[tlug] Linux Distro Choices [was Re: Denshi Jisho]

[Alain Hoang <hoanga@example.com>]

Hi,

Kim AhlstrÃm wrote:
> Time to finally jump onto the list!
>
>[snip]
> As my first question to the list I will hopefully induce a flame war
> that will rage on for decades.
>[snip]
> So my question is thus: What distribution should I choose?
>

   Welcome to TLUG.  Glad to have you aboard!  Distro questions
are always a popular question.  Sort of like fashion questions
are always a popular one among uh.. fashionable people.  I'm
going to punt on a good answer and instead give you some a
terrible formula and lying statistics that you could
instead use to determine a distro to run.

First, the stats....
If we took all the currently archived messages and did a simple
keyword frequency search we would get these type of stats:
gentoo: 4315
debian: 9449
ubuntu: 5565
knoppix: 1006
redhat: 8871
fedora: 1993
centos: 2326
slackware: 2281

What does that tell us?  Well Debian-based and Redhat-based words
are rather popular and the Gentoo folk have their strong share as
well.  It also says that I'm too lazy to find out all the different
distros out there or do a more exhaustive search to give you
any more interesting data points.

As for the formula.  You can take all the replies against this
thread and any other arbitrary thread that you like in TLUG
and try applying this completely randomly thought out mechanism
for scoring:

* 1 point for a one sentence mention of a distro
* 5 points to a distro that someone on this list claims they run
* 10 points to a distro where someone gives a fine explanation
  on the merits and weaknesses on that particular distro
* -2 points for each complaint about a particular distro
* 20 points to the distro that someone that offers as a
  free hosted service for denshi jisho
* -50 points for a distro that doesn't makes UTF-8 support
  so difficult to use that even a seasoned UNIX guru gives up


FWIW, I run Ubuntu

Cheers,
Alain