I started off with SuSE, moved to RedHat, and am now using Debian at home with RedHat on the production and test servers at work. I've also used Slackware on an underpowered e-mail reading/router machine at home.

RedHat no longer is anything for a home user, a market which has been farmed off onto the Fedora project while RedHat directs itself toward business customers, but RH 9 has excellent hardware detection. Hardware detection is a Good Thing to have when installing on a laptop and it is what originally motivated me to switch from Suse 7.0 to RedHat 7.1 a few years ago.

Now that I'm a much more experienced user, Debian is hard to beat because of the amazing number of packages you can download and install with a simple command like "apt-get install kdebase". Mind you, the APT tool and the necessary repositories also exist for RPM platforms (RedHat, Mandrake, Suse, Connectiva), but Debian has so many more packages already built, which should save you a lot of work. You also don't have to subscribe to a for-pay service to get the latest updates. So, while I had to compile Perl 5.8.1 and then 5.8.2 for our RedHat systems, on Debian "apt-get upgrade" installed Perl 5.8.2 automatically.

Be careful, though. Debian unstable Perl builds have threading enabled by default.

If you are just looking for a Unix-like system, don't forget that there are also FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. I've installed OpenBSD a grand total of once and you should not attempt to do so without one of the installation guides next to you, with all of your hardware cataloged as well. OpenBSD's default configuration is claimed to be the securest available.

Update: rewrote last sentence in the second paragraph; added the words "on Debian" above.

--
Allolex

In reply to Re: best Linux distribution by allolex
in thread OT: best Linux distribution by K_M_McMahon

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