Workstation Distro?

Otacon

Otacon

Otacon

Soldato
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I'm pondering ditching my doze workstation at home and moving into Linux 'full time' for my desktop OS, and would like some advice on a suitable distro :)

Server wise I'm quite settled with Gentoo these days, but configuring it as a workstation OS is going to be pretty time consuming and quite a ballache. Getting my two screens to work how I wanted that was a right PITA the last time I played with this, and I cant be bothered with that again, so something that will 'just work' with my multimon setup would be great. The system will be an admin workstation, and I'll be casually developing on it (liking the look of Ruby at the moment), very little gaming.

Any particular distro that suits my wants better than any other, or do people just adapt their favourite distro to their workstation tasks (which is of course quite possible).

Ta :)
 
I'd probably say Ubuntu Dapper when it goes final, although it's a good distro for those not familiar with Linux, one of Dapper's aims was to encourage business use of it - hence it's very stable. Having used it as a Workstation type machine for Uni Work since Flight 3, it's solid as a rock even for beta.

Other suggestions would be Fedora Core (FC5 is the latest I think), SUSE or if you want really stable has a look at CentOS or Debian stable - just don't expect the latest and greatest packages. If you are familiar with Gentoo, then you'd probably do well to sticking with what you know.
 
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Dunky said:
SUSE
Click to expand...
Pretty familiar with SuSE, and generally like it (though it seems a bit 'bloaty'). Dont think the latest release is particularly up to date mind, but worthy of consideration.

And yeah, FC5 is the latest :)
 
I think most of the bloat would have went with OpenSuSE and SuSE 10.0 Professional would be a bit more streamlined and would probably suit you. These days it seems to come down to what package system a distro uses, the desktop (KDE, GNOME, Fluxbox, etc.) and their package cycle. Not much in it these days...
 
All depends really :D
If you really want a system that simply 'just works', and has a massive number of packages available on the initial CDs, then I'd lean towards Mandriva with the essentials from PLF, especially as there tends to be a wider variety of packages in RPM format.
If you're comfortable with the relatively little intial choice provided by Ubuntu, then again its a good choice for pretty much anything, but the KDE support is a little lacking in favour of Gnome; Again a matter of personal choice.

Linux distros these days are pretty much the same, apart from Gentoo & its ilk. Whatever you choose, its going to inevitable be pretty much the same stuff under the hood with slightly different goals from the developers.

Saying that though, IMHO Mandriva & Ubuntu are the only two worth considering. (And I've used most of them as a casual desktop user)
Saying no more before this develops into a distro fanboy thread :D

-Leezer-
 
Ubuntu
been running ubuntu for a good few months now and i'm generally pleased with it once automatix has done it's stuff :) really easy to install software, of which there is a good range.

FC5
Another good distro which will put you in stead for the more corprate sytems that run RHES / Centos. have a look at adding Fedora Frog once you have installed and updated the distro.

http://easylinux.info/wiki/Fedora_frog

it's basically a automatix script but for fedora :)

Suse
Suse is a great distro if you like the kitchen sink and then some, i started of with suse 7.1 and left at suse 9.3 - lol i have had very good experiances with SuSe slick which can be found at the below url much quicker and also supports dvd,media playback out of the "box"

http://en.opensuse.org/SLICK

Cheers
Deano
 
Personally I use Gentoo on my pc as the sole OS (although i keep getting tempted by a cut down windows 2k purely for games...)

The setup isn't too bad, although basically i have a list of stuff i emerge overnight after the install is done, far too lengthy to do whilst i'm awake :p

Other than that Ubuntu on the home pc works quite well, don't really like it myself but in terms of getting up and running quickly it's got to be one of the best.

Slackware is another option possibly worth looking at, slightly quicker/easier to set up than Gentoo and with 'slapt-get' (think thats what it was, been a while) you've got a fairly decent package manager as well
 
Slapt-get is a system killer, when I'm not messing with the likes of LFS or gentoo slackware is my distro of choice, and slapt-get does have a tendancy to bring your system to its knees
<edit>if you use packages from the linuxpackages.net servers that is
 
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Must admit I stick to FC (mainly because at work we tend to use this and RHEL for our linux boxen) though I have dallied with Ubuntu and Gentoo in the past.
FC5 would be the preferred option if you plan on running services, as it has some pretty good management tools built in for system services such as samba and apache, and tools for configuring authentication via Kerberos, LDAP and NIS, all of which would require a fair bit of hackery with Ubuntu. It just seems more like a distro aimed at professional computing than Ubuntu, which is aimed at the desktop market (not that this is a bad thing!)
 
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