OT: "Best" Linux Distro?

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Jochen Kunz may have mentioned these words:

>There is no best Linux distribution.

Yes there is.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Build your own. Takes from a few days to a month or more, but then you can 
build *just exactly what you want* with the compiler options that you want, 
etc. Don't want X, don't build it. I can easily fit a non-X distro (with 
all the other bells & whistles) in less than 512M, and wouldn't booting 
from a cheap CF card be fun? ;-)

I've been doing LFS for 2 years now, and now I can't stand *any* other 
distro for my own use; altho my technophobe wife uses SuSE and a Knoppix CD 
can come in handy for a few things.

>  There may be one that fits your
>needs best out of the available choices.
>
>If I have to use Linux (i.e. at work) I use Debian. It suffers a bit
>from FSF/GNU ideology, but it is less brain dead then e.g. Suse. It is
>easy to update / maintain and as stable and consistent as Linux can be.

I've used Slackware (ancient), Caldera (1.3, 2.2, 2.3 - it was a really 
good distro back in it's day), I'd had good luck with RedHat 9 (but 
absolutely *nothing* later than that)...

I've not really monkeyed with Debian much at all, except the installer 
sucks; and it didn't much care for my (admittedly very odd) Crusoe-based 
laptop.

My wife's SuSE box is rock stable, and bog simple for her to use. It's all 
ooey-GUI and happety-go-lucky so she can browse her Internut & whatnot, and 
it's pretty easy to maintain (printers, etc.). If you're looking for a 
desktop Linux, this will prolly fit your bill. It does, however, suffer 
from bloat (as most nowadays do)...

>Fortunately Unix gives me the freedom of using somthing like fvwm2.

Whooohoooo! Someone else loves my favorite Window Manager! ;-)

> > 3) Systems still suffer from rot, just like Windows does.
>A system that gets used is "aging". That is the way live goes. It is a
>law of nature. There is no way to work around it beside not using the
>system.

I've upgraded more because I had to remain compatible with new devices out 
(think USB & whatnot) than to actually improve usability of the machine itself.

[[ Oh, and the Model 100 emulator for Linux needs glibc 2.3, and my 
2-year-old LFS system had glibc 2.2; so it wouldn't compile. :-/ ]]

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger  --  SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
  _±±_                          zmerch at 30below.com
(©||®)  If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead
  _)(_   disarmament should *not* be your first career choice.