Poll - Favorite Flavor?

Potential Holy War...my apologies in advance.. :)

[evinrude]

After an interesting server meeting this morning in which we discussed standardizing our motley assortment of servers on a particular platform it was decided that we'd "standardize" on three. The reason being, our boss wants us to be familure with a spread of different *nix OSs. I'm already familure with several, having admined a number of boxes, or at least assisted in maintenance, and it didn't suprise me the three we settled on, as, in one form or another, they're already installed somewhere. <-- good run-on sentance, that....

But, as discussions such as this tend to go, there are people with definate opinions on what is right and what is wrong. Oddly, when it comes to OSs, I've never really considered myself one of them (well, if we're discussing flavors of *nix, anyway..) possibly 'cause I don't know the individaul systems as well as I should. Because I don't hold a strong opinion, I essentially let the others work it out, feeding input whenever a question of web servers came up.

I know there are strongly held opinions in regards to OS loyalty, but I think in regards to *nix, I'm a tad confused. I understand the sometimes bitter feuds between Mac/Windows/*nix loyalists, but the flavor o' *nix battles leave me a tad baffled. I understand that each flavor has differences, be it in commands, architecture, licensing, or what, but it seems from my experience that these differences are fairly subtle, or obvious enough to work with.

Am I just naive? Or simply not loyal enough. ;) FWIW, we settled on Linux (probably RedHat or Slack), FreeBSD, and Solaris. And just curious, if you do have a "flavor" you ...errrr... favor, what would it be and why?

[windsor]

I'll avoid the imminent holy war, at least for now... :)

[long rant deleted..]

[no, make that two of them, deleted..]

I prefer Solaris. Let me approach this from the hardware side of things (since I'm a "hardware" type of guy anyway). I strongly dislike the commodity PC "design" (heh heh heh), the SPARC stuff is rather spiffy. With that in mind, nothing supports the SPARC hardware better than Solaris.

I also like PowerPC boxes, particularly the Mac clones that suddenly disappeared (thanks Steve Jobs). Hopefully MacOS X will make the Apple boxes entertaining (MacOS 9 and older is boring, really).

Rob++

[littleman]

Okay, I'll go from the other angle. Using a used p100 + Linux running a lightweight window manager you could put together a useful machine out of other people's trash.

[DaveAtIFG]

I've been hoping for some useful comments from this thread. As a Linux newbie and someone with a only a webmaster's view of Unix (via telent), and a long time DOS/Windows user, I'm ready to pick a Linux "flavor." There seem to be 20+ common distributions, which to choose?

I need to dual boot Linux and W2K from the start so I can remain productive during the learning curve and because Linux doesn't yet read the NTFS file system (AFAIK).

I downloaded and installed Mandrake 8.0 and the KDE interface soon got trashed, probably my own fault, but I couldn't untrash it after several hours... Set it aside. Tried Corel, nice workstation package, I liked it, but it didn't seem too powerful and I couldn't get dual boot working. Boot Corel or nothing...

I'm currently playing with RedHat 7.1, the docs are the best I've found, it seems very powerful, flexible and stable... Haven't got dual boot working yet but I'm sure I'll figure it out... Seems like a rock solid package.

It's frustrating because things I can do in 2 minutes under Windoze seem to take me 2 hours under Linux... Learning curve...

Anyone have any impressions, comments, or recommendations about any of the many Linux distros?

[evinrude]

Not having much of a fave...I can say I've used...hmmm...lessee... Slackware, RedHat, and Caldera (not even sure that ones around anymore...). RedHat was the easiest to install, but installs fairly insecurely by default (as in, lots of services running..). Slackware was the hardest, but installed pretty tight. Choosing custom setups for any system allows you to set it up pretty much how you like. Oddly enough, I had troubles with RedHat 7.1 and went back to 6.something before wipping the machine clean and putting OpenBSD on it.

To multi-boot, I've always kinda cheated. I install Windows first, then install Partition Magic. Using Partition Magic I can set up the drives the way I want them, including formatting in whatever FS is needed. Partition Magic makes it pretty easy to set up partitions for Linux (among other OSs...), and has a pretty spiffy bootloader.

[littleman]

I have had the best luck installing applications with redhat. I have come across some applications (mostly server ad-ons) that I've been able to install on redhat but not on mandrake. I've been sort of partial to mandrake because it's been easy for me to install, recognizes hardware nicely, and comes with most of the goodies, so for a desktop I think I'll stick with it for now.

<modified a bit>

[theperlyking]

I've set up SuSE and Debian servers before and my lastest foray into Mandrake has left me puzzled, it doesnt behave like I expect and is decidedly unstable (though I probably shouldnt have played with the OpenGL games :) ). I think i'll wipe Mandrake and go with debian - I love the apt-get feature.

[Bolotomus]

I'll stay terse on this. I like Debian, I use Debian, my network admin for which I have no end of respect uses Debian. He tells me (in a thick accent) "Stay away from Red Hat. It is not academically correct." Academically what? Huh? OK, whatever! DEBIAN!

[littleman]

:)

[Air]

I've used SCO, AIX, Solaris, HP/UX, Red Hat, Caldera, and Mandrake to varying degrees. If you forget the hardware, if you're into that sort of thing, Red Hat is the one I prefer most. The heavy hitters are cool but if you subtract the hardware nothing special IMO (excluding SCO because it too runs on commodity hardware).

I guess my favourite depends a lot on who's paying for it :)

[bartek]

One of the most "transition friendly" distos I found is Bestlinux [bestlinux.net], apparently the most popular distro in Europe (desktop). Installation was a breeze from start to finish.