Best distro

[Foreign White Devil]

On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 03:34:17PM -0700, DON.RAIKES at ORACLE.COM wrote:
> I realize I am probably starting a feud, but what are the pros and cons

	Fedora and Ubuntu are probably the easiest for getting started
in Linux.  Debian still doesn't support SpeakUP, and for the foreseeable
next three years, probably still won't, and the others are more
difficult to use and learn.  Fedora is Redhat based as far as their
package manager (the ability to add/remove programs) and is probably the
more popular, while Ubuntu uses the Debian package manager, which in my
opinion is the superior product (unless Fedora has improved their older
practices, and I think they have).  There's probably just a tad more
support for Fedora, but don't quote me on it.  I'm still sticking with
Debian, myself, for the bug-tracking system, the package manager, and
their ideals to never release crap, even if it means releasing nothing
at all.  download and try the Live-CD's, which allow you to try each
distro before deciding on the one that suits.  They run in memory and
don't change your current operating system.  Hang out in the
irc.freenode.net chatrooms and see which impresses you the most.  You
can tell alot about a distro by the users running it and what help they
generally provide.  You'll probably be visiting them alot as you learn
your way around the system.  I would recommend trying the Fedora and
Ubuntu Live-CD's, see how well written  and helpful they are as far as
documentation and ease of setup goes, and pick one or the other of the
two.  It is going to be an adventure as you learn, and you'll likely go
back and make many changes to how you want things set up, especially
where disk partitioning is concerned, and kept data.  I like my home or
user directories separate, so daya I've collected is still there if I
need to reinstall from scratch or decide to ditch  everything for
another distro.  YMMV, but Fedora and Ubuntu will give you the fullest
of all possible setup options and software selections of the latest and
greatest stuff.  All the other distros are mainly offshoots of Redhat,
Debian, BSD, SuSE, and Slackware, each being noted mainly for their
method of package or software management.  I don't recommend the last
three, as their package management methods and software selection sucks
by comparison to the first two.  Redhat/Fedora will probably provide the
most support, and while Debian/Ubuntu fixes the bugs quicker, Debian
(not Ubuntu) takes forever to add support for newer software.  HTH,

			Michael