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

[Matt Juszczak]

Hi Pete,

> yea that is one thing that tends to bother people with RHEL/CentOS.
> Although redhat does this for a good reason IMHO.  They make a good
> effort to maintain ABI and KBI compatibility from w/in their major
> releaases (5.x.x for example).  This helps with third party software and
> hardware vendors getting a non-moving target to develop products
> against.  In my industry (vfx, animation and video) this is super
> helpful since we tend to rely on 3rd parties for not only software
> (autodesk maya for example) but also for hardware drivers (graphics
> drivers, along with not-to-common IB and other network adapters).

Yup, I agree.  I understand the reasons they do it - it's just not my cup 
of tea.  For companies I work at, it's a different story... many of them 
do automated updates, and if RHEL/CentOS were constantly including newer 
versions of packages, that automated update process would have more 
problems than it already does.

I remember a few months ago, a box that used sudo tied into LDAP had sudo 
updated to an newer version, which required an entry in /etc/nsswitch.conf 
for sudo.  That broke a lot of things :)

> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
> http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/

I always use EPEL, plus iuscommunity: http://www.iuscommunity.org.  Not a 
huge deal to add the additional repos, but it's nice to have the latest 
and greatest out of box if needed :)

> personally speaking - use centos.  it has good hardware support from
> most vendors, they are quite involved in getting KVM working and usefull
> if you are into virt. stuff.  and the cobbler/koan provisioning system
> is kick-ass and just works on redhat platforms.

Ok, thanks Pete.  Just so you know, the only reason I'm using Linux versus 
FreeBSD for this project is because I need to use Rackspace Cloud, which 
doesn't yet support FreeBSD.  Perhaps there'd be an option to use another 
provider, such as flexiscale, but probably not worth the effort of 
building custom images, etc.

-Matt