[ale] please won't someone help me with Linux

[Chris Ricker]

On Sun, 20 Jun 1999, Wandered Inn wrote:

> PoMansEnt at aol.com wrote:
> > 
> > I am very knowledgeable with Macintosh and Windows.
> > 
> > I want to use Linux, at least for now, as a work station.
> > 
> > Can't decide if I should go with Red Hat or SuSE or
> > ______(whatever)_________________.
> > 
> > Guess I don't know enough about any of them.
> > 
> > Can someone offer any help? I thought one of the big things about Linux was
> > the support you could get from other Linux users.
> 
> Can't help you much with SuSE, but I've done a few RedHat installs. 
> Just completed a Mandrake install, which, as I understand it, RedHat
> with some extras.  Based on the Mandrake install, I'd suggest going with
> it.  I had absolutely no problems getting everything configured and the
> install was flawless.
> 
> Generally, you'll find most folks have their favorite dist, but very few
> folks have a lot of experience with more then one or two.

My $.02, since I actually do have a lot of experience w/ lots ;-).

Caldera
-------
I think I've probably ranted on here before about all that's broken with the
latest version of it.  If not, there are pleny of gripes from others in
their mailing-list archives ;-).  Their support currently seems to be
overwhelmed as well, as are their distributers (not necessarily a bad
thing--their new install has been more popular than even they imagined it
would be, so it's just that they're in catch-up mode right now).  If you
have Windows on your machine already and want to dual-boot, and especially
if you need extras it includes like Partition Magic, it might be okay.  
Similarly, if you need Netware it's still your best option.  I wouldn't
consider it for anything else, though.  Quality-wise, I thought that 1.3 was
better, though it's a little out-dated now.  Also, it's the most commercial
of the distributions, if that's the sort of feel you're shooting for (or
that your PHB is insisting upon ;-).

Debian
------
Still has the world's worst Linux install program ;-).  Once up and running,
though, Debian has tons of packages, most of which are of high quality, and
a really nice system for keeping your system at the latest revision of
everything.  I wish other distributions included something like apt /
dselect (RH has autorpm, but that's an add-on written and maintained by a GT
student, not something integrated into the system).  Also the most
politically correct if that matters to you.  Also, it uses a different
package manager than most other distributions, which largely have settled on
RH's package manager.  Again, that may or may not matter to you.

PHT (TurboLinux)
----------------
Not as popular in the US, it's actually thought to be the world's most
widely used distribution.  To me, it feels a lot like RH to run / install,
though it's generally not quite as current, and a little slower with updates
when they're necessary.  It also feels more tightly integrated than most
other distributions--apps actually add correctly to window manager menus
when you install them, for example.  If you want to try it, I'd recommend
hunting up the Australian edition, which has lots of the security toys
you're going to install anyway yourself (ssh, etc.).  Still, though, there's
probably not much reason to pick it if you're in the US unless you spend a
lot of time typing in various Asian languages and need its superior language
support.  Oh yeah, or if you need the clustering software (think
high-availability clusters, not Beowulf clusters) which they've started
selling.  FWIW, this is my little brother's favorite distribution, but he's
a UGA student and doesn't know any better ;-).

RedHat
------
RH is currently the market / media leader, at least here in the US.  It
tends to be cutting-edge (perhaps too much so) in libraries and features
that it includes.  On the other hand, it's still the only fully PAMified
distribution available, it was the first to ship with the faster knfsd, etc.
Its desktop setup out of the box isn't as nice as some of the others, and it
doesn't have as many packages as SuSE or Debian.  It's also quite expensive
in comparison to the others ($80 MSRP vs. $50)--not that that matters in the
world of Cheap Bytes, but I always buy an official release of the
distributions I actually run to support their continued development.

RH derivatives
--------------
***Mandrake
Mandrake takes RH and adds bugfixes (and introduces new bugs).  I don't
think they really add enough to be worth the switch, but then I don't really
like KDE and I don't need its better-than-RH support for different
languages.  I also don't appreciate the additional bugs they add, since they
didn't fix the bugs in RH 6 I wanted fixed ;-).
***LinuxGT
LinuxGT is a new RH derivative.  In concept, it's like Mandrake--they start
with RH 6.0 and add bugfixes; Mandrake tends to focus on desktop-level
add-ons like a much better KDE setup, while LinuxGT adds server / security
apps (apache-ssl, for example).  My experience with it has been that they've
not really added anything that most people want (for example, I do need
apache+mod_ssl, but I compile that myself even when it does come with my
distribution), and they really managed to break the RH installer in a lot 
of really stupid ways in the process, among the other bugs they've 
introduced.  Also, they gratuitously changed the colors in the installation 
program to some really offensively ugly ones ;-).  In their defense, though,
it is a beta release still.

Slackware
---------
To be honest, this is the one Linux distribution I really don't like (and
yes, I've run versions of it from 1994 to the latest 4.0 release).  My
general opinion is that if you like Slackware, you should run FreeBSD
instead and at least get the cool ports system and daemon logos out of the
deal ;-).  Seriously, though, Slackware is the smallest and the
least-current of the major Linux distributions.  It uses its own package
management system (if you want to call it that) which is severely lacking in
features in comparison to dpkg / rpm / slp, and it uses BSD-style init
scripts instead of the SysV setup that everyone else (including the *BSDs
these days ;-) favors.

Stampede
--------
The stand-out feature of this distribution is its optimization for the newer
Intel chips--everything is compiled with PGCC to be faster on your Pentium
and later CPU.  Right now the install is still too hairy to fight with
unless you really want to run Stampede, but the system is fairly well put
together otherwise.  It uses its own package manager, slp, which is on par
with dpkg / rpm in terms of functionality, and it uses BSD init scripts. I'm
not sure how useful the optimization is (I have both it and Debian installed
on a PII workstation here, so I compared run-times for some intensive
bootstrappings run under the two different distributions on the same
machine, and the Stampede setup was only around 15 minutes faster on a
48-hour computation.  Of course, I'm not trying to say that particular
calculation I was running is anything like a good benchmark, but...).  It's
probably not something you'd want to consider now, but it's a distribution
to watch out for as the 1.0 release comes out....

SuSE
----
SuSE feels a lot like RH, but with weird random Teutonic twists ;-).  The
main reason I can see to pick it over RH is the significantly larger number
of packages it includes (SuSE is second only to Debian in the number of apps
you can install).  It also uses a different admin suite (one more like
Caldera's COAS than RH's Linuxconf).  It's quite popular in Europe, and just
now becoming popular in the US.  It may have troubles down the road, as many
of its developers have recently left for Linux startups.  Also, I wouldn't
even consider it for use as a login server--it has *tons* of suid files
lying around for no real reason, but it's okay for a single-user
workstation.

My general preference is for either Debian or RH.  Both are fairly
high-quality distributions (higher, in my experience, than the others out of
the box).  I don't really find the additional packages of SuSE all that
useful--generally, if I want it and it's not in the ~650 that something
normal-sized like RH or Caldera give me, it's too specialized to be in the
~1000 that SuSE give me, though it might be in the ~2500 or whatever
Debian's up to today (but then, I'm a scientist in a field that isn't
exactly the target profile of distribution makers ;-).  Also, I prefer to
admin using vim, so I don't really care about which admin suite which
distribution includes as long as they didn't horribly break files to include
it.  I also prefer SysV init scripts, which precludes Slackware / Stampede.  
I also like to use PAM (really nice for when you want to switch the box to
using authentication against a db, for example)....

Beyond that, I tend not to like SuSE and Caldera for political reasons.  
I'm certainly not a non-commercial, GPL-only sort of person, but if I want a
proprietary install, I can always find one.  Debian and RH are special in
that they're the only completely open-sourced distributions, which matters
to me because I routinely put together customized versions of, for example,
each RH release which includes packages they should have but don't (ssh,
sudo, etc.), fixes their init scripts and installer, etc.  I can't do that
with SuSE / Caldera since I use my customized Debian / RH discs when I do
installs for friends and so forth.

Similarly, the ethics behind Mandrake and the like bother me slightly.  
What they do is certainly legal, but I don't think it's very ethical, and I
don't think it's good for the Linux community in the long term--someone's
got to spend the millions that RH does on R & D and on paying kernel hackers
to code, and which RH won't be able to afford to spend if people like
Mandrake continue to sell what is essentially RH's product at a
significantly lower price; I'd be much more favorable towards Mandrake if
they voluntarily contributed a portion of their proceeds from the PowerPack
versions back to RH (like Macmillan does w/ their RH-based distribution) or
at least to Linux International or something....

All my reasons, of course.  Yours may vary.

later,
chris

-- 
Chris Ricker                                               kaboom at gatech.edu
                                              chris.ricker at genetics.utah.edu