On 08/11 01:26 , Matt Hallacy wrote: > On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 10:39 -0500, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > > Debian all the way. > > It has the least stupid name of the 'good' (i.e. debian-derived) distros, and a lot of solid history behind it. ;) > > Solid history, like crippling an important and widely used encryption > library causing an untold number of SSH keys, SSL certificates and > encrypted data streams in general to be exploited within 65536 tries. > That particular error lingered for 2 years. > > If you want a solid server distribution, CentOS, RHEL maybe Slackware. > If you want a solid desktop/laptop distribution, Fedora, or SuSE. The downside is that the more commercial distributions have less incentive to make the administration task easier. Their packages are harder to install and configure; but so what? Someone's paying them to do things a particular way. The 'laziness' of volunteers breeds a desire to distribute and automate as much as possible; which benefits the end user by making packages more widely available (many distributed update servers, instead of a few centralized ones) and easier to install (.debs offer the option of configuration at install time, rather than being explicitly non-interactive like RPMs which can and will break things quietly in the background). You pays your money and you takes your chances. -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com