
On Wed, Apr 27, 2022 at 12:37:21AM -0400, William Park via talk wrote:
I've been running Slackware since forever. It's time to grow up and see the world. Which distro would you recommend that I move to? Yes, I know it's personal, and reasons will be varied and educational.
- Ubuntu -- OK. I use it at work in VM and in WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). For me, Mint is another flavour, just like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc.
- Oracle -- I use it at work too. Was CentOS, but switched to Oracle because they said delivering end-of-life OS is bad marketing.
- Fedora -- OK. Doesn't seem to have its equivalent in Ubuntu side.
- OpenSUSE -- Difficult to pin down. It uses RPM but in their own way. It has rolling release (Tumbleweed) and versioned release (Leap).
- Arch -- no. I don't need/want to learn what they are trying to teach. I run Slackware, so I already know all that.
I ran SLS then slackware then moved to Redhat 2.0 (back when there was such a thing) because it actually had package management, which clearly showed slackware was useless (this would have been around 1995). I then stuck with that until Redhat 6.0 which was so buggy things like bind regularly crashed, and even reporting bugs to redhat seemed to serve no purpose (I even knew some people working at redhat at the time, and they couldn't even get it to the right people). At that point I moved to Debian 2.1 (around 1999). I have stuck with it since because it works and I haven't seen any new distribution offer anything better (Ubuntu is Debian done wrong (fixed release dates equal broken software), a few other new ones believe in the build everything from source yourself which is just a stupid waste of compute resources). At work we use opensuse (which has certainly shown me why that isn't anymore popular than it is and why the rpm package format is very much inferior to the deb package format), and I work with yocto also using rpm packages (in theory it also could use deb but that isn't the default and hence often broken in some packages) so I know what a pain making rpm packages is compared to making deb packages (debhelper tools are wonderful). So if you want something flexible that works, use Debian, and if you want a more polished desktop environment out of the box, use Mint debian edition. -- Len Sorensen