negative experience, but I was expecting more.
 
My favorite is RHEL / CentOS. They're stable. They have a long support life cycle. And the updates that are put out (which vary based on life cycle phase) are generally non-disruptive.

Where possible, I run RHEL like it's a FreeBSD system - I choose the minimum package installation, and configure everything in files, rather than using their system-config-* programs.

One of the big downsides of RHEL vs. FreeBSD is the package selection. (I am not in the business of adding non-vendor supported repos to RHEL, and I prefer to not compile from source unless totally necessary.) Ports provides an astounding number of useful apps to choose from.
 
darkstar said:
I love Slackware Linux, Because it almost similiar with FreeBSD, and sometimes i still use it.

Second that, on both accounts.

In my opinion most Linux distros are usable from an end user's point of view (it's all Linux and it all looks pretty much the same), but when I have to admin the box as well, Slackware causes me to utter the least amount of profanity hands down.

Fonz
 
Sometimes Linux crosses my way. For instance, recently tried OpenSUSE 11. Well, it looks quite nice, much nicer than (some very widespread proprietary OS). But as I used it further, I once again came to a conclusion that there's nothing as logical and well-documented as FreeBSD. It always takes so much expensive time to tune something in Linux, and its graphical tools are just a small top of a huge iceberg, that I always give up and return to my favorite OS. But I think one can expect that Linux and (Free)BSD will gradually become closer to each other, and despite all license issues help each other to develop, rather than compete.
BTW FreeBSD license is of course my favorite one, the GPL's "do what we say" can some time turn its dark side to the Linux community.
 
On the subject of GNU, they introduced their own brand of proprietary software that hinders development and quality. That's why Linux is so far behind. The BSD license gives more absolute freedom.
 
hugo said:
Not necessarily, I know at least one person that got started with FreeBSD ;)

:) First started with 4BSD, then bought BSD/386 (sources! I could buy UNIX with sources!). That turned into BSD/OS, but I moved to NetBSD to run on Alphas. Now FreeBSD for the last five years or so.

I never did fully get a hang of the System V admin tools, that's why Linux system administration feels so odd. :\
 
I support AIX at IBM and first installed FreeBSD at
home (in the 90's) because it seemed closest to AIX.
I found it easy to install and maintain.

Later I went through a period of running Slackware
and liked it but eventually came back to FreeBSD.

My wife runs Ubuntu because that's what her brother
installed on her computer and she finds it a very
easy to use desktop. I am staying with FreeBSD, only
change is I would like to buy a bigger disk drive
for my PIII (have 17GB now, getting a little tight).
 
Arch, by far. The only feature I miss is Use flag / ports-like functionality. The entire distro is focused on simplicity (NOT ease of use!), vanilla-ness, minimalism, and tweakability. ABS is similar to ports except, sadly, no config flags. To the person that said ABS was hard, it only takes two commands? One to build the package from the PKGBUILD (another feature, Arch packages are built simply through a bash script called a PKGBUILD, which is very easy to write), and one to add through pacman. Pacbuilder makes this even easier. There's also the AUR for user-made packages.

Right now, the only two things I can see FreeBSD has over Arch are stability and the ports configs. I've never had stability problems under Arch, I can just see from a technical perspective why FreeBSD would be more stable. The rolling release is actually more stable, for me, than most scheduled-release distros. *BSD does a very good job of having rock-solid stable releases, as does Slackware (never tried Debian), but I've had too much misery where I'll upgrade the system and three things are broken, with no clue what caused them... with rolling, I can tell what upgrade broke what, and I can downgrade or at least have a starting point towards fixing the problem. Note, this has never happened with Arch so far :)

If there was no Arch, I'd likely use Slackware (not as cutting edge, less dependency management means less minimalism since it's more likely that unused packages will be left on the machine, 64-bit version not supported much) or Gentoo (needs more KISS and focus).
 
smooth said:
linux sucks FreeBSD rules thats it
in my world there is only
*BSD, windows, MAC OS X
no linux hell no

windows ??? wtf ? so linux sucks but windows is ok ? you are payed by bill gates to write things like this ?
 
My Unix experience started with FreeBSD. After that i worked with different linuxes: Red Hat, Ubuntu, ASP. But again and again i realized that FreeBSD is the best.
 
DutchDaemon said:
@Almindor

Using ports on a desktop/laptop sounds like overkill to me. I will only use ports on heavy servers where I need the extra edge of compiling in a certain way. On the desktop, I use packages 95% of the time (I will use a port if I need a quick security upgrade, or if I just don't want to wait for new functionality).

My latest laptop was up and running in 1.5 hours (STABLE compiled + 478 installed packages, X11/windowmaker). If it takes more time, you're doing it the wrong way.

By the way: GenToo and FreeBSD, while 'alike in spirit', are still very different beasts. I don't think a less-than-optimal experience with GT has any reflection on BSD (one of my colleagues ditched GT for BSD, and he couldn't be happier).

Not if you want to have latest (and in case of freeBSD is usually latest-1.. see e.g: gnome) desktop software.

Also since 7.1 is so close I went with beta and using 7.0 packages would be like having Ubuntu Edgy.

You didn't get me tho. The port installation. while taking time, isn't something that bad (I don't compile suicide ports like Oo_O obviously). The problem is the amount of configuration it takes for the system to behave integrated-like (mime-types, defaults etc.)

But it's not a FreeBSD fault, after all it's a server OS.
 
Trying a lot of different distros (starting from RH4), I found Arch to be most suited for my needs, but of course after FreeBSD :)
 
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