[ale] good linux / good processor architecture

[Casey Allen Shobe]

> > what linux distro do you reccomend and why?

Wow, time to give my opinion so people can be pissed off at it...woo hoo!

My first linux experience was with redhat 5.0, which IMHO sucked (and blew,
at the same time!).  I was very nonimpressed with RPMs which were the Big
Thing for Redhat back then.  I'm still very nonimpressed with RPMs.  I'll
probably get things thrown at me for this comment, but I think MSIs are much
nicer (MicroSoft Installer), because all of the installation options are
presented in a pleasant installshield wizard (Apache for Windows comes as a
*.msi).  I'd like to see something like this that would work in text or GUI
mode on linux.  Anyways...

So after hating redhat and turning against linux for a while, I found
slackware nearly two years ago, and fell in love.  I have since tried later
releases of Redhat, Mandrake, Caldera, SuSE, and TurboLinux.

My biggest beef with Mandrake is how godawful slow it is without serious
modification.  Caldera was probably one of the easiest installs as a
beginner, and I really like the way it has a GUI startup screen WITH the
moving kernel text within the graphic.  Problem I had with Caldera is that
it didn't come with a lot of what I considered to be necessary command line
tools, and finding Caldera RPMs was downright impossible.  Not that I mind
installing from source, at all, but if I was going to do that, I'd use
Slackware.  And so I did...

Redhat still sucks (IMHO) as much if not more than it used to.  It's what
every one of the "I run linux because it makes me cool" crowd runs, and it's
kind of obvious.  Sure, you can find Redhat RPMs, that's because Redhat made
the RPM (Redhat Package Management), but who needs RPMs?

I have a great respect for SuSE.  Based out of Germany, I find this linux
distribution to probably be the number one thing I'd recommend for beginners
and intermediate users alike.

Personally, I always used Slackware until I discovered the immense pleasure
of running a Linux from Scratch (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org).

Now, this is all assuming you're asking about the x86 platform.  SuSE also
makes distributions for Alpha, PPC, and IA-64.

I can't decide if my next linux server should be a sparc or a PPC (or
other).  Any recommendations?

- Casey Allen Shobe

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