[TriLUG] Debian vs Mandrake vs Redhat vs . . .

[Chris Hedemark]

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On Monday, March 10, 2003, at 04:13 PM, Joshua Bedick wrote:

> I may be opening a can of worms, but here goes.  What distro do people
> recommend?

Let's check the requirements...

> Here are the requirements:
> Easy updating for security and other fixes.

Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian and their offshoots all come to mind.  Red 
Hat is a little less "free" than the other distros in this respect.

> Stable!!!

Red Hat 7.2 or 7.3 (not the 8.0 release though).  Debian has several 
branches, and their stable branch is renowned for its stability (though 
not for its bleeding edge features)

> Good support for software.

If you mean commercial software like games or shrink wrap applications, 
too many companies equate Linux with Red Hat.  Otherwise, any popular 
distro should be fine in this respect.

> 2.4 kernel

I could be wrong but I think the popular ones are all up to 2.4 by now.

> trivial to maintain

Debian.

> I've looked at Debian and Redhat so far.  I love dpkg, but there are 
> more up
> to date RPMs for the software I'm looking at, i.e. Webmin in dpkg is 
> .94,
> not the latest with security fixes.

Some of the Debian people may want to chime in here but I think there 
is an option in your apt configuration where you can elect to use newer 
software than the more conservative default settings would normally 
provide.

Note that Red Hat isn't very great about distributing upgraded versions 
of popular packages, either.  They are pretty good about getting major 
security fixes out fast but other stability or functionality bugs may 
never be addressed at all.

> I did look at Mandrake, but the 2
> machines I've tested it on so far where less reliable then the Debian 
> and
> redhat ones.

Not to diss 'drake but my experience with it has been like what you 
describe.  It's a darned good looking distro in its stock configuration 
but I wouldn't run it on a server.  Or even an important production 
desktop.

> I'm still open, but a bit cautious.  Haven't played with SuSe
> or a number of others.

SuSE isn't quite Free (or at least they haven't been in the past) so I 
tend to lump them in with Caldera^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSCO.

There are a number of nice looking Debian offshoots out there.  My 
biggest beef with Debian is the installer and some of the Debian 
offshoots have probably fixed this.

Some will tell you that Red Hat is great if you pay for support.  I say 
"humbug" to that.  We're running RHAS 2.1 on a few machines at the 
office, and submitted some test bugs to Red Hat under our enterprise 
support account.  Not one of them has been fixed yet.  One of them 
hasn't even been looked at yet.  Totally unacceptable.  The sysadmin & 
I are both amiable to alternatives and while we're mired down in a 
major project right now, the idea of switching to Debian or FreeBSD has 
come up and will be looked at in greater depth.  I cannot at this time 
recommend that you go with paid support via Red Hat.  Hopefully since 
they are targeting enterprise customers now they will begin to notice 
that their support organization is not yet an enterprise support 
organization and will get that fixed.

So if you're not going to waste money on non-support, you might as well 
look at other distros.  Debian strikes me as a great low-maintenance 
distro but plan to spend some time learning the installer and learning 
the ins & outs of its package management tools.

Chris Hedemark
PGP/GnuPG Public Key at http://yonderway.com/chris/hedemark.gpg
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