Moving to Linux

I am looking to make the move to Linux. I am fed up of MS and having to restore my computer every couple of months.

The only problem I am facing is which version (distro) of linux i should use. I do not have any set criteria and I am willing to learn. The main purpose of this PC is for development work.

I would like to know your ideas, or distros you have used for development to help me along the way.

Thanks

I think Ubuntu is a good all-around distro for beginners. Development is no problem; you'll just need to install the tools after getting the base system up. The most important development meta-package is called "build-essential", IIRC.

Ubuntu's not the only good beginner distro, but I won't try to comment on the others, since I don't have much experience with them.

First distro i set up was Fedora Core... been using it for years and it's helped me learn quite a bit. Really easy to configure and use... Been over 5 years now I believe, and haven't found the need to try others. Although I have heard from many on here in reading posts that there are several other good distros out there... but I can't comment on the others as I haven't really used them...

I'm with Hiker, I started with RedHat, then Fedora. I use CentOS for servers just because Fedora has a quick trigger on creating new versions, which is kind of a pain when you don't get to visit the server very often.

I've used a lot of distros over the years. The following are my personal experiences (Your mileage may vary)

Slackware: My first linux install. The QUE series book came with 3 CDs of Slack, Debian and RH 4.2, but only Slack would recognize my 1x CDROM and thus it was what I installed. It is still not a distro geared for beginners, but is great because the installer doesn't install too much stuff. You can install the stuff that you want, instead of everything and the kitchen sink.

RedHat: Used it since Redhat 5.1 something like 10 years ago all the way down to RH 9. I still have an RH9 box at home running my webserver and we use RH Enterprise at work. Good for enterprise stuff. One more nice thing about RH is that they work with hardware manufacturers and often support stuff before other Linuxes. Case in point -- there was this newish RAID card that only RH Enterprise supported before other linux distros or BSDs. See my comments in Fedora below for what I don't like about it.

Fedora: Used FC1-FC6. Not a bad distro if you ask me. Easy to install. Fedora is Red Hat's community supported distro, so they try out experimental stuff here and port the stable stuff back to Red Hat Enterprise. One thing I don't like about RH and Fedora is the rpm package manager. I have mixed feelings about it. Sure a lot of software comes as RPM packages. It does install stuff conveniently, provided you have all the rpms that you need to install a package. Problem is that it doesn't tell you what one RPM depends on until you try to install it. For instance, if you try to install gcc from RPM, it will tell you about some more missing RPMs. You download all of those and then try to install gcc again and it'll tell you that those new RPMs need additional RPMs and so on. After about 5-6 iterations, you finally get all the RPMs you need in one directory and then the install happens smoothly. Then again, you have people saying "real men install from source" and that is always an option, but then you then have the whole library dependency hell instead of RPM hell. If you want an idea of this process, try compiling apache from source with PHP and libGD support. Very character building. yum goes a long way into fixing these problems.

SuSE: Used OpenSuSE a few times. Dad swears by it. It is very easy to install and has a nice packaging tool called YaST which can be used to manage packages sanely. The nice thing about YaST is that it auto installs dependencies like yum. Unlike yum though, YaST can be used to configure the entire system as well (YaST = Yet Another Setup Tool) SuSE can also use rpms to install software. I used SuSE for a while myself, before switching to Ubuntu

One more big problem with Red Hat, SuSE and Fedora is that they come on something like 6 CDs. So it takes a while to get the latest version (unless you buy the CDs, which I did for RedHat 5.1 - 9.0 since I wanted to support them)

Gentoo: The Ricer linux. Used by people who think they should tweak every compile time parameter to get an ultimate optimized system. Unfortunately, they usually don't know how the switches really work and end up with a slower system than a bog standard install of some of the other distros.

Ubuntu: My current favourite. It can be installed easily and comes on a single CD. Everything else can be installed by using apt-get or Synaptic package manager and downloading the packages from the internet (This is not the distro for you if you don't have a decent net connection). The package manager is smart enough to install all dependencies automatically which makes it nicer than rpm.

Current Fedora is a single DVD, or multiple CD, or you can make a single small boot CD and install directly from a mirror, or you can make a bootable USB stick, or you can get the single CD live version and install from that, or you can install from a hard disk image.

And I haven't had any dependency problems with yum in recent memory. yum install <somepackage> gets the necessary dependent rpm's. The exception may be with some software that Fedora chooses not to offer such as audio and video codecs where the gpl status is "iffy".

My Number 1 rule for picking a distro: pick the distro that your buddy uses, so you can pick his/her brain and buy a beer as a reward.

This is, IMHO, far more important than any real or imagined difference in the distro itself.

If you don't have any existing bias, pick Ubuntu, Fedora, or Suse. All are first rate.

Thanks for your advice. A number of my friends have been using Debian, which i guess is similar to ubuntu as they use the same package system.

Has anyone and any experience in using this distro?

If i understand correctly they have recently released version 5.0.1

Yes, Ubuntu is based on debian distro, but it has more bells and whistles and is a bit more newbie friendly than debian, in my humble opinion.

I run Debian on two of my servers, and run Ubuntu on my desktop and main laptop.

Debian is solid, available for many architectures (x86, power PC, arm, etc.)
Debian does not move as quickly as Ubuntu, and by default doesn't have all the eye candy.

Either Debian or Ubuntu is a very solid, good choice. But use the Beer rule

Thanks fishtoprecords

I think i will follow the Beer for a friend method of choosing a distro, I think it has a few benifits. WHich will be available to everyone, such as sharing problems, and interesting things we find.


Thanks for your help.