Not sure which Linux to use

[craigmodius]

I'd give my vote to Fedora/Red-Hat. Reason being is it seems the lion's share of documentation, both in the book stores and on the web is Fedora/Red Hat based.

I got tired of running Mandrake and having a problem and not finding any answers or documentation to fix it. So I ended up back on Fedora/Red-Hat a few months ago and no complaints

[TripleRLtd]

The biggest difference is that, when installing, you may or may not have a nice GUI interface for all the configuations you are expected to change, so you will need basic knowledge of a text editor and the patience to read documentation and figure things out. Linux still boots, for the most part, in a command line style, so you are dealing with scripts and variables.

In an ideal situation, all hardware supported and running something like Mandrake, you can pop in a CD and just walk through the installer configuration and leave with a fully functional system. However, one piece of hardware that's not fully supported, or even a little tempermental, and you will be reading documentation and searching google looking for one person who got it working and shared their knowledge.

Commands to know: cd, ls, cat, man, grep, and some CLI text editor, like ed, nano, or anything else simple that's included on your install CD.

Supporting a linux distro varies by what tools you use. Apt-get with Debian systems, emerge/portage with Gentoo, and Slackware has it's own too. In Gentoo, I can type 'emerge -pvu world' and get a print out of what would be updated. (-pvu in this case is pretend, verbose, update) Each tool has it's own set of commandline switches, documentation, and idiosyncracies.

Cool, command lines and syntax. I kind of miss dos. ;-) It looks like I'll have to spend a weekend down at my mate Titchski's now.
Thanks, btw.

[gizmo1_1]

I have used about 30 different linux distros over the past 10 years. My favorite has beed Mandrake, but they are all similar in the way that they operate.

If you want to avoid a downloadOSdisc.com

Has a great selection for 3 to 10 $US each. They are a very reputable company wiich I have dealt with for a few years now. Fast Service.

As for the Best of course I am going to say mandrake, due to the fact that you get the best of both worlds. Easy setup for beginners, and Much more advanced initial setup options for the experienced.

You will find many resources on the internet about using Linux, and There are thousands of forums for finding help with any software that you want to install.

[houseisland]

Hi,

I have a minimal grasp of Linux. My experience has been with Windows and Netware. So my observations here are those of a frustrated learner.

I have found all Linux distros I have played with perversely difficult, mostly because the documentation is poorly written. It all presents an overwhelming flood of undigested and unfocused information. The authors cannot put themselves in the mindset of a learner and miss critical steps in their instructions and explanations because it all seems so obvious to them. Almost none of the documentation is task oriented -- as in "to set up a DNS server, follow these steps in this order and let's not get side tracked with a lot of stuff you either don't need to know or won't understand "at this point" on your path to becoming a Linux guru."

Another and less frequent Linux documentation crime is empty superficiality -- this crime perpetrated by the "Instant Linux Learning for Cretins" genre of books.

I recall trying to find out how to change the system time on a laptop where the CMOS battery had failed -- no way to change the time in the BIOS. Eventually I just gave up and booted to a DOS floppy to do what should have been a relatively simple task from within any operating system. None of the Linux documentation I could find explained the syntax well enough that I could actually set the time from within a Linux session.

Linux is also difficult because, like Netware, most of what is important seems to be command line based. Netware, however, has good documentation. With Windows you can learn by exploration of the GUI and trial and error and error -- this is only partially so with Linux.

So to the point: I have found that Red Hat and Suse are the easiest to install and that their documentation is the least painful. One could do far worse than starting here.

[noone]

At various times I installed Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, Debian, even Caldera (before you know who). Universally, I found it was easy to report bugs, slightly harder to find legitimate bugs, and somewhere near impossible to find real documentation on what files affect what system settings. This was, admitedly, many moons ago.

http://www.tldp.org/ was the main resource I used for finding out what to change and what options were available. It contains documenation for just about everything. The reason, I think that each distro doesn't keep a clone of this, is because it really doesn't change much if you choose one over the other.

The one distro that seems to have, imnsho, the best documentation, is gentoo. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/index.xml contains guides to various platforms, full start to finish install guides, and the forums contain so many FAQs that it's easy to get lost.