If I wanted to learn how the other side lives, ...

John R. Graham

... regarding Linux distributions I mean, what would you recommend?

Gentoo was my first love and I'll be sticking with it. I don't have intimate knowledge of any other Linux distribution. I've muddled along with CentOS, Red Hat / Fedora, and Ubuntu when business needs mandated that those be used but have never become profoundly knowledgeable with any of them. At work, I'm viewed as an expert; as such, I often field questions about various flavors of Linux. Much of our Gentoo Linux domain knowledge is distribution agnostic, but some is not. For the latter category, my answer is usually something like, "Well, in Gentoo, the package manager can do it this way, so let's look through the apt or yum or whatever man page."

So it occurs to me that it might be a good mental gymnastics to become more knowledgeable of one of the popular, best-of-breed binary distributions. If you have significant experience with others, especially if it's with more than one, I'd love to hear your recommendations.

- John
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Jaglover · Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2018 5:02 pm Post subject:

Two big ones, Debian and Red Hat.
Two small ones, Slackware and Arch.
I've used Debian in past and I did like it.
Red Hat I did not like.
Tried Slackware, probably didn't dig deep enough, didn't find this magic Slackware users are talking about.
Never tried Arch, and now probably never will (systemd).
I have one Devuan in VM, just to see how they are doing.
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Zucca · Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2018 6:06 pm Post subject:

Void is pretty promising. I have Void-musl installed on my laptop. It's like Arch, but systemd free and a choice of musl.
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CasperVector · Apprentice Joined: 03 Apr 2012 Posts: 156

Alpine for servers, and Void for desktops (cf. Zucca's reply for the latter). Alpine is very minimalist and elegant, while still keeping the system impressively easy to use, in comparison with more radical projects like Aboriginal and Stali. And it uses OpenRC, although I personally use s6/s6-rc which are also packaged in Alpine.
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Zucca · Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2018 7:12 pm Post subject:

++ for Alpine from here too. I have my Pentium 3 laptop running Alpine.
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Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2018 7:37 pm Post subject:

John, I'm going to be boring and suggest you opt for something very mainstream, such as Ubuntu Server for your servers, and Lubuntu for a desktop or laptop.

Although I have no intention of using anything other than Gentoo on the machines I have for work and personal use, I use Ubuntu Server on my servers because it works well and there is a plethora of detailed information about it on the Web (Ubuntu became the most popular Linux distribution for web servers).

As far as a desktop is concerned, back in January I had to wipe non-functioning Windows 10 from my family's PC, so I installed Linux. I wanted a binary distribution that is widely used, looks a bit familiar to my family who are used to Windows, and would be predominantly easy and fast for me to maintain as the de facto family sysadmin. Lubuntu (Ubuntu with LXDE instead of GNOME or Unity) ticked all the boxes. Lubuntu 17.10 uses systemd, with which I want to become familiar (even though it's not installed on my personal machines and I don't want it on my personal machines either). I'm pleased to say Lubuntu 17.10 has been working very well, I have found enough in it to tinker with in order to learn something new (I've already posted a few articles about it on my blog).

I know several people who use Ubuntu (Server and desktop), so I had wanted to become more familiar with it and its derivatives. These were my way of doing that, and it has been worthwhile.
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Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

I'd go with Debian. Aptitude is probably the nicest package manager I've ever used. When it works, anyway.

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

I have never tried it, but actually, look at TrueOS, that's the one i'm curious about.
When my friends ask me a distro to use, i just recommand Mint, not because it is any better (lol i never use it myself), just because it's the most popular (and i assume most easy to install and use base on that).

JWJones · n00b Joined: 11 Jan 2015 Posts: 19 Location: Oregon

The short list, in my book:
Slackware
CRUX
Void
Alpine

Non-Linux:
OpenBSD
9front

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20533

Seems to me that the primary difference is package management with init system second.

I'm most interested in Qubes OS. Sadly Fedora (RPM based), but uses Xen in some fashion for "security by isolatoin."

And openSUSE, because I haven't cared for my RPM distro experiences (RH/Oracle/CentOS).

Maybe Slackware.

I have liked brief usage of Mint (version 13 or 14 from ~2012).

Otherwise I'm most likely to go with OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, or see if I can do anything useful with SmartOS.

Longer term, I'm curious about Redox OS.
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Naib · Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2018 9:00 am Post subject:

there is always exherbo :twisted:

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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2018 9:22 am Post subject:

Naib,

That would be the dark side. :)
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Zucca · Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2018 9:26 am Post subject:

From the mentioned CRUX and Dragon Fly BSD are in my "to test out" -list.
If fact, I've chosen Dragon Fly BSD as my escape route if systemd were to integrated into Linux kernel. :lol:

(or rather is Linux were to consumed by systemd)
I'm also interested in KaOS as a system for my relatives. Rolling release and (should be) easy to use.

Currenly I've been offering Fedora for my relatives. At least my father hasn't had problems, unlike with the earlier OS, Win 10, which had at least one problem every other week... but that's another topic then.
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C5ace · Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2018 9:28 am Post subject:

I used OpenSuse for many years with Gnome 2 and after Gnome 2 was discontinued Xfce. OpenSuse was always a piece of cake to install and update with YAST. Switched to Gentoo when when OpenSuse switched to systemd.

Zucca · Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2018 9:29 am Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2018 9:55 am Post subject:

Zucca,

exherbo was started by a group of ex-gentoo devs. From memory, they tried us use KDE to force the adoption of Plaudis as the default package manager.
Its a real fork of Gentoo. Portage replaced by Plaudis. Incompatible ebuilds, I forget what they are called.

It was a distro that strived for perfection, sometimes at the expense of breaking backwards compatibility which required a lot of work by users.
Users are discouraged.
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
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Zucca · Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2018 11:37 am Post subject:

Yet another package manager standard.

I welcome different implementations which follow a good known standard. And sometimes it's good to reinvent the wheel, but... "If it works, don't fix it."
<someone insert the well known XKCD here>

I see we're steering out of topic yet again. Damn internet discussions!
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pun_guin · Apprentice Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 204

The "other side" is probably Ubuntu.

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