Tom H wrote:
On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 7:04 PM, Ralf Mardorf
<ralf.mard...@alice-dsl.net> wrote:
A good Linux distro for beginners is a Linux distro with a huge
community, IOW a distro that is used by many people and that comes with
lot's of up to date forums, wikis etc., hence a good distro for
beginners would be one of the major distros, any exotic distro in most
cases isn't useful for a beginner.
Thats' a weird definition. My parents a re newbies and they have no
idea that there's such a thing as a forum, wiki, etc.
A newbie to ANY o/s is going to need some help with installation,
configuration, software selection/installation/configuration, general
use, etc.
That help has to come from somewhere - either paid, or from a community
(or both).
So, your choices come down to:
- a commercial distribution that has good support (which may cost
extra), or,
- paying somebody for support, or,
- a distribution that has good documentation and a strong, supportive
community
Having said that, there are a few other questions:
- ease of software installation (IMHO apt makes things easier than any
other packaging system out there)
- need for current versions of specific software packages (at least for
some of the packages I rely on, the packaged versions tend to lag well
behind the upstream versions, and I end up installing a lot of stuff
from the upstream tarball) - depending on your specific software needs,
Ubuntu might be a better choice (though if you plan to explore
virtualization, then it's a real contest between Debian, Red Hat, and Suse)
- level of technical expertise - if you're coming from Windows or a Mac,
with no serious expertise that's one thing; if you've administered a
Solaris or AIX server that's another - if you have deep experience with
a non-Linux o/s, then it comes down to WHY you want to install Linux:
- if it's to run software, then it really comes back to availability of
software and ease of administration (and really comes down to Debian,
Ubuntu, Suse/OpenSuse, Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS for serious use)
- if it's to learn and explore, then Debian is great, but there are also
Gentoo, Linux-from-Scratch (for real, in-depth learning), and one might
also consider exploring the BSD family of stuff
Of course, this is all one person's opinion - based on:
- running headless servers
- having run Solaris, then Red Hat, then settling on Debian
--- generally running Old Stable until Stable has been out for a year
(partially conservatism, partially lazyness)
----- currently running Lenny as Xen Dom0s and for production, Squeeze
on a couple of development VMs
--- installing a lot of stuff from upstream tarballs (notably list
management and database stuff)
- periodically looking at Suse, every time I find yet another nit with Xen
- periodically looking at Red Hat for a deployment platform (we do some
R&D for Red Hat based customers)
- occasionally considering either Gentoo or building a custom
distribution from scratch
- periodically eying FreeBSD and NetBSD - for lots of reasons
- throwing up my hands in despair every time I look at the state of
OpenSolaris
- running Mac OSX on my laptop - because who needs headaches when
writing documents, preparing briefing slides, reading email, and surfing
the web - and I can run Windows stuff under Parallels, and open a
terminal or X- window and drop into a BSD development environment (don't
need to worry about Linux, since I've got other boxes for that, and
there's always Parallels)
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In<fnord> practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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