The chatroom are not generally a good way of find help more are just teen flammers or angry people

You should vivist some forums very distro has their own forum generally.

The distro you choose depende of your needs and taste . If you rae starting. there is some lerning curve

Some distros like Suse , Mandriva, Ubuntu, PC los are good distros to start since are more user firnedly

Once that learn a bit more you can try Gentoo, Fedora, slackware, Debian : this dttros are more manual so for beginner a I dont knwo r you xperice are a bit difficult whne it staring once you leran you will find them more easy.

And dont let this trolls confuse you. Choose the distro you are really like. And leave this thing stop you. trolls are evry every where even on windows communities

And for the love of God people please stop submitting this dumb shit to SumbleUpon.

Anyway my suggestions on distros.

Centos - good server base easy install. If you want a lamp it’s an easy way to go. Stable as hell. Yeah they are associated with redhat in that they are giving away what redhat sells.

Fedora - pretty much the same as cent. It’s just not RHEL (redhat enterprise linux). Good stable base for any LAMP server.

Gentoo - this one I haven’t tried myself. I can’t give much input.

Ubuntu - Debian made a little prettier a little easier and well documented. When reading through the endless documentation pay attention to version. Something documented for gutsy may not work on other releases. Not a bad OS for a windows convert. I use it on a couple laptops my kids use.

Debian - stable with a large core base of users. Like you said the developers all have to have real jobs and find it hard to always document projects. I think the ubuntu bitterness stems from not coming up with the idea themselves because they wanted to stay completely true to opensource. Debian could have built the same business model while maintaining their credibility in the opensource community if they really tried.

There are literally hundreds of releases available. You may even find a distro specifically compiled to preform the functions you are looking. Some with live CDs to test before actually installing. Have a spare computer with lots of hard drive space try freenas or openfiler. Have a computer you want to hook to a TV try freevo or mythdora or mythbuntu.

In what way do you handcode your OS by installing gentoo?
Makes me wonder if you really spent more than 5 minutes looking at each distribution?

modifying configuration files and specifying which packages you want on your system is hardly “handcoding” an OS.

‘Why can’t someone just say, “Debian is designed around this idea, Ubuntu around this idea, Fedora does this really well, but Gentoo is better at this.”’

Each of these distros’ websites briefly explain the underlying concepts and ideas for that distribution.

NOBODY is going to agree that one specific distribution does a general task (such as hosting your website) better than any other.

FreeBSD ^_^

http://www.commandlineidiot.com/blog/2007/why-i-wrote-that-post/

Microsoft has a vested interest in your remaining stupid — they want to be the default option, which means they don’t want you to make choices. Of course you pay for that — both with the upgrades, and with the licensing fees of all of the proprietary software you would have to purchase to run a decent Windows system (assuming there weren’t people out there making things available for you either through free software or piracy.)

If you don’t appreciate his zealotry, it’s either because you haven’t thought about the fact that you would have less of everything (and by a significant margin) — music, media, web-content — where would you be if you had to pay an access fee for every video on you-tube? That is the Microsoft model, or the Metallica model. Every one of those You-Tube videos is intellectual property — you want to watch, you have to pay. You want a membership at Myspace or Facebook? You have to pay.

Or maybe you are just so wealthy that you don’t care, and living in a world where only the wealthy who can afford the thousands of dollars for director, and photoshop, and office and acrobat get to participate in the discussion is OK with you. Either way, your position is implicitly idealogical, and implicitly disenfranchises others.

So before you get all shitty about why Open Source people don’t suck your dick when you call, like proprietary help desk people after you purchase the gold level service agreement, stop and ask yourself “What have I given back to deserve the attention of this community at all?” Because at that point, before the conversation has even started, they have already given you a tremendous amount out of simple respect for your humanity.

btw, very cute article — us Linux Evangelists should try to take an objective look at ourselves more often. Personally, I’ve “disconnected” from many online and in-person discussions of flavors that quickly turned into raging battles… it’s more tiresome than the Mac vs. Windows debate.

Right in the middle of creative flow, while laying down an awesome keyboard part I get some ridiculous and intrusive message with code - like numbers and letters which mean absolutely nothing to me other than, my performance is ruined, I have to stop, read a manual, and become frustrated as hell as to why this damn thing just can’t work so I can make a record and get on with it.

Apple came a long way in simplifying the user interface of computers for those of us who didn’t know what a DOS file was. It became so obvious that we all want a simpler method to input data, that Microsoft followed suit and came up with their answer to the Mac by releasing Windows. People want to have a visual concept of what something does and they do not want to read a manual 900 pages long to figure out how to record a piano. this is called intuitive design. if only life were actually this simple.

Again, Apple came to the rescue and designed GarageBand: a recording system that, just by taking a close look at, pressing a few buttons and, exploring the menu options, is almost a no brainer to operate. While it may not be the ultimate piece of software for industry pro’s, THEY ARE GETTING THE IDEA. Logic Pro was then re-released and cleaned up considerably so that we knew instinctively how to operate it. This is certainly becoming an industry standard now very quickly, I might add. Although Apple’s market share is decisively less than it’s competitor, the adaptation that Microsoft made has worked out undeniably in their favor. People want SIMPLE.

Enter Linux and Ubuntu, taking personal computing back to the dark ages. Whist open source is a great idea and in many ways seems so altruistic in its endeavors, it’s still quite obviously geek speak and, geeks do not, IMHO, know how to communicate to anyone other than themselves. This makes support a major inconvenience. When I have a problem with something and humble myself to seek the knowledge of a real pro, the last thing I want to be told is “click, click, google” or “search the database and you will find 700 articles on your problem”. WTF has time to read through 700 articles in order to find what I’m looking for written by geeks in a coded language? I mean really guys. You’ve got to get more and socialize just to see how messed up your communication skills really are.

Face it boys and girls, it’s an enduser world out there and the majority of endusers don’t know kaka about php, html, or mysql is. We think Flask files are the racks that chicks flash us on the 101 freeway on Flash Friday’s and that Linux, is that dirty little boy that everyone laughs at on Charlie Brown. The day that geek speak is written in English and can be deciphered by my Dad is the day that the Internet and computers will really see it’s full potential.

Thanks for letting me air it out. My 2 cents.

The CentOS project compiles the sources (which are by law, freely available) of Redhat, which in its compiled form, is quite expensive; takes all the Redhat logos, names and other trademarks and then provides the fully compiled ready to go form of said sources to the public for free.

Naturally Redhat doesn’t like people knowing they can get the same software that they sell for free from another place, so they took legal action and now CentOS can no longer reference any names or trademarks of Redhat and now refer to it as ‘A Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor’

While the fedora project is similar, and also sponsored by Redhat, its not updated as often, and doesn’t have much in the way of support.

Do some research before attempting sarcasm

truly amazing how protective individuals are of their own choice, and everyone knows that only your own opinion is the one true opinion: You are entitled to your own opinion, but your still wrong. Linux Zealots are all about efficiency, You are entitled to my opinion.

But what can you expect? Linus is probably the one that yells the loudest and so clearly has no real deep understanding of OS design, but it’s ok, We are all entitled to his opinion.

There are few distro’s out there i have never touched at all, Gentoo was my favorite, but at work i get paid for things other than setting up my computer, and at home i don’t want to f**k around that much, so i use Sabayon there. Don’t get your hopes up, they may be popular, but they have a long way to go yet. It’s amazing how their confidence of knowing the way to the perfect distro is capable of derailing them again and again.

At work i use Fedora, not because i like it (it’s probably just less painful than *buntu) but because being born of Red Hat it works well with our Red Hat servers. For a quick and straight forward distro Slackware is the way to go, though recently they seem to have slipped behind badly. The latest release might turn things around … but unless they provide full x86_64 support i’m not going back.

Just my 2 cents but at the end of the day, once you know either one of Gentoo, Slackware or Debian well, you know linux. If you have a good understanding of their differences to each other as well as RedHat / Fedora / CentOS you know all that you need to do pretty much anything with the OS itself. Course, no distro is the same, that would just make things too easy.

Go on about “zealotry” all you want, and mock conviction and principle. But, actually, as we enter the communication age, those who sacrifice their freedom for a contingent expediency *are* reflecting the very worst complacency that the human condition has to offer. Because it’s related to software, it’s easy to trivialise and to miss the grander point. Increasingly, software mediates almost every moment of our existence; whether the majority will remain serfs in this new world is a crucial question of modern ethics.