On 01/05 01:43 , Linda Kateley wrote: > So what linux do you use and why? I started with Red Hat 5.1 back in November 1998. After a year or so tho, all the Debian guys enticed me with how easy the Advanced Package Tool (APT) made upgrades. RH had nothing like it until a few years later. Also, Debian is a very community-oriented distro. (Or at least it was, I don't know what it's like right now). Red Hat was in the business of promoting Red Hat Software. So there were RH-specific tools that made it easier to admin, but the knowledge didn't transfer to other distros. Also, the Debian package-building process and software update process were optimized for reducing the workload the community of developers had to do. RH by the other hand had paid developers to put updated packages in their distro repository, and this flavored the sort of packages one would find, and also their update/release cycle rate. Eventually all the Debian guys here at Real Time convinced the boss that Debian really was easier to use, and after a little experimentation he readily agreed that it was. So RTE became a Debian shop for several years. The Ubuntu came out, and while I dislike the sound of the name, the fact that it's Debian but with less ideology, a wider list of software that's "not quite as Free", and some ease-of-installation features that make it look friendly to newbies made me see the appeal of it. When I bought my last desktop from QuietPC (http://www.quietpc.com/) it came with Ubuntu installed, and I installed Ubuntu on my gf's computer and she's fairly happy with it. I taught SuSE administration for several years, just after Novell bought them out. I learned to despise it very quickly. Even before the Novell acquisition, SuSE always had some non-standard ways of doing things (administration tools, filesystem layout). My main problem with SuSE these days is that you pretty much need to decide at the beginning if you're going to admin it by editing the config files, or if you're going to use their GUI tools (YaST and YaST2). I've found that it tends to put related settings in widely-dispersed config files, and only the GUI tool knows where all those settings are. So if like me, you're used to editing the configs (because Debian is comparatively quite standards-compliant and doesn't have a lot of tools peculiar to it, and would rather use tools designed to work on a lot of different distros and just update/modify them for its needs), you'll hate SuSE because things that you expect to make changes often won't have the effect you desire until you either track down where all you need to make changes, or you break down and use the GUI tool. SuSE, to me, seems to suffer from the problem that Microsoft Windows has. Namely, it's trying to be so easy to use and automagically do stuff for you, that occasionally it automagically breaks itself and is opaque and hard to administrate if you don't do what the developers of the admin tools had in mind. -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com