Is anyone's choice of distro influenced by the type of servers they find themselves working on?
For example, I find myself doing alot of work on REHL systems in the cloud, and thusly run Fedora (so I don't have to figure out where config files, etc. are kept in other distros).
Is there any reason you'd use Ubuntu over an Ubuntu-like distro such as Linux Mint? I'm just curious, because I feel like not many people know about Mint here, and the general feeling is that people don't want to use Ubuntu, but like apt and the Ubuntu repos (which Mint uses, without so much of the bloat of Ubuntu, and with a different UI like Cinnamon, which is fantastic).
That was the case when I ran Linux on my server. I used Debian and so my (non-Windows)desktop was also Debian. I followed the trend to Ubuntu, but now I'm on OpenBSD for the server and kept Ubuntu for the desktop.
I used to do the same kind of thing, but now I just run OSX full-time because I like the user experience, and Vagrant virtual dev environments let me run whatever distro I want.
Not for me. It actually keeps me on my toes a bit regarding differences in distros, especially since I have done well taking on project where server (mis)configuration was an issue as well other devs were struggling with.
I use CentOS 6.x almost exclusively, since I work with several different low-end VPS for my businesses. I found it's much, much easier to have adopted a sort of "let it fail" philosophy and replicate across many (then worry about the failure when I have time) instead of paying dearly for a single high-end VPS that does occasionally have downtime. I'm also "sort of" in the business of CDN-type services, so geographical/latency distance is important to me, which is another reason this "let it fail" across many replicated servers around the world works best for my situation.
For hardware firewall/security appliance, I use pfSense (a FreeBSD "distro").
I use a combination of Arch on my main PC, and a combination of ChromeOS/Ubuntu-through-crouton on my Chromebook (it's the Samsung 5 550, not the Pixel, sadly)
Every time I've tried to use Elementary I find it really buggy and slow. I know that it's currently in beta, but every time I read about it people talk about how stable it is, which doesn't seem to be the case for me.
I've tried several times to use it as my main OS, but every time I keep coming back to Arch. The same is true with Ubuntu and other Ubuntu flavors, most recently Ubuntu Gnome, which is basically the same as what I run with Arch, but with an Ubuntu foundation and less time spent getting it working. Even that felt slow to me.
I'm currently running Fedora, but I'm really tempted to switch over to Arch or maybe even NixOS.
The latest version of Fedora was a bit of a mess compared to previous versions, including things like bugs with waking up from sleep. Moreover, I'm finding the release schedule a bit slow. Also, I've heard good things about Arch and NixOS in terms of Haskell support.
Ah, same here. At the risk of sounding negative, the Gnome folks really jumped the shark on that one (though it's a bit better now). Things are just so much more complicated.
I understand that taste is a very subjective thing and most folks will stick to things they're used to, but this was one thing I really couldn't get un-used to.
Currently Ubuntu; likely switching to Debian in the near future.
I was a huge Gentoo fan early on, but switched to Fedora when I stopped enjoying the USE configuration (which I still believe is awesome, just way too time-consuming), then to Ubuntu when I stopped enjoying yum (well, I never enjoyed yum). I think aptitude is the most stable package manager I've ever used.
Likely going to Debian soon, though. Trying it out in a VM (love those buggers!) It doesn't matter a whole lot since I run openbox, but as a developer, I think knowing the package manager well makes a big difference in the quality of the experience.
Same here. Using 12.04 currently, but with the recent release of Debian Wheezy I'm considering using it for my daily work and getting more involved with Debian as a whole.
Fedora here, but I'm on something of an older release (F16), and I haven't heard good things about the latest release so I'm reluctant to upgrade. Not sure if I'll switch to something else or what, at this point.
Suggest moving sideways to CentOS/Scientific Linux/Springdale Linux (RHEL 6 clones) if Fedora 12/13 based desktop with some updated packages is not too old for you.
Hear, hear! I can (and do) run Crunchbang on tiny embedded devices all the way up through those netbooks. For all of those smaller (capability) devices, you really can't go wrong with #!.
* Sabayon - It's a better experience than pure Gentoo
* SliTaz - You won't believe me how insanely fast it is!
* Peppermint OS - Perfect for mum and friends
I'm on Ubuntu for no good reason really, I guess I just like feeling like there's a large community, it's well supported and that I have a complete OS which many distros (understandably) don't seem to provide. I don't like Unity though, so I use Cinnamon.
Fair point. I guess it's more that since you can mix and match pretty much anything on any distro, and I don't use Unity, I wouldn't really be affected if I moved to something else.
Does anyone have a good alternative for Ubuntu's Unity. I like Ubuntu because of the community, but I just can't get over Unity. My normal keyboard shortcuts are all jacked up and it's just... impossible to deal with for me.
It's weird; I was introduced to linux via CentOS (while working) and I immediately fell in love with it, but I can't pin down /why/ I genuinely like this particular distro. Anything I come up with seems pedantic at best.
Maybe I'm just in love with a particular part of linux. Maybe its how I'm able to look at the innards of an OS and see how components of a system interact. Or maybe I'm in love with the puzzle in an enigma that is dependency management. I just don't know.
I started out with Gentoo, maybe 10 years ago. It was the coolest thing, but later realized that I was spending a lot of time compiling everything and wanted these magical things called "binaries" instead.
So I switched to Ubuntu - Warty Warthog! I loved it because it was a minimal distro that was very useful and fit on a single CD. (I neither had lots of internet nor CDs available to me at the time.) Also, I never knew which options to select for a Fedora Anaconda install. So many packages - what do I want??
Then I tried Mint. It was neat, I guess, but never seemed appreciably easier than Ubuntu. I was hoping for an easier experience doing things like playing MP3s and displaying patent-protected GIF files, but I dunno, I never really got into it.
I did, however, get into the Cinnamon window manager!
Today I begrudgingly installed Ubuntu 12.04. It's more or less the only distro that anybody supports - you can get directions to install $foo (driver, software, Steam, what have you) on Ubuntu but other distros are hit or miss. And Ubuntu is more or less as updated as I care to be, a guarantee that I don't know I can get with other distros.
Mind you, I don't really like ubuntu nowadays. I'm not into Unity, I'm not into paid-results-in-system-search, and as a power-user, I was really unhappy when the switched from init scripts to upstart. But the community has widely adopted it as a 'standard' platform for their software, so, well, here I am.
"I started out with Gentoo, maybe 10 years ago. It was the coolest thing, but later realized that I was spending a lot of time compiling everything and wanted these magical things called "binaries" instead."
I'm using Gentoo and I don't really notice this, but that's probably because my needs are fairly minimal and I take the approach of "if it's working, don't change it". Unless I happen to upgrade to something that requires a new version of a library that then breaks other things that were linking to it, setting of a chain of forced recompilation, I don't really spend much time compiling at all. (Amortized time compiling, in light of the library issue just mentioned, might still be high.)
Curious what other Gentoo users' perceptions of time spent compiling is.
You have to compile quite a lot just to keep up on Gentoo. If you don't, your system will fall out of sync with the packages that are in portage, and trying to install new software and keeping your system running will be painful at best.
In my opinion, this is Gentoo's greatest weakness. I don't really see a way around it, however, short of the Gentoo team somehow getting the resources to mirror every version of every package in portage.
When installing a new gentoo system, you basically let it compile overnight.
When something was broken - let's say X11 wouldn't start - the first thing you'd try is "re-emerge X." 2 hours later, the display is still broken and only later do you realize you had xorg.conf misconfigured.
(I think all of the auto configuration for displays is great, by the way. But on the occasion it doesn't work, I wish I could just edit xorg.conf, but of course that doesn't even exist any more because everything is autodetected by default.)
I loved the idea of USE flags, until I realized that they were just a wrapper around ./configure options.
Same here, around 8-9 years ago... on a laptop. Things would break all the time for me and it was hard to even use any vanilla kernels on it. It taught me most of my basic linux skills, and the forums were a treasure of information (before they took a dive, not sure how they are nowadays). I often had to boot Knoppix (livecd) to fix things.
It was a distro that invited a lot of experimenting and tweaking.
I've been running opensuse as my main distro now for a couple years. Great kde support, very stable, gets the job done. For servers I gravitate towards CentOS.
Oh yeah, gentoo's documentation was, hands-down, the best on the net at the time for getting your stuff to work (say, ndiswrapper for getting wireless working.) Their guides didn't really rely on gentoo-specifc features because gentoo doesn't really have features beyond portage, which more or less wraps gcc.
I just spent a few minutes looking through the gentoo doc again. Makes me really excited how good the community doc was - this is how it's done! [1]
as a power-user, I was really unhappy when the switched from init scripts to upstart
Why? Personally, I much prefer the declarative configuration over the lengthy SysV boilerplate, and there's always pre-start and such if you want to insert some shell code.
By the way, may I suggest Debian Sid/Unstable? Most of the commands and package names are the same (for obvious reasons ;), it has a rolling release (so you're always up-to-date) and it's still on SysV init scripts.
At the time they made the switch, there was not much documentation or support for upstart. All documentation on the internet was (is?) for init scripts and runlevels.
For example, I wanted to take some old hardware and set it up as a server. Easy - just change init to runlevel 3 (no display) and boom, there you are, headless linux.
If I wanted to do that in ubuntu, I still wouldn't know how, to be honest. I guess I'd have to reinstall it with ubuntu server? Do we even have single-user mode any more?
(I learned sysadmin from "the armadillo book" [1]. I feel like most of the concepts are identical, but the tools are so different now. all I want to do is run a new script on boot. why do i want upstart??)
all I want to do is run a new script on boot. why do i want upstart??
Frankly, if all you wanted was that, you could just stick the script in the kernel init= parameter, no need for Upstart or SysV ;)
Both of them are daemon management applications, and frankly I don't think it makes much sense to optimize for the "running script on boot" versus sanely managing daemon startup.
That said, at least on Ubuntu the SysV infrastructure is still called (as an Upstart job), so you should still be able to stick something in /etc/rc.local.
Alternatively, you can just write an Upstart configuration file:
My work environment is currently a chaotic mix of a variety of linux distros, most of them broken in some fashion. I was hired to club the system into submission, and am using CentOS as my base for rebuilding everything.
Work system is Fedora-XFCE, home system is Slackware.
When I see comments like these, I feel like there must be two different KDEs. Every time I've tried to use it, I've had the exact opposite experience: it runs really slow and provides a complete nonsense UI.
I used to use Debian for everything until I started working with OpenStack, and now use Ubuntu because it has releases in sync with OpenStack releases.
So now I plan to have OpenStack running on both the server in the office & on the laptop that has a KDE desktop on it, too. It'll be nice because I can take my Windows 7 VM with me when I take the laptop out.
I know pacman doesn't do everything that apt/dpkg does, but for a personal machine I highly prefer it to any other. What exactly don't you like about it?
112 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadFor example, I find myself doing alot of work on REHL systems in the cloud, and thusly run Fedora (so I don't have to figure out where config files, etc. are kept in other distros).
For hardware firewall/security appliance, I use pfSense (a FreeBSD "distro").
I found myself gravitating towards RPM-based distros during that time.
I've tried several times to use it as my main OS, but every time I keep coming back to Arch. The same is true with Ubuntu and other Ubuntu flavors, most recently Ubuntu Gnome, which is basically the same as what I run with Arch, but with an Ubuntu foundation and less time spent getting it working. Even that felt slow to me.
The latest version of Fedora was a bit of a mess compared to previous versions, including things like bugs with waking up from sleep. Moreover, I'm finding the release schedule a bit slow. Also, I've heard good things about Arch and NixOS in terms of Haskell support.
I understand that taste is a very subjective thing and most folks will stick to things they're used to, but this was one thing I really couldn't get un-used to.
I was a huge Gentoo fan early on, but switched to Fedora when I stopped enjoying the USE configuration (which I still believe is awesome, just way too time-consuming), then to Ubuntu when I stopped enjoying yum (well, I never enjoyed yum). I think aptitude is the most stable package manager I've ever used.
Likely going to Debian soon, though. Trying it out in a VM (love those buggers!) It doesn't matter a whole lot since I run openbox, but as a developer, I think knowing the package manager well makes a big difference in the quality of the experience.
Ubuntu based, but much faster and less distracting http://peppermintos.com/
The perfect OS for a developer/sysadmin who is thrilled for more http://sabayon.org/
If you want to stick with Ubuntu and just remove unity, here are instructions for replacing it with Linux Mint's desktop interface (Cinnamon) and file manager (Nemo): http://askubuntu.com/questions/292394/how-to-completely-remo...
Maybe I'm just in love with a particular part of linux. Maybe its how I'm able to look at the innards of an OS and see how components of a system interact. Or maybe I'm in love with the puzzle in an enigma that is dependency management. I just don't know.
So I switched to Ubuntu - Warty Warthog! I loved it because it was a minimal distro that was very useful and fit on a single CD. (I neither had lots of internet nor CDs available to me at the time.) Also, I never knew which options to select for a Fedora Anaconda install. So many packages - what do I want??
Then I tried Mint. It was neat, I guess, but never seemed appreciably easier than Ubuntu. I was hoping for an easier experience doing things like playing MP3s and displaying patent-protected GIF files, but I dunno, I never really got into it.
I did, however, get into the Cinnamon window manager!
Today I begrudgingly installed Ubuntu 12.04. It's more or less the only distro that anybody supports - you can get directions to install $foo (driver, software, Steam, what have you) on Ubuntu but other distros are hit or miss. And Ubuntu is more or less as updated as I care to be, a guarantee that I don't know I can get with other distros.
Mind you, I don't really like ubuntu nowadays. I'm not into Unity, I'm not into paid-results-in-system-search, and as a power-user, I was really unhappy when the switched from init scripts to upstart. But the community has widely adopted it as a 'standard' platform for their software, so, well, here I am.
I'm using Gentoo and I don't really notice this, but that's probably because my needs are fairly minimal and I take the approach of "if it's working, don't change it". Unless I happen to upgrade to something that requires a new version of a library that then breaks other things that were linking to it, setting of a chain of forced recompilation, I don't really spend much time compiling at all. (Amortized time compiling, in light of the library issue just mentioned, might still be high.)
Curious what other Gentoo users' perceptions of time spent compiling is.
Now if Ubuntu would integrate systemd I'd stop considering fedora.
In my opinion, this is Gentoo's greatest weakness. I don't really see a way around it, however, short of the Gentoo team somehow getting the resources to mirror every version of every package in portage.
When something was broken - let's say X11 wouldn't start - the first thing you'd try is "re-emerge X." 2 hours later, the display is still broken and only later do you realize you had xorg.conf misconfigured.
(I think all of the auto configuration for displays is great, by the way. But on the occasion it doesn't work, I wish I could just edit xorg.conf, but of course that doesn't even exist any more because everything is autodetected by default.)
I loved the idea of USE flags, until I realized that they were just a wrapper around ./configure options.
It was a distro that invited a lot of experimenting and tweaking.
I've been running opensuse as my main distro now for a couple years. Great kde support, very stable, gets the job done. For servers I gravitate towards CentOS.
I just spent a few minutes looking through the gentoo doc again. Makes me really excited how good the community doc was - this is how it's done! [1]
[1] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xorg-config.xml
Why? Personally, I much prefer the declarative configuration over the lengthy SysV boilerplate, and there's always pre-start and such if you want to insert some shell code.
By the way, may I suggest Debian Sid/Unstable? Most of the commands and package names are the same (for obvious reasons ;), it has a rolling release (so you're always up-to-date) and it's still on SysV init scripts.
For example, I wanted to take some old hardware and set it up as a server. Easy - just change init to runlevel 3 (no display) and boom, there you are, headless linux.
If I wanted to do that in ubuntu, I still wouldn't know how, to be honest. I guess I'd have to reinstall it with ubuntu server? Do we even have single-user mode any more?
(I learned sysadmin from "the armadillo book" [1]. I feel like most of the concepts are identical, but the tools are so different now. all I want to do is run a new script on boot. why do i want upstart??)
[1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596003432.do
For example, here's the info on Runlevels, including how to set Single-User mode either temporarily or permanently: http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#runlevels
all I want to do is run a new script on boot. why do i want upstart??
Frankly, if all you wanted was that, you could just stick the script in the kernel init= parameter, no need for Upstart or SysV ;)
Both of them are daemon management applications, and frankly I don't think it makes much sense to optimize for the "running script on boot" versus sanely managing daemon startup.
That said, at least on Ubuntu the SysV infrastructure is still called (as an Upstart job), so you should still be able to stick something in /etc/rc.local.
Alternatively, you can just write an Upstart configuration file:
Work system is Fedora-XFCE, home system is Slackware.
So now I plan to have OpenStack running on both the server in the office & on the laptop that has a KDE desktop on it, too. It'll be nice because I can take my Windows 7 VM with me when I take the laptop out.
devstack will work on Debian as well, although it is not officially supported.