Best Distro to LEARN?

[Guest Rad]

Tyme, you have to keep in mind that age is relative. So Gentoo is old enogh to have it's own flavor that people can talk about and discuss, but it's very young when compared to other distros and to the fact that it's still developing (i.e. getting easier, supports more hardware, ...).

[bvc]

Linux is a kernel, so you have to study the kernel code in order to learn how it works.

No;

linux=kernel+apps

kernel=hardware/sys

Everything else you do is related to the distro you use.

..and what is everything else?.....configuration. The kernel can't help you here, but apps and the commandline do.

So, it doesn't make much sense to talk about the best distro from the point of how much it'll make you learn about Linux!

How much you learn about linux has everything to do with the distro you use. Have you tried LFS? It does nothing, I mean NOTHING for you. Tried Mandrake? It doesn't almost everything for you. They are distros. Use mandrake and you have no NEED to learn very much. Use LFS, and you MUST learn everything. Use gentoo, and you NEED to learn some things. Hence, it's thought that gentoo helped you learn about linux, but the same linux and opportunity for learning is in Mandrake as well.....but you were not forced to learn it. It IS the distro, and ONLY the distro in terms of what a user is REQUIRED to learn. The kernel is the kernel.

[jlc]

I think when I started this post, my concions was wanting for people to tell me yes, install RH because Corprate America uses it the most.

 

Oh well, to each there own. I'm running RH at work so I figure I would go back to playing with Slack at home.

 

Although Mrs. Hays has sparked in intrest for me in Archlinux! Thanks a lot, now I just might have to spend the day playing with that one now.

[bvc]

BTW...what's up cybrjackle? Have you had probs at the Lib Forum? Sometimes it works and other times it doesn't for me.

[jlc]

A while ago, I just visit about once a day to see how things are going.

[tyme]

Tyme, you have to keep in mind that age is relative. So Gentoo is old enogh to have it's own flavor that people can talk about and discuss, but it's very young when compared to other distros and to the fact that it's still developing (i.e. getting easier, supports more hardware, ...).

hmm, age isn't relative man ;-) it's one year old. that's it's age...you may be thinking maturity....anyways, it's a moot point. and gentoo supports as much hardware as any linux distribution.....

[sarah31]

Tyme, you have to keep in mind that age is relative. So Gentoo is old enogh to have it's own flavor that people can talk about and discuss, but it's very young when compared to other distros and to the fact that it's still developing (i.e. getting easier, supports more hardware, ...).

hmm, age isn't relative man ;-) it's one year old. that's it's age...you may be thinking maturity....anyways, it's a moot point. and gentoo supports as much hardware as any linux distribution.....

 

:? gentoo one year old :?

 

 

i think it is nearing it's third birthday (or past it)

[tyme]

ok, i read something wrong somewhere....

 

version 1.0 came out about a year ago...

[sarah31]

just checking :wink: kinda pointless but feh i had nothing to do at the time except make fun of you :P

 

it really doesn't matter how old it is. it is not as old as, lets say, slack but it is not a new or young distro anymore. the only time age excuses work for me is with regards to the size of a distros package offerings. even then time is not always a good excuse.

 

changes to a distro (whether one considers them needed or not) will only come as fast as the developers can produce them. gentoo RH or mandrake changes may come quicker because they have lots of developers. other distros, such as arch linux or libranet (which i don't really consider a distro so much as an installer and some gui tools but it works for my arguement), don't often change as fast as the users may want because they have far less developers.

 

i have used the age arguement before for arch and gentoo but really it boils down to the number and expertise of the developers. i can tell you arch linux developers work every bit as hard to produce as good a distro as possible. it may not be pretty like mandrake or rh or as polished but it does work and it does require a certain amount of knowledge patience by the user. the same was true for gentoo, but gentoo is getting to the point now that with all of the developers they have that they should be able to correct bugs quickly and quietly (which i think they do for the most part).

thats what i expect from any distro with a big development team (which is why i stopped using mandrake...at the time i used it they fixed one thing and broke another or beta releases actually surpassed the performance of final releases)

[tyme]

good points sarah31 :-) i agree :)

[kevmccor]

I have read this fascinating thread as one who is faced with the need to upgrade because everything wants glibc-2.2. I have used Mandrake for about 2 years, faithfully buying a new box every so often. I feel that I have learned a fair amount about linux with Mandrake, and because I made an effort to figure out how things worked. I think it is a real advantage to have a system that provides rpm's, or another packaging system, so a reasonably good and useful installation can be made, but you have to probe deeply to have an understanding of how things actually work, what is truly useful, what is reliable, and how to avoid problems. I still need to learn how to use programs like databases, apache, ssh, and such, but I just don't have the time. Really valuable knowledge is in learning how to make the system work for you. Compiling programs is fine, but I don't see it as anything special. My real concern with my distribution has emerged as having a system that is reliable and easy to maintain. This, I think, is what you will learn to create with whatever distribution you choose. If you don't, you will choose again.

 

At this point, I have obtained debian cd's, but I really don't want to go through a tedious install. I will not consider gentoo for that reason. This leaves Mandrake, Red Hat, and Libranet as the candidates. Now, I have learned about installs and how upgrades don't work and how to be very concerned about partitions. I know the gist of Mandrake. I would use Red Hat if I was interested in a real computer job (and probably learn perl, python, php "lamp"). So, really, can one learn anything with Mandrake 9.1, or should I use my distro budget on Libranet?

[sarah31]

to be perfectly honest...if mandrake works for you then why change distros? maybe just take a look "under the hood". i learned alot with debian because i was occasionally force to look under the hood when their configuration tools were not working.

 

the only reason to change is if you think you are not getting the best/most out of your distro and no matter how you try, your distro does not allow it.

 

there is also no reason you cannot double boot. maybe you can learn something with one distro that you can try to apply to mandrake. often other distros with show you just how much mandrake does for you and what you can do to make things work "better" for you. i know a few people that have done alot of testing of other distros and always went back to the "easier" ones because they just worked better for them. some people just aren't interested in doing more "work" and this is not a bad thing.

 

on the other hand you may enjoy it....al i can sayi s that this tread will give you some ideas as to some distros tha may interest you. gentoo is involved at the beginning but once you have the initial install done and have x and a DE or WDM installed it can be very easy. arch is a fair amount of work to and it can be frustrating but once you get some thing down and shake of uncertainty is is nice too. libranet is an esy debian install but can be a bit difficult to upgrade certain things on due to the their tendency to mix various repositories and expiremental trees. I cannot coment o RH as i have never used it. Sorcerer, lunar and root linux will be alot of work too since they are source based as well especially root. lfs will give you alot of linux experince and frustration i am sure too.

 

if you are really interested in testing other distros make a new partition for one and then distrowatch and from there visit the home pages of the distros. there are alot to choose from and all will be some sort of learning experience. you may choose a big/top ten distro or you may find a smal gem of a distro (which arch was/is for me). only you can really decide what is right for you and the only way you can find out what you want is by exploring the other linux offerings. if one distro fils to please you at least you have your mandrake to boot back into.

[static]

I'd say mandrake for newbies wanting to learn linux, RH / SuSE for those wanting to learn industry linux, gentoo / LFS for advanced intermediates wanting to know linux.

[jlc]

I'm sorry, I don't mean to harp on this, but I don't get why people think that "gentoo" is for the advanced user? If you can follow there great instructions on there site you can install it. After that, it emerge this emerge that? It's not really that advanced or a hard learning curve. Well, it's advanced in the way they set it up with portage, but it doesn't take an advaced user to setup and use it. Since it is so bleeding edge though. It might take an advanced user to fix it when it breaks. I ran it for several months since 1.2 was released and it BROKE quite a few times. When it basically takes 24 hours to install to a decent Desktop Station. That's not a good thing for ME anyway's.

 

I don't believe anyone would argue that LFS isn't advanced, you have to build everything from scratch. Can't get anymore better than that for learning.

 

RH / SuSE for those wanting to learn industry linux

 

I love that quote, that's about the best I've heard! SuSE is making such a HUGE push right now, it's easy to guess the direction there going. I know not everyone here is from america, but since I am, I wonder how many American Corporations would go with a German product over an American (RH) product? One of the main reasons I use RH for is because my company uses it. I personally have used SuSE more than any other Distro and believe it to be nice. They do some wierd things Internally but hey, who doesn't and some shaddy buisness tactics when it comes to Open Software. This is a nice quote from a Madpenguin review:

 

Well, if Linus Torvalds uses SuSE as his home system (and he does), that's good enough for me. Enough said.

 

Can't be all that bad.

 

Slackware I think is also a good one to learn from, many (if not all) things are done by you and vi (what ever editor you use), but Slack still has the ability to use a package depency system, call Swaret (fork).

 

I haven't had a chance to look into ArchLinux yet, but it looks to be a good learning distro also. I started to install this weekend and then got called away from home so couldn't do it, I will have to give it another chance when I have some free time.

 

Anyway, when you look at package management and dependency issues. All most all of the Distros are doing some kind of system:

 

Debian/ & cousins = apt-get

RH/SuSE/MDK = apt-get for RPM and URPMI for the latter.

Gentoo = portage

Arch = pacman

Slack = swaret & some others.

FreeBSD = ports. Just thought I would throw that one in there even though it's not Unix.

 

Anyway, I've BLAH BLAH BLAH enough.

 

Later,

[tyme]

I'm sorry, I don't mean to harp on this, but I don't get why people think that "gentoo" is for the advanced user?  If you can follow there great instructions on there site you can install it.  After that, it emerge this emerge that?  It's not really that advanced or a hard learning curve.  Well, it's advanced in the way they set it up with portage, but it doesn't take an advaced user to setup and use it.  Since it is so bleeding edge though.  It might take an advanced user to fix it when it breaks.  I ran it for several months since 1.2 was released and it BROKE quite a few times.  When it basically takes 24 hours to install to a decent Desktop Station.  That's not a good thing for ME anyway's.

 

While they have emerge, there are not tools for easy configuartion. Everyone says "well emerge makes things easy." Yes, it makes installing things easy. I've installed things from source before (when I was using Mandrake) so I don't need to relearn that :wink:. Yes, they have great instructions for installation. They don't always work perfectly, but they do have great instructions.

 

No, they don't have any configuration tools. You want to setup and install shorewall? You better learn what you need in the kernel, how shorewall works, and to write your own firewall rules (unless you use webmin-even then I don't know if it makes it _that_ easy). Like I said, the install instructions are easy to follow, but once the system is installed you have to learn how to setup things that you want to use. THAT is where the learning occurs. Saying "oh it has emerge" is not a good arguement-emerge is simply the packaging system. It's not a configuration tool. It'll tell you what files need updated in /etc when things get updated, but it isn't going to do it for you.

 

And, whenever I do break something in Gentoo, I figure out how to fix it without a reinstall. The long reinstall time makes me actually _want_ to do this, to avoid spending the next 2 days setting it back up to my liking.

 

Now, that said, I don't think Gentoo is the best distro out there-I'm simply pointing out flaws in the arguement that Gentoo is not "advanced" based, from what I see, solely on the emerge tool. I think it makes for an easy install, while learning how things work (if you read through the install instructions) and once the system is up and running you have an easy install tool but no easy configuration tools, so when you want to configure things you have to learn how to do it. Yes, other distro's do this. Yes, you can learn this stuff on any distro. Yes, LFS is the best way to learn how Linux works. I won't argue with any of those points. I won't run around saying "gentoo is the best distro ever" because, honestly, the best distro is the distro that's best for you. If you like Mandrake/Red Hat/ and that ilk, well good :). If it's Slackware/Debian/etc. that's cool. If you want all out and did LFS, that's awesome-'cuz know I can ask you for help when my system breaks :wink: . When all is said and done, it doesn't matter what distro you choose. I'll be happy just because you decided to go against the grain and use Linux.

 

So screw distro wars.