Best distro

[Michael Whapples]

On Sun, 2008-07-13 at 18:05 -0700, Foreign White Devil wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 03:34:17PM -0700, DON.RAIKES at ORACLE.COM wrote:
> [...]  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.
????????...
I really have to dispute that. 

I would argue in a way slackware is one of the easier distributions,
they try and keep things simple (may be not in the traditional way). for
the init scripts they have it set so that to enable or disable it you
just set the execution permissions accordingly rather than having to use
applications to do it for you (I think it was rc-update in gentoo) and
then you sometimes found the script didn't start it because it also had
a line inside it reading "exit" before the code of the script which you
needed to comment out (another way of enabling/disabling an init
script). Also things like the package management, yes there isn't the
dependency checking with the one provided in slackware itself, but by
keeping it simple its alot easier to compile things from source (which
is the only real way of getting the latest and greatest with the
greatest choice of set up options (ie. you can compile in which of the
optional components you want/need)). If you do want a more advanced
package manager then there is a slackware package manager based on
debian's apt called slapt (then you just need to find the packages). By
keeping so much manual and simple, you know what is going on because you
are making it do it. Yes you need to know what you are doing, and that
is where the slackware book comes in (www.slackbook.org). Linux from
scratch goes further than slackware, and is probably the best way to
really know about the whole system, although I would say if you want to
get a system running fairly quickly then LFS may take too much time, and
that's why I like slackware, it gives the core stuff and let's you get
the optional stuff you actually want.

By the way BSD is not Linux, so you won't get speakup working on that.
BSD is another flavour of unix,and has various distributions, openbsd,
freebsd, netbsd and I am not sure if there are others, all with there
own strong points.

>   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.

Are you sure for ever? that's one thing about debian, it gives you the
various branches, unstable/testing/stable, so you can decide what
balance of stability you want at the cost of newest features. So yes
stable may take time to get updated versions of software, but when it
does you know that it should be very stable.

Michael Whapples

>   HTH,
> 
>           Michael
> 
> 
>