[nycbug-talk] OT: Favorite Linux Distro (based on FreeBSD experience?)

[Edward Capriolo]

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 3:56 AM, Andy Kosela <akosela at andykosela.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 10:03 PM, Matt Juszczak <matt at atopia.net> wrote:
>>
>> Any suggestions?  Anyone have any recommendations?
>>
>> Thanks!
>
> If you are coming from the *BSD side of doing things then Slackware or
> Crux/Arch Linux will be the most familiar to you.  This could be not
> exactly what you want though.  RPM infrastructure has been really
> polished throughout all these years and now it's pretty stable, so the
> natural choice for a production server would be RHEL/CentOS which is
> basically an enterprise standard these days.  I started messing with
> Linux when RPM was synonymous to 'dependency hell' in the 90s, so
> Slackware was my top choice back in the days.  Patrick Volkerding was
> and still is doing an excellent job to maintain it.
>
> Avoid also Debian based distributions -- they can be good for a
> desktop, but definetly they are too heavy and 'automated' for a
> server.  Their text configuration files are a mess too.
>
> Good luck,
> Andy
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I have been a long time CentOS user. I have not looked at RHEL
6/CENT6. But I will say that the RHEL5 line, and the binary
compatibility is getting long in the tooth. There was definitely a
"golden age" for RHEL5 but it is over for me. I am quite sick of using
kernel 2.6.18_245972495 , which is really closer to 2.6.32 then
2.6.18. Also RHEL freezes things like BerkelyDB since lots of code
links to it. PITA when you want to build open ldap which wants to link
to berkelydb and RHEL only has a super old one as an option.

I am not advocating the Fedora Core line for servers, but I really
enjoy the platform more. CentOS 5 "stability" means I could not get
recent sound, video, or gnome for my laptop. Also I am missing RPM's
for cool things I like to play with without having to build myself.

There was a point where RHEL5 was great because it was a stable/recent
kernel with stable/recent userspace. Now it is still +stable but
-recent.

Edward