OT: "Best" Linux Distro?

[Alistair MacDonald]

Jules Richardson wrote:
> Cini, Richard wrote:
>>             I'm thinking of ditching Windows totally on my desktop at 
>> home
>> as I build my next upgraded x86-bsed PC. So, I wanted to take a poll 
>> of the
>> group for a recommendation on which Linux distro to use. I downloaded 
>> Fedora
>> Core, Slackware, FreeBSD, Unbuntu and Linspire. 

I've gone MCC, SLS, Slackware, SuSE, Debian over the years. I've also 
played with Redhat and Knoppix. Waiting to be tested on the new machine 
is Ubuntu.

I switched to Debian because it gave the most control over the system 
and left things reasonably standard. The thing to watch out with Debian 
is the slow release cycle. If anyone does go with Debian is it better to 
use 'testing' rather than 'stable' (IMHO). 'unstable' is normally fine, 
but does glitch occasionally. Ubuntu is derived from Debian 'unstable' 
with some extra bits. (Which is why it will be tried on the new machine 
-- better AMD64 support)

For those with processor cycles to burn there is also Gentoo, which is 
primarily source based, ie more like FreeBSD's ports system.

My personal experience with RedHat has been bad. But that is just my 
personal experience. I could never get it to do what I wanted. I had to 
let it do what it wanted.

> Personal observations about Linux over the years:
> 
> 1) It's suffering from *serious* bloat, feature-creep and eye candy 
> these days.

Very true.

> 2) [...] I'm currently 
> struggling to find any half-decent OCR tool too.

I've given up on that.

> 3) Systems still suffer from rot, just like Windows does. After a while, 
> it gets very difficult to be able to tell what bits can be removed 
> because you're not using them (or that were installed in a bundle with 
> something that you do use, and are just using up diskspace). Linux badly 
> needs some sort of kernel-level package / module / library management 
> (offerings like RPM tend to be too coarse grain IMHO)

Debian has 'deborphan' which can identify those packages which are no 
longer referenced by other installed packages. You can also force the 
removal of packages if you are certain that you don't need them. I 
suspect that most of the distributions do. The trick is working out the 
appropriate incantation.

Alistair