Thread: Linux Version reccomendation

If you are new, Ubuntu would be good. They have a fair amount of hand holding.

From what I have heard, system76 is worth a look.

SUSE uses much disk space, but is worth a shot.

I'd advise Ubuntu if you want an easy to install linux distro for beginners. You can learn from it, and it's a good starting point for learning to use linux.

Originally Posted by Pobega

My first friend told me to get Gentoo Linux, but friend #2 said that Gentoo is mostly console based

That's nonsense, but Gentoo still isn't the right distro for Linux newbies. I follow the others in recommending Ubuntu, or Kubuntu, if you've heard better things about KDE than Gnome. Personally, due to continuous problems with Gnome's session manager, I much prefer KDE.

Just jump right into Slackware... man up a bit. Geez.

Originally Posted by SlyMaelstrom

Just jump right into Slackware... man up a bit. Geez.

take your own advice, use Linux from Scratch or DIY Linux.
where you have to chase down the sources for everything you want installed and build it yourself, not download a prebuilt os like a wimp

Ubuntu / Kubuntu / Edubuntu all have one critical error, they use a no root account and sudo only securty model, which makes them as vulnerable as any windows box to malware exploitation. No-one that ants to have a secure and reliable system would even concider using them.

Xandros, Vector*, Archie, Yellodog ... [ basically all single cd distros ]
each are targeted at a specific use / user experience, they all have extremely LIMITED resources available, as in software to work with their customised layout.

Pick a gui by default distro if that's what you want. the main GUI options boil down to GNOME for the Macos look and feel or KDE for Windows.
the light weight, low resource using options blackbox, fluxbox, enlightenent** windowmaker..... [ long list ]

the gui by default distros are all but lfs, diy, slak, debian and gentoo, the rest treat you like microsoft, keep you in the dark and feed you bullsh!t.

you won't really learn the power of linux by using a gui on it, you'll only learn that from the cli.

*Vector SLAK based single cd distro
**enlightenment is the only one with a truly minimal gui, no taskbar, no system tray, no menuing, outsde of the popup menus for each mouse button, minimal support for any bloat.

Originally Posted by Jaqui

Ubuntu / Kubuntu / Edubuntu all have one critical error, they use a no root account and sudo only securty model, which makes them as vulnerable as any windows box to malware exploitation.

Huh? They disallow direct root login, and that somehow makes them more vulnerable?

not that they disable root login, they disable root account, making that single user system one with the user logged in as super user, since it is the user password that grants access to system applications, not a different password.
so they have every single user system running as root without a root account, the windows equivalent of running as administrator. [ which is the norm for the windows world and the reason windows flaws get exploited so easily ]

I went through ubuntu, and found a number of areas it failed in meeting my needs, like it can't be installed for a multiboot linux box, it has to be the only distro on it. I find having multiple distros available handy for testing, since only slak, debian, gentoo are guaranteed to use the fsh standard, and only debian of those three has support for rpm to meet the lsb standard. not any other distro is standards compliant, making testing and development for them a nightmare if you don't have a copy on the system. the from scratch distros can be compliant, it depends on the person building them, if they don't make sure they meet the standards then their distro isn't compliant.

but to promote linux as a viable development platform for commercial software houses, the distros need to be fully standards compliant, so they can build once and run on any distro, with no distro centric tweaking needed. Red Hat, Suse, Mandriva and Ubuntu / Edubuntu, Kubuntu are all minimally compliant, the *buntu's for filesystem, the red hat, mandriva and suse for package manager.

Security wise, debian, slak, suse are the distros that have gained a security rating, the others are all not available with a configration that gets one. they may have SELinux available, but it isn't installed and configured effectively by default.
[ SELinux is known to cause major interactivity problems, it killed smbclient on a rhel system being used by a system admin to examine porting their entire netork to linux. naturally he wasn't impressed by that, yet he doesn't know linux well enough to be able to secure it without uing selinux ]

I have to agree with Sly as well. I fooled around with SuSE for awhile, but didn't learn nearly as much as the week I installed Slackware (no windows manager) onto my laptop. I think (from my limited experience) that you'll learn much more about how Linux works that way. Go with the command line only for awhile; get to know your computer.

I use Mandriva, which I much prefer over Debian. Maybe i'm just not man enough to handle Debian.