My Favorite Distribution - Shlomi Fish

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liorracalre My favourite distribution is Mandriva Linux (formerly known as "Mandrake Linux"). The reasons for this is:

  1. It is updated regularly. A new version ships every 6 months or so.
  2. It is very integrated. Everything works together, and one change affects everything else.
  3. There are very nice configuration tools available. (Eric S. Raymond recently complained about the brain-deadness of the CUPS configuration tool. I never encountered this because I was using Mandrake's printer-configuration tool, which is pretty decent.)
  4. There are plenty of packages available in the repository sources (core distribution, contrib, Penguin Liberation Front, etc.) If I cannot find a package there, then most RPMs or SRPMs can be easily installed. (If all else fails, there's always ./configure --prefix.) The urpmi utility is very convenient.
  5. The packagers are friendly and helpful, and there are active support channels.
  6. There are timely updates which can be automatically installed.
  7. The distribution is stable, and doesn't crash or anything. (now if only I didn't have to use those wretched Nvidia drivers...) Note: I no longer install the proprietary Nvidia drivers.
  8. There's a very good graphical installer.

I may add more later.

The main downside as I can see are the cute bugs that surface every once in a while. Due to an upgrade or whatever. One can resolve them and get on with his life, but their presence is still a bit annoying.

I'd recommend Mandriva for people who are experts (high power users to developers), or to beginner people who have someone who can help them. People who don't configure or install anything with the computer (The so-called "Aunt Tillie"-type users), will like it very much. Mundane users who are more expert and install things, may find that they encounter problems that they have no idea how to resolve. (not too often, but still). To them, it is possible that Mandriva would not be recommended, but I don't know which distribution would be better, if at all.

Contents

Why I think I won't like other distributions

Red Hat

I used Red Hat until 6.2 when I switched to Mandrake 7.1. (because it shipped with a journalling filesystem). In any case, Red Hat feels like a less integrated version of Mandrake. The Fedora releases so far also have a reputation of being incredibly unstable and buggy.

Debian

  1. I'd like to get a stable distribution more often than once every 3 or more years. Plus, many times Debian Stable has shipped with very old software.
  2. Debian is still not as integrated as Mandriva is.
  3. The new Debian Social contract (which requires all types of Media to adhere to its Free Software Guidelines) casts a deep shadow on its integrity. The last thing I need is for man pages, HOWTO's and info pages to disappear from it. Fonts could also be an issue.
  4. Many Debian adovcates are full of hubris. They rave about the quality of Debian, denounce the other distributions, and forget that there are many things in which it is inferior to other distributions. Until recently, for example, it had a very unfriendly and lame installer, and no-one found it worthwhile to fix it.

See also:

Gentoo

I'm afraid of the long compilations.

Conectiva

Haven't tried it yet. What is disturbing about it is that its homepages are only in Portuguese. Update: it seems Mandrakesoft has bought Conectiva and relabeled itself Mandriva recently. They hope to merge both distributions.

S.u.s.e

When I tried it some time ago, I had problems finding the paths in the hard-disk. Also, it is rumoured that the configuration tools tend to overwrite changes that are made directly to the configuration files.

Slackware

When I'm using a Linux distribution, I want a distribution, not an unorganized collection of vanilla packages. Slackware is probably more suitable than Mandriva for older hardware, and it's better than Gentoo, because you don't need to compile everything. But on my spiffy hardware, I can easily run Mandriva and enjoy all the glue and integration.

Mandriva for Servers

There seems to be a common opinion that Mandriva is not suitable for servers. I don't know what is its basis. It seems like one of the "Perl does not scale to large codebases" myths.

I don't see a reason why Mandriva cannot be suitable for servers. While it is most often used for workstations and desktop computers, there is nothing inherently wrong that makes it unsuitable for servers.

For the record, Oded Arbel praises Mandrake for servers.

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