Just curious how many forum users use Linux? (I use Ubuntu)
Which flavor do you prefer and what flavors have you tried?
It pays my bills. Or should I say, Asterisk and Tomcat do. And a little Perl for glue. And OpenFire, LAMP, postfix, sendmail, and tons of other stuff that doesn't really care what distro you run it on.
Prefer: Debian. Raw Debian. The reality is though that RedHat is the Corporate world's standard, even though it is significantly inferior in many ways. Main example: In-place upgrades not working between major releases is a Release Critical bug in Debian and derivatives. RedHat says "suck it -- back up your data and reinstall," which is a complete joke for an "Enterprise Class" product in 2012.
CentOS: At work, it's all about servers. They have zero need for "commercial support" so it's CentOS.
Since reproducibility and consistency are huge in a server "farm", I've slowly been killing off anything that's not CentOS 5.8 or 6.2. I'd prefer not to have two, but there's always an interim period where not everything is regression tested for Production on the newer version of an OS.
There is one... RedHat 8 box still in Production. It's a bear to move it. It has been up an impressive 3.25 years without a reboot. It's going to have to be "forklifted" out later this summer.
The list of Distros I've used enough to say I know or knew them well-enough to fix 'em:
(Any resemblance to the order of popularity of the top 100 Distros at DistroWatch.com is purely because otherwise I'd never remember them all.)
Mint - loaded to see what hubbub was about. They install non-free CODECs and have a decent graphical way to do basic sysadmin. Not surprising it's popular with folks who want to use Linux on the desktop. Not my cup o' tea.
Ubuntu - Shuttleworth stole some of the most talented Linux individuals around from Debian when he started this project. Go figure. People like to get paid. Solid system. Good for newbies who do NOT want to learn Unix.
GNOME 3 is god-awful.
Fedora - Dog's breakfast. All the openness of truly building from source, but done with slapped together package management, and almost as little planning. Great to see what's coming next in RHEL and works better on non- server hardware. Again GNOME 3 is god-awful. We use some EPEL packages in Production when necessary.
"Old" RedHat - Started around RedHat 5.1 with this one. Used all of 'em.
RHEL/CentOS - what usually makes my money. Whoever decided to put NetworkManager on a server distro by default, should be tortured and killed slowly and painfully. RedHat proper has gone fully to the "let's make tons of money" model after discussions with them about pricing a conversion of our CentOS environment last year. Good about releasing most of what they do as Open Source and supporting the "Community" though. Most kernel.org work is done by people paid on their staff and other major hardware manufacturers. If you want a warm fuzzy that someone will answer Linux questions when your staff calls an 800 number, break out the checkbook and bend over. CentOS suffers from "distro lag" since they just rebuild RHEL, and it's almost press overly bad how much they have to contact the upstream "pros" to fix their release Spec files that don't actually build. I think RH enjoys messing with them.
Debian - The root of Ubuntu and requires getting just down and dirty enough that you'll learn something. Upgrades cleanly. Very developer-centric which can lead to really retarded stuff in the design but screaming good documentation as to why, if you can handle the S/N ratio of their mailing lists and wikis. I get along well with this distro. Most folks don't. I started at the "potato" release.
Slackware - All the goodness of Linux, mixed with all the insanity of a BSD. Small and lightweight, but generally run by one guy.
SuSE: Linux by crazy Germans. Nothing else needs be said. I hear it's one of Torvalds favorites.
Mandriva - Long ago they had a nifty graphical installer before anyone else. I loaded it and played with it and everyone copied their idea. Nothing new or interesting since.
Knoppix - the granddaddy of all the "run from CD-ROM" Distros. Have used it and tons of other "flavors" as rescue CDs over the years. Also based off of Debian originally.
Clonezilla - Another pioneer. Everything they did could be done by hand, but has always made things easier if you wanted to give someone a disc and say "go image that machine".
Gentoo - Same sentiment as you. Got old rebuilding OpenOffice.
New processor is a better way to get a 2% speed boost vs compiling for specific hardware.
YellowDog - Anyone who really does/did Mac and Linux before Mac moved to Intel hardware either did it with Debian or YellowDog. YellowDog's real gift to the world was "yum", which caught RedHat up to the quality of package management in Debian. Without yum, and stuck with raw "rpm", RedHat's package management tools were sub-standard at the time. Without yum, modern RH admins would be lost.
Linux From Scratch - If you really want to understand what Linux is about from the ground up, this is the way to find out. You need to make sure you have no life and nothing else to do for a few months.
I don't know. There's more. And lots of Solaris on real server iron, and some AIX (and pains), and HP-UX.
Ultimately it comes down to knowing and using Unix at the command line. Linux on the desktop is a never-ending stream of changing half-baked GUI paradoxes.
I use OSX on the desktop. Integrated GUI for the day-to-day, command line Unix under the hood. I spend most of my day in a Terminal session, logged into various Linux boxes while still having the Corporate-required Microsoft Outlook a Command-Tab window switch away. And a Linux VM or two for development, testing, or tools that aren't cross-platform. A Windows VM for ONE stinking vendor's website that requires MSIE. Best or worst of all world's.
