*nixers, please give us a few words about your *nix of choice.

[n0cmonkey]

Keep it short, simple, and about the operating system you use. No flamewars please. A thread like this can help someone gather some comments from the users of each distro into a single synopsis (or something) for the FAQ thread. If you use more than one, comment on all.

*nix? Any type of Unix or Unix-like system. Yes, you FreeBSDers' opinions matter (for once ). I hate the term "*nix" but I dont have a substitute for it offhand.

Why am I asking you to only write about what you currently use? Because that is what you chose to use. If you tried something else you didnt like it enough to keep using it. I want this to be a positive thread, not a major flame fest about whose distro is better.

Wont the answers be biased towards the distro the user is writing about? Yes. We'll get over it. Hopefully the linux users here are able to admit when there is a fault with the software they chose to use.

You have used a few of them, why dont you write this yourself n0cmonkey? I've tried. I cant do it. Its been too long since I used some of them. Plus, one person's experience will not give potential users a good idea of what to expect.


Want anymore information in the posts? Yes. As much information as you want to give. Hardware, level of Linux knowledge, environment it is being used in, etc. If you have a problem with your unix-like OS of choice, tell us. If it does something surprisingly well, or unexpected, let us know. Someone may just be looking for that feature.

Thanks, I look forward to the responses. I may even work on an OpenBSD post.

EDIT1: Hopefully fixed the title

 

[Kai4Linux]

I for one use Mandrake. Why? First I tried RedHat, but OpenOffice didn't work, nor did my audigy. BEing new to linux and all, this was a big problem. Also solving dependencies was a pain. Mandrake solves that with URPMI, and since i am using it as my desktop, it just made the transition from windows to linux easier.

 

[TheOmegaCode]

I started out with Mandrake and SuSE but got hooked on FBSD because of a friend. He gave me the disks told me to install it, and the power of the ports collection just took over. I've been using FreeBSD for 8 months, and I love it. I haven't really tried any other OS's because I'm still 'new' to FreeBSD. I figure, once I get the OS down pat (or when I buy an iBook, whichever comes first), I'll get another box, and start learning another, probably OpenBSD or Debian...

 

[n0cmonkey]

Good start guys! Lets try and keep it less "Z didnt do this, but Y does" unless you are still using Z too. And incluse as much detail as you can/want. We want to be able to give potential users a reason to use what you are using. We arent talking to people that listen to Marketeers, we are talking to intelligent people

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

i use debian GNU/Linux!

Why?

well there are many many many many many many reasons.....

1. debian is totally volunteer driven - you don't have to watch your back while using your own operating system; the developers are in the same boat as you, they want a nice computing experience, making money is not an issue (and as nice as money is, it always seems to taint things for those without)

2. debian attempts to follow standards and stay away from proprietary (insert anything) - yes i know debian is not perfect here, but it is pretty good. nothing is in extremely wierd places.

3. debian has a nice ratio of holding your hand for certain things, and leaving certain things up to you to do manually - this is a totally subjective thing, but for me its pretty good.

4. package management - this is the one people rave over, and was probably the biggest thing that lured me into trying debian. its a very good system, with source and binary packages available, heck, all the gentoo cpu optimization freaks can now do the same thing with apt-build on debian. this sort of gets back into the holding your hand part - but for example, instead of editing XFree86Config-4 by hand, i can do 'dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86' and it gives me a nice ncurses based configuration wizard where i can pick all the stuff i want. since it remembers previous answers, its basically just ENTER ENTER ENTER ENTER ENTER ENTER *change something* ENTER ENTER ENTER ENTER done. now its totally subjective as to whether this is preferable over hand editing the X config file. the way i see it is: if the 'holding your hand' route is more convenient, go for it, but DONT do it at the expense of finding out what's really going on. this is definitely a problem, and is one reason why i'd like to try out slackware on an extra machine sometime, just to get a feel of some things by hand that i havent done before, like installing X from source, etc. however for the most part, i do know whats going on behind the scenes when i apt-get something, or dpkg-reconfigure something, etc etc.

5. the community - not to say that gentoo or slackware or free/open/net bsd or the other 'community driven' open source/free OS's don't also have great communities, but debian definitely has a great one. every time i have a problem or a question that i get answered within a minute or maybe a few at most in OPN/#debian, i like debian a little more. windows was always sort of "uhhhhh, reinstall", and some other linux distros can be that way....i like the fact that there's almost always a good solution to things in debian.

6. which leads to another thing that i probably could have included somewhere else but instead i'll make a new number for. distro upgrades. most of the time (as long as there arent any big problems, always check OPN/#debian first), you can switch around between the various debian distros rather freely. when i first installed debian, i installed potato, which i ended up upgrading to woody, and just lately i moved to sid, each time it was a matter of "vi /etc/apt/sources.list; :%s/olddistro/newdistro/g; :wq; apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade", then sit back for a bit, (meanwhile doing the things you always do with your system), and after its done d/l'ing all the stuff and installing it, you're running a different release of debian! no reboots, nothing messy.

i think those are enough reasons, there are so many more, but those are the biggest ones. now, back to finishing my Biggie fry from Wendy's.......

 

[n0cmonkey]

Great post BingBongWongFooey, gonna share those fries?

 

[GigaCluster]

Wow, that was a great response, BBWF.

I went from Mandrake 7.0 (my first distro) to Debian 2.2 to FreeBSD 4.3 to Mandrake 8.2 to RedHat 7.3 where I am at this point.

I thank god for Mandrake 7.0 because it gave me *no* problems with my hardware. I remember back then I knew that if Linux gave me a problem with my hard drive, it would be back to Windows, forever. Mandrake 7.0 allowed to me to cross over into Linux world with no problems. I don't even remember now why I switched -- everything seemed to be going very well.

Regardless of what it was, I switched to Debian 2.2 in which X11 would not work. It would start, but then freeze with a blank screen. Having only the CLI, I made it work for me and liked it so much that I decided to stay without graphics. However, I thought that using "UNIX" is somehow more elite than using "Linux" (both in quotes because they are in fact almost identical in usage for a newbie).

So, I switched to FreeBSD 4.3, with which I stayed for over a year before switching back to Linux.

I went back to Mandrake because I liked it so much, but I strongly disliked 8.2. What sticks out in my mind about it was the fact that passwords expired in something like 2 weeks. Back then I didn't know how to change that period. So, when my password was about to expire in 2 days, I made another switch to Red Hat 7.3.
I really like RedHat -- it has nothing that annoys me. Well, one thing: lack of a graphical text editor that has decent screen word wrap. I upgraded the kernel to 2.4.19, and am all set. All my hardware works, and I am finally truly happy with Linux, after 2 years.

As much as I like RedHat 7.3, I will be switching again whenever a distribution with KDE 3.0.2 or higher comes out, as I am not comfortable with using version 3.0.0-10. I have never upgraded the GUI yet, and don't quite know how. I downloaded all the KDE files, but afraid to mess it up. I figure I'll eventually work up the courage to go ahead with it, and if I mess it up, I'll make my backups through CLI, then wipe the system and install a new distribution.

 

[Chronic321]

Windows XP Home Edition-

Fast, great GUI, Compatible with tons of software.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Chronic321
Windows XP Home Edition-

Fast, great GUI, Compatible with tons of software.

Thanks! The first thread crap of the thread!

Alright *nix users, lets hold ourselves to higher standards than this Windows user. Remember, the Windows users that are actually worth paying attention to, wont be posting crap like this in the thread. Thanks

 

[worth]

Originally posted by: Chronic321
Windows XP Home Edition-

Fast, great GUI, Compatible with tons of software.

Are all your 87 posts trolls?

I use Debian GNU/Linux myself, mostly because of the easy package management it offers. I thought about giving Gentoo a try, but I understand that it takes a long time to compile some software packages, such as KDE.

 

[GigaCluster]

Originally posted by: Chronic321
Fast, great GUI, Compatible with tons of software.

I can't help but not respond to this sentence: Windows is compatible with tons of Windows software?
You shocked me with how versatile Windows is, Chronic.

 

[Electrode]

I, too, have been trying to make a 'which is for me?' FAQ, but have been unable to. Never would have thought of doing it this way.

On to my contribution:

Of all the distros out there, Slackware Linux is my favorite. Why? Because it is shipped with only essential software configured, and with many examples for everything else. No frilly GUI tools that get broken if you recompile something with a security patch. No RPM dependancy hell. Up-to-date software. Everything it comes with is completely unmodified, pretty much the same thing you'd get if you downloaded a source tarball from the package's site.

It also has a cool BSD/SysV hybrid init system that I don't think any other distro has.

Another 'distro' I use is Linux From Scratch. It is, by far, the most customizable distro out there. It is literally whatever you want it to be. If you know your way around Linux, and you're not really satisfied with any of the prepackaged distros, LFS might just be what you're looking for. It's also the only way I know of to get a fully functional system, complete with X and a good window manager, into bootable CD form.

 

[Sunner]

Well, I use 3 *NIX OS's on a regular basis.

Linux, Gentoo
I've used just about every major distro out there at one point or the other, I was a Debian user for a long time, but before I switched, I started getting the feeling that Debian was losing it, they didn't seem to have any discipline, things were delayed constantly.

So I switched to Gentoo after hearing lots of people talking about it.
Very nice, it's rather bleeding edge, which is a good thing for my personal workstation, the package(ok, ports, happy now n0c?) system is even better than Debian's, mainly due to the ability to keep several versions of libs and such around, so there won't be any problems when you have KDE3 installed, and some program requires KDE2 libs.

Unlike most Gentoo users, Im not all that hot on the whole "compile everything" thing though, but really, it doesn't matter a whole lot to me, it's a one time investment that might need an upgrade now and then, Im willing to make that sacrifice to get the goodies.


And secondly, I use OpenBSD on my firewall, and on another box.
Now this is one seriously professional OS, the whole system design feels as solid as Fort Knox.
Best manpages in history, FreeBSD's are good as well, but not THIS good.
IPF is a very nice packet filter, and PF is even better, performance is amazing.
Their IPSEC implementation is very nice as well, relatively easy to setup and maintain, and performance is there.

The only drawbacks as I see it are:
The lack of SMP support, which keeps it from "real" servers.
Mixing and matching between ports, packages, and loose programs, I like OS's that are based on their package system, OpenBSD is not.
For example, the most popular Linux, RedHat, everything is installed as a package and registered in the RPM database, IMO it should either be this way, or there shouldn't be any packages at all, I dont like mixing and matching.


And finally, our server OS of choice at work, Solaris.
Now this is definately an OS I have mixed feelings for.
On the one hand, it is extremely reliable, and scalability is far supperior to that of any BSD or Linux, and only met by other enterprise class UNIX's.
And of course, another big benefit, the SPARC platform, while not always the best performing, SPARC's are extremely reliable, and the Solaris/SPARC combo is an extremely capable one.

On the other hand, the default install leaves it wide open, with a million services running by default, it lacks many tools from start, most notably a C compiler, and until Solaris 9, no SSH server/client, plus a bunch of other minor things, but in the end, the minor things add up.

Solaris 9 seems to have remedied many of my problems with Solaris, though the wide open problem remains.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Great post Sunner.

 

[Abzstrak]

Well, I originally learned nix on AIX, and will probably always remember it fondly, but being without an IBM risc....

I've used quite a few distros and about 3 weeks ago began using gentoo... up until that point my distro of choice was redhat. I really liked redhat but I found myself doing ALOT of customizations to get it running the way I wanted and after reading about all these tweak freaks running gentoo, I figured I'd give it a try.

My primarily used system is my IBM thinkpad 600E, with a 400MHz cpu... it cut it ok with most distros, but with gentoo it is noticably faster... Right now I'm running Waimea as a window manager and the combination of it with gentoo is about twice as fast as my previous redhat/ximian.

I really like the portage tools in gentoo, but I've had alot of issues with emerge not being able to download things, or their dependencies, or whatnot... Half the time now I've taken to downloading the source on my own and compiling, which has turned out to be easier than fighting emerge...

At any rate, I've been considering LFS, but I think Gentoo will hold me for a while since it allows me enough tweaks and customizations to keep me satisfied.

 

[Workin']

I run Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 ('sarge') on my server because it is rock solid stable and doesn't need to be rebooted after upgrades. And system maintenance is simple - 'apt-get update' followed by 'apt-get dist-upgrade' 3 times a week is all you need to do. It's not 'bleeding edge' but who needs their server to be a guinea pig?

On my workstation I run Red Hat 7.3, mainly because KDE3 and a bunch of other stuff get installed right out of the box and more or less all work right without too much tweaking. Also just about every program ever written for linux is released in the RPM format for RedHat (Iknow RPM works with other distros, too).

On my ancient Macintosh I run MkLinux using the Mach microkernel, because no other *nix adequately supports its outdated NuBus architecture. This is by far the most difficult setup I have encountered - it works OK from a base install but getting it to work the way I want it to has been a real learning experience.

edit: I just got Debian's ppc port running on my NuBus Mac! I found a 2.4.x kernel modified to use the NuBus architecture. The biggest problems were figuring out how to get the installer to run and getting the ADB mouse working under X (and to get X working!).

 

[RedBeard0531]

I used slack 8.1 which got me hooked on KDE3. Then i herd ppl talking about gentoo, so i tried it and im loven it. it actualy lets me use a custom kernal right from the start. It is much faster than slack( ecxept for install), an i actualy learned what wasgoing on during install.

To those considering gentoo:
read (and mabey print) Install directions X directions (it doesnt install x for u) and USE variable setings (IMPORTANT!!!).
Also understand how to configure a kernel.
Have planty of time!!!!!!! it took abt 15 hrs to get installed and have X/GNOME/KDE on my dually p3-600

 

[n0cmonkey]

Great comments everyone! Keep'em coming!

 

[aircooled]

RedHat 7.3, because I am typically a Windows user, but I wanted to run my personal website on Linux/Apache. I've also installed Mandrake 8.x in the past, but I like RedHat 7.3 better.
For a beginner in linux (like me) I recommend it.

 

[Chaotic42]

I use Debian GNU/Linux, and I have both an OpenBSD and a FreeBSD CD, but I haven't installed either.

I've used SunOS before, but not enough to form an objective opinion on it.

BBWF pretty much summed up why I use Debian.

 

[pac1085]

I've tried alot of different distributions but I'm using Slackware right now. It has a fast and simple installation. I like the init system it uses. For the most part, all of the configuration files are VERY well documented. Packages are fairly up to date. No PITA packaging system like RPM. A basic install gives you just about everything you need...nothing more. It supports XFS off the main cd, so thats also a plus for me. Creating packages to use with Slack is also very easy to do. Overall a very matured and rock solid distro.

I'm running Debian 3.0r0 on my second machine and am very happy with it. apt-get has to be the best binary packaging system around

 

[m2kewl]

Slackware/Redhat beta

 

[Verby]

Freebsd.

I like the ports collection, and the ease of kernel upgrades/config/tuning.
and its nice that it handles software dependences for you, instead of making you do it yourself.

The online handbook has answered every question ive ever had, and the only peice of hardware i own thet it wont support is an old quickcam VC.

 

[mindwarp]

I use debian also, but for my newbie friends I recommend mandrake to get used to linux first. Xandros when it comes out should be a great mix of debians power but mandrakes usability, look out for that too.

Systems:
Main Desktop
Debian 3.0
Athlon XP 1600
Radeon 8500
512mb DDR
60 gig maxtor D790 7200

Router
FreeBSD 4.6
PII-233
64mb ram
generic video
2 gig generic harddrive

Backup Router
FreeBSD 4.6
Cyrix-166
65mb ram
2 500mb scsi drives

Wifes desktop
Win2k / Debian 3.0 dualboot
Athlon XP 1600
256mb PC2100
Geforce 2 GTS
20 gig harddrive

Mame Cabinet Machine
Debian 3.0
PIII-733
512mb pc133
Geforce DDR
20 gig maxtor 7200 harddrive

And I have 3 sun sparc classics running openbsd along with a P166 running debian 2.2


Cool Linux Sites

themes.org
kde-look.org
Freshmeat
Linuxnewbie.org
Linux Documentation Project

 

[gennro]

Worst thing about linux is the game support guys, if u like games u really can't live with linux, but for everything else linux can do it better then windows.

I like mandrake 8.2 myself, real easy install.
But its hard to figure out what all the software does.
If i had a server to set up i would defintly use linux as first choice!