What Linux distros do you recommend?

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mushroo
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10 Oct 2011, 1:08 pm

Orwell wrote:

Stay away from the Red Hat distros; they're crap. Fedora is buggy as hell, and SL wouldn't even let me install Scilab OR Octave without a massive fight. What kind of "scientific" distro doesn't include the ability to install a decent numerical analysis system? Red Hat should only be used if it's someone else's computer and some other sysadmin's problem.

Well, I wouldn't say "crap," just different design goals.

Red Hat is designed to be a super-stable "enterprise" distribution, this means a small repository of very well-tested software. The target user is a sys-admin who understands how to configure additional repositories (RPMForge, EPEL, etc) and/or install applications from source. You will find all the necessary server apps in the Red Hat repos, but fewer end-user laptop/desktop apps compared with a distro like Ubuntu/Debian, it's true.

If you look at the Scientific Linux website, their primary goal is to provide a very stable base system (essentially Red Hat) for labs and universities. The intention is that each site can put together their own custom "spin;" for example if your facility (hypothetically Orwell University) requires Scilab and Octave, then your admin will add these apps to the customized "Orwell Linux" install media.

Now Fedora on the other hand is designed to be "bleeding edge" so, yes, it is buggy by design, for the purpose of getting those bugs reported, tested, and fixed for future Red Hat releases.

Fogman
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11 Oct 2011, 11:19 am

mushroo wrote:

Now Fedora on the other hand is designed to be "bleeding edge" so, yes, it is buggy by design, for the purpose of getting those bugs reported, tested, and fixed for future Red Hat releases.

Much like Debian 'Sid', or the Ubuntu Snapshot releases.

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Orwell
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11 Oct 2011, 10:52 pm

lxuser wrote:

Have you recently used Fedora? I have and I have never found it buggy like you say. Ubuntu had a lot more bugs then Fedora did. Also Red Hat is based on Fedora not the other way round.

Yeah. I tested the latest Fedora 15. I used a couple earlier releases, probably back in 09/10 or so. I also used Scientific Linux's latest release (6.0). Managed to get a slew of broken dependencies within 10 minutes of first boot when all I was doing was standard post-install stuff of getting my basic working environment set up- and I was only attempting to install from repos that SL offered, so you can't blame me for using unsupported stuff or going to shady third-party repos. All I wanted was fairly basic- R, Octave, etc, nothing terribly fancy or esoteric. I've been running Linux in various flavors for over 3 years and am reasonably tech-savvy- if I can't manage to get my basic environment set up on your distro, it's doing something very wrong.

Quote:

If you look at the Scientific Linux website, their primary goal is to provide a very stable base system (essentially Red Hat) for labs and universities. The intention is that each site can put together their own custom "spin;" for example if your facility (hypothetically Orwell University) requires Scilab and Octave, then your admin will add these apps to the customized "Orwell Linux" install media.

It's supposed to be well-suited to scientific computing; why then do you run into dependency hell when trying to install common scientific software like GNU Octave?

My understanding is that Scilab is difficult or impossible to install on Red Hat and related distros because of missing dependencies. I generally use Octave, so that's not a deal-breaker... but installing Octave on SL broke stuff for some inconceivable reason.

Really, just stay away from anything that uses RPM as its default package format. I've never met an RPM distro that didn't keel over and die if you so much as looked at it funny.

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lxuser
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12 Oct 2011, 6:40 pm

@ Orwell

I will admit that Fedora does have its problems, that's why I ultimately ditched it. But Ubuntu and Debian have a fare share of problems too. After using Linux for 6 years I finally found the right distro, and that's Arch Linux.

Orwell
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12 Oct 2011, 6:56 pm

lxuser wrote:

I keep hearing good things about Arch, haven't gotten around to giving it a fair shake yet. I do use their documentation; it has got to be the best out there.

Ubuntu has some things I dislike from the direction Canonical has been taking it, but Debian is serving me reasonably well. My main problem with it is that my system is growing increasingly outdated... of course, this is largely by choice. I used to run Debian Testing, which is a fine rolling distro (a little more conservative than Arch perhaps, but still reasonably up to date and quite stable) but I'm on Stable now to avoid having to deal with GNOME 3.

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lxuser
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12 Oct 2011, 7:30 pm

Orwell wrote:

lxuser wrote:

I used Debian Lenny, I couldn't stand how outdated it was and the fact that they had no repository then for non GPL stuff which meant you had to use a miserable attempt at a repository which was third party. Also I found a few bugs in the most simple of things which annoyed the living hell out of me, same with Ubuntu.

Are the people at Debian still GPL extremists?

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12 Oct 2011, 8:26 pm

lxuser wrote:

Are the people at Debian still GPL extremists?

The people at Debian are not, and never have been, GPL "extremists".

They do have a particular stance on free software, and it might seem annoying to some people, but that's how they roll. If you don't like it, there are literally hundreds of alternatives.

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lxuser
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12 Oct 2011, 8:38 pm

Ancalagon wrote:

lxuser wrote:

Are the people at Debian still GPL extremists?

If you actually read the last few previous posts, you would of realised that I don't use Debian any more in fact I haven't used it for 2 years. They were GPL extremists, when I used it they didn't have anything in their repository that wasn't licensed under GPL and that was trade marked.

Ancalagon
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12 Oct 2011, 9:09 pm

lxuser wrote:

If you actually read the last few previous posts, you would of realised that I don't use Debian any more in fact I haven't used it for 2 years.

That they are not, and never have been, GPL "extremists" is not in any way dependent on whether or not you used Debian at all, much less when.

Quote:

They were GPL extremists, when I used it they didn't have anything in their repository that wasn't licensed under GPL and that was trade marked.

Wrong.

The Debian Free Software Guidelines specifically mention the BSD and Artistic licenses alongside the GPL, not as the only acceptable licenses, but as examples of acceptable licenses. Even the FSF, which was established by Richard Stallman, who wrote the GPL, doesn't restrict the software they approve of to GPL only stuff.

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lxuser
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12 Oct 2011, 9:22 pm

Ancalagon wrote:

lxuser wrote:

If you actually read the last few previous posts, you would of realised that I don't use Debian any more in fact I haven't used it for 2 years.

That they are not, and never have been, GPL "extremists" is not in any way dependent on whether or not you used Debian at all, much less when.

Quote:

They were GPL extremists, when I used it they didn't have anything in their repository that wasn't licensed under GPL and that was trade marked.

I can understand the reasoning behind it. But its sometimes rather impractical. Sometimes you need software that isn't free, which it would be better if they maintained the repo instead of leaving their users to use a miserable attempt at repo which was third party.

Last edited by lxuser on 12 Oct 2011, 9:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Ancalagon
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12 Oct 2011, 9:44 pm

lxuser wrote:

They do maintain the non-free repo.

If you don't like how they do things, you can always switch distros. Which you did.

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lxuser
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12 Oct 2011, 9:46 pm

Ancalagon wrote:

lxuser wrote:

They do maintain the non-free repo.

If you don't like how they do things, you can always switch distros. Which you did.

You're right I didn't read The DFSG, sorry. Also I don't think that they had a non-free repo for lenny, well not when I used it at least.

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13 Oct 2011, 2:37 pm

Not even close to right, lxuser. The Debian project has maintained the non-free and contrib repos for years, well before Lenny was even in testing. All the proprietary stuff you could want, including Flash, ATI/Nvidia drivers, Sun Java, Dropbox, etc ad nauseam, are available for download directly from the official Debian mirrors. There is almost no package, free or proprietary, that is included in another distro but not in Debian (the only exceptions I can think of off hand are Opera and libdvdcss2, but the former has a dedicated Debian repo straight from the vendor and the latter is excluded only because including it would be very illegal in America... you can still get it from the semi-official Debian-Multimedia repo though).

The "GPL extremism" as you call it becomes more understandable once you actually have to deal with the hassles and downsides of proprietary software yourself. Nevertheless, Debian does offer its users the option of choosing their own trade-off between freedom and convenience.

As to it being out of date... it is quite common to run the Debian Testing branch, which despite the name is considerably more stable than most distros' "stable" releases. It stays reasonably up to date, although updates stop for a couple months during freezes while a new stable is being finalized. There are currently plans in the Debian community to officially endorse the use of Testing as a rolling distro and provide more dedicated support to that path, including the possibility of continuing updates to Testing/Rolling even during the freeze period.

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lxuser
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13 Oct 2011, 5:56 pm

Orwell wrote:

Yeah okay, I didn't know that. Like I said before, I can understand the reasoning behind wanting to use as much free software as possible.

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14 Oct 2011, 8:33 am

I should have known better than to post a question like this and expect to get a quick, easy answer. When has that ever happened on WP for anything, let alone about computer preferences? I think I'll just stick with Mint for now. It seems to work well.

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14 Oct 2011, 9:33 am

If i were you, i'd install Virtualbox on my windows system, then go to www.distrowatch.org, download a few and start tinkering.

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