Press releases. Red Hat Adds Common Criteria Security Certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Latest Version of Red Hat OpenShift Container. Red Hat today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5.
As part of the contest that was conducted a while back, I got around from the geeky readers who choose their favorite Linux distributions. Based on this data, the top spot in the best Linux distribution list goes to Ubuntu My personal favorite was Ubuntu for desktop (#1 in this list) and Red Hat for servers (#5 in this list). If you are new to any of the distros listed in the top 5, read the rest of the article to understand little bit more about those distros and find out whether your favorite Linux distribution made it in the top 5.
Fig: Favorite Linux Distribution Voting Results 1. Ubuntu Like most of you, Ubuntu is my #1 choice for desktop Linux. I use it both at home and work.
Ubuntu is the #1 in the Linux desktop market and some use Ubuntu for the servers also. Ubuntu offers the following three editions. Ubuntu Desktop Edition. Ubuntu Server Edition. Ubuntu Notebook Remix Additional Details:.
Home Page:. Ubuntu. Created by: (who also provides commercial support, if you need it). Used As: Desktop and Server. Latest Version: Ubuntu 9.04. Read more about at wikipedia. Refer to our article series.
Debian is also called as Debian GNU/Linux, as most of the basic OS tools comes from the GNU Project. Lot of other famous distributions are based on Debian, which includes our #1 distro Ubuntu and many others — such as Knoppix, Linspire, Damn Small Linux etc., Additional Details:. Home Page:. Debian. Created By:.
Latest Version: Debian 5.0.1 Read more about at wikipedia. Fedora Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat. If you are interested in experimenting with the the leading technologies, you should use fedora, as the release cycle is very short and fedora tends to include the latest technology software/packages in it’s distribution. Additional Details:. Home Page:. Fedora. Created by: (sponsored by Red Hat).
Latest Version: Fedora 11. Based On: Red Hat Linux Read more about at wikipedia. CentOS If your organization does not want to spend money on purchasing Red Hat support, but still want all the benefits of the red-hat distribution, this is obviously the best choice, as this is totally based on the red-hat enterprise Linux. As you can imagine the Nort American Enterprise Linux vendor mentioned in the quote below is Red Hat.
From the CentOS website: CentOS 2, 3, and 4 are built from publically available open source SRPMS provided by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS is designed for people who need an enterprise class OS without the cost or support of the prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. Additional Details:.
Home Page:. CentOS. Created by: CentOS Project. Latest Version: CentOS 5. Based on: Red Hat Linux Read more about at wikipedia 5. Red Hat This is my favorite server distribution.
If an organization doesn’t mind spending dollars on purchasing the red-hat support, this is always my #1 recommendation to any organization who runs mission critical applications. On a side note, one of the reason I like Red Hat Linux for mission critical production application is that Red Hat tends to take some of the new features from Fedora, which is well tested by the community. Additional Details:. Home Page:. Red Hat.
Created by: Red Hat. Latest Version: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Read more about at wikipedia.
Awesome Linux Articles Following are few awesome 15 examples articles that you might find helpful. Note: To get high quality free Linux articles,. @Joshua, Maybe it’s because we are getting older (my first true Linux install was Debian 1.3 back in the mid 90s) I used to enjoy spending days working on a new install to get things to work right, install all the apps I needed and tweak things to my taste. But now I need my computer to do work and can’t have it down for days while I get it working properly.
Ubuntu installs easily, has large repositories and I haven’t had to struggle with any hardware issues for quite some time. Plus if I recommend this distro to a friend to try, I can easily help out if they have a question since I use it on a daily basis. From Pitr thinking: What?! The Chief is havink Debian runnink on his machine?!
Nothink a disk wipe and a Suse install will not be fixink. Chief: Pitr, What are you doing? Pitr: Installink Suse on your machine, boss man. Chief: But why?
What difference does it make what flavour is on my machine? The shareholders don’t care, my machine doesn’t care, and I certainly don’t care! Pitr: You see, boss every time you are clickink mouse in Suse, you feed small hungry child. Every time you clickink mouse in Debian, God, he is killink a kitten. Chief: Oh my Lord. I had no idea!
Pitr: Just thank gods that you did not use Red Hat! Clickink mouse each time creates new Linux distro! As for myself; I would have picked ubuntu 8.1 but I up/down graded to 9.04 and I have spent as much effort testing/degugging the O/S as I have spent actually doing my own work. I don’t even have any blacklisted hardware in my machine. But Intrepid Ibex was difficult to find fault with. Anyway, by definition, this is a poll which indicates what our favorite distro is, as opposed to which distro is actually better.
That would require a lesson in software metrics from the ACM.: ) but it could be done. After all, we’ve always been able to objectively compare apples to oranges when it comes to windows and linux, right?; ) So why not bust out the hard/soft/derivitive metrics for a distro comparo? There would be no voting involved, sad to say, cause I do love a good online poll, but it would be an incredibly geeky thing to do. What I can state, based solely on personal experience, is that Knoppix has never (ever) let me down. Using Knoppix for recovery purposes has saved my data everytime. Knoppix +1 YAy. @All, Here is the full listing of all the distros that were mentioned as favorite by the users in the contenst.
Red Hat 12 6. Arch Linux 11 7. Slackware 8 9. Mandriva 4 11. Sabayon 2 13. PCLinux 2 14.
Backtrack 2 15. Damn Small Linux 2 16. Knoppix 1 18. PrestoMyPC 1 @KenW, Rafael, As you see in the above ranking, Linux Mint came almost at the bottom. Just both of your votes would’ve pushed it up in the ranking.
🙂 @Srinivas, I agree. I’m pretty sure that most folks who voted for Ubuntu are using it as desktop. Probably a separate server for desktop and servers may show a different results. We’ll conduct such survey in the blog very soon. @Joshua, Like Scott has mentioned, it is just too easy to set it up and running. Moreover, Ubuntu is the famous distro among the newbies. Since I didn’t separate desktop vs server distro in the contest, it is no surprise Ubuntu came on the top.
@Scott, You installed Debian in mid 90’s? You are definitely as wise as Master Yoda. In mid 90’s I was playing around with Solaris. You are absolutely right about Ubuntu, for some of my non-geeky (read it as — Microsoft, self proclaimed geeks) friends, who wants to know what is all the hype about Linux, I recommend Ubuntu to them. @cronjob, Very hillarious discussion between Chief and Pitr.
🙂 You are absolutely right. This list shows only the favorite disto. But technically may not be the best. It would be interesting to create a poll where every disto can be rated based on features, technical-aspects, functionalities.
What are the different technical-aspects you would consider for every distro to be rated, if we have to create such poll? @cronjob, I never worked for IBM. But, I’ve worked closely with IBM/KPMG/E&Y consultants on different projects. Sometimes putting onus on the customer may be a good thing, which gives the opportunity for the customer to think about their business. 🙂 Anyway, I didn’t mean to push that back onto you. I’m really interested in finding out what kind of metrics you would be interested in seeing. Thanks for start digging on it.
Let me know what you find out. @Vivek, Thanks for the comment. Like I’ve mentioned to “KenW and Rafael”, Mint got only one vote and just three of your additional votes would’ve pushed Mint from the bottom to a reasonable level. Ubuntu was with i started off with like 3 years back like one fine day, i had my Windows machine go kaput on me and i was actly tired of the constant reinstallations so those three days in which i didnt bother to touch my computer, i introduced myself to Ubuntu. And my word, was i hooked. I had used Red Hat and Fedora in college.
But i didnt know their capabilities. Now around a month back, i have started off exploring Sabayon 4.2. It looks great, plays great, media and devices work outta the box. But a lot of the deal is like totally messed up, you can get to points where you end up in dead ends. I want to try something else now tired of what sabayon is offering.
Red Hat Linux
Is it back to ubuntu for me or can you guys suggest me onto something? For a light-weight distro that runs fast and does most anything people do on a laptop I would say GOS. It’s Ubuntu based but the performance is much faster. For a full brown distro Ubuntu is nice because it has so many users, great forums, very stable. This is an opensource distro however and you need to add proprietary software to get some common desktop/application features working. Mepis is a really nice distro out of the box that performs most of what you would do on a computer without modification.
Suse is stable and easy to work with. Its a bit bulky however and has performance issues on older machines.
Fedora is nice but not the most user friendly distro. Mandriva is comparable to Fedora in terms of user experience in my mind. Sabyon is interesting, very cutting edge but a bit unstable and has more hardware compatibility issues than other distros. Whatever distro you choose perform a search for “distro name perfect desktop” and you’ll find guides to customize the distro (for major distros).
Is a good source of information on Linux distros. Good luck and thanks to the many developers, hacks and geeks that provide us so many great choices.
I’m a lifelong Windows user that was just recently introduced to the world of Linux. I’m glad there is a FREE alternative the the $400 for upgrades Microsoft is demanding for a product key for Windows 7 Anyway, I’m currently using Xubuntu, which is a spinoff of Ubuntu with the Xfce desktop environment. I like it a lot. I tried Mint, Fodera, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, SUSE, and a couple of others. For me, Xubuntu was the easiest, most flexible, and most customizable. Or, I finally got the hang of Gnome by the time I got to Xubuntu 😉. Farooq, I’m guessing that what you need is to load the kernel, its modules and little more.
Skip loading X and the desktop environment and you’re done! This you can do with just any Linux Distribution! Remember that Linux is the mostly the Kernel and not the whole set, that’s called a Linux Distribution.
The Kernel just by itself would not work by itself, it needs to be loaded, for that you need a Linux Loader (LILO or Grub) (which is basically a boot program that loads the Kernel to the memory and points to the Kernel entry point). The last thing you need it the command line working, to receive and process input from the keyboard and display it on the screen, the common program to do this is Bash.
Windows update hider windows 10. Just having this you can run any simple (independent) binaries, but you will probably end up needing some libraries and some other support apps. Advice: Try installing a SlackWare distribution from scratch and stop when you have the minimum system running which consists on just the LILO and the Kernel (and the modules, if any).
But the easy and fast way is to get one of those incredible small PEN drive distributions because they probably are just what you need. If you’re on the clock check DSL (Damn Small Linux) it’s a very popular small Linux Distribution. It’s dissapointing more people didn’t vote for Slackware and its derivitaves. Zenwalk really is my favorite, and I run it both on a general desktop (everybody at my house uses it, and I do the administration) and on a laptop (personal – programming, Blender 3D, GIMP). Wonderful to work with.and. administer. – Sigh –.
Personally, I can’t stand Ubuntu. It has screwed me over more than once, with screwy graphics drivers on the desktop and totally breaking after an update on my laptop. So yeah, you could say I have a vendetta – I just say Ubuntu sucks. I would rather side with an Red Hat derivitave than a Debian derivative, but I just like Slackware derivitaves more, maybe because it was my first distro (NimbleX 2007), and maybe because there’s less auto-management crap to deal with when sitting at a TTY as root. Even though I don’t use Slackware, I’m still one at heart 😉. From all these only Debian passes as linux distro.
All others have ported too many windows flaws that made them somewhere between linux and windows. While Debian gets ubuntized, it looses it’s advantages too. Sadly, most linux distros try to do everything on their own – that is great if you want to use it as a shovel (like windows), but it gets terribly wrong as soon as any internal problem appears.
Last one I got into today with mandriva (that is far more stable and user friendly than fedora) – after tranfer of system from drive to drive system keeps waiting two minutes for the root partititon it already found according to dmesg – kernel is probably not a reasonable source of hw information anymore. After this everything works as it did before. All redhat things from rh5 to latest centos fail install when they encounter a problem with install media – that is too absurd. I reported it in time of rh6 (even before getting first debian) and 10 years were not enough to add one if statement. Specific distro based preconfiguration options for Grub are big nightmare in many cases (at least ubuntu and mandriva). This kind of problems is very non-unix by their nature, but they started to appear as companies try to make money of linux by porting windows problems to it to make it comparable. That is the same mistake Apple did in System 7.6 and every next to end up just as a bit better type of windows without any real advantage (eye candy is no advantage, it’s just eye candy).
I used Apple system 7.5.5 until 2001 for all my office work no matter what linux/windows/OS2/whatever was on my PC. So my list would be: 1. Debian – not too selfservicing with great package management, 2. Slackware – very basic anything allowing YOU to manage the system. Absence of basic management disables it for userfriendly desktop or loaded server. Mandriva – for destop of windows people.
Even my mother installed it successfuly yesterday, while she was unable to with windows and redhat8 which is during the install basicaly the same like today’s fedora. LFS – to learn how the linux realy works 5. CentOS – if you realy need redhat like distro for any reason.
@PP: New does not mean good, in many cases exactly the opposite. Php is a fun thing that is badly managed and putting newest on production server is generaly bad idea. I am far happier with outdated and bugfixed version. The biggest advantage of redhat is compatibility with specific closed hw vendors who make only RHEL and SLES packages with binary kernel modules. That is the moment I use CentOS and pray loud. @Ramesh Natarajan (8): Installing debian in mid90s happened to be far easier than to instal redhat in that time.
I always hear these linux was hard – well yeah, it took me two days to start the X window for the first time, but after that it was again a piece of cake until these closed 3D drivers come. To me making debian desktop reasonable in mid 90s was harder than with OS/2 Warp 4, but still easier than with windows. Yeah, basic desktop in widows takes just long time with next, next, next – but is that really a usable environment for anyone? You know, I didn’t really like Unity all that much when I first encountered it.
I’ll say it — I HATED IT! I chose to work with Unity on Ubuntu for the sole purpose of learning how to use the interface efficiently.
I have a VM of Fedora 15 with GNOME 3 so that I can do the same thing. I think that we get comfortable with our GNOME 2.x and KDE 3.x until we are forced to evolve. This is the direction that the major DE’s are going, guys. I don’t have a problem using KDE 4.x, Unity, and I’m getting used to GNOME 3.x (though I think the developers still have a way to go). XFCE, LXDE, and any number of smaller WM’s are great alternatives to GNOME, KDE, and Unity.
Since using Unity, I’ve come to appreciate the feel and power of the Unity desktop. I’m almost embarrassed to say that I like it. It isn’t my favorite, but it is the most unique desktop experience I’ve had so far in Linux kernel OSs. Having had now eleven years of linux experience I have come to the conclusion that the most reliable Linux distribution is hands down Slackware. Slackware is unaltered from the authors and has been the most reliable OS I have ever worked with over the last 11 years period.
Having said that I will also note that Linux is my 23 operating system in my lifetime. Yes I am over 60 years old and started with computers in 1968. Debian is the next most reliable Linux distribution but it alters the packages from the authors. Both Debian and Slackware are not for the novice computer user. This article obviously focused on the most popular Linux OS distribution. In my opinion clowds the quest of the best Linux dristribution. After all what is best, is it the most popular or is it the most reliable.
For me I choose reliability. If I upgrade a package or kernel I want that package or kernel to work. I do not want it to render my computer a desk weight as both Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuSE has. If you are in business and demand a prime time (Reliable) OS that is consistantly dependable and trusted then you can not go wrong with RedHat and or CentOs. Slackware is a great 32 bit OS but at times one requires a 64 bit operating system expecially when solving large complex problems cost effectively.
Then you need RedHat or CentOS. Ubuntu has always been my number one choice for work or home, Canonical has been committed to proving easy to deploy, best supported and cutting edge distro that has made my life as a Linux evangelist much easier. Now I have my entire university running Ubuntu back and front end. My team of faculty and students have managed to deploy Ubuntu in corporate world in India which was quite resilient to anything to do with desktop Linux so yes, I agree with you, Ubuntu is hope for Linux thanks to Shuttleworth. I find it very distressing that Ubuntu, a distro that exists only because impatient people with money to throw at what they saw as a problem petulantly disrupted an entire community because they could not be bothered to switch to Fedora or SUZE or any of the myriad of distros focused more on features than stability. In fact, there are distros based on Debian stable that are oriented to beginners (MEPIS comes to mind) that offer a far better experience than the overhyped Ubuntu for the beginner. This same beginner, if they had a successful experience, might join the Linux community in a far more active fashion and one more productive than all the shouting that they will do as to how horrible the experience was at the hands of Ubuntu.
Debian, in the raw, is not intended for the beginner and graphical installer notwithstanding, really should not be a beginner’s distro of choice without some handholding; MEPIS does a great job of that and provides the tools needed to transition and grow in a safe and stable environment. There is an excellent book (the name escapes me but Tux is laying on a hammock on the cover) that includes a distribution of MEPIS and is specifically aimed at beginners.
It is not an intimidating 1000 page monster (as, inevitably, Ubuntu guides tend to be being based on something that pros deem UNSTABLE) and it is geared towards someone who left windows behind just after getting the distro. Moreover, MEPIS has a very active community with many people that have survived the initial period of adjustment and have successfully left windows et al.
That being said, it is unlikely -dare I say, certain- that my words will not derail the Ubuntu onslaught. I would hope that my words would reach someone and make enough of an impact that they might consider a distro, any distro, based on Debian Stable before considering something like Ubuntu. The stability and reputation of Debian is legendary and it is not worth damaging it just so the latest gadget that may or may not survive the marketplace -Intel invented Thunderbolt; aside from Macs, anyone seen any Thunderbolt around?- and that might make sense if the goal was to attract retail dollars but that makes zero sense when the goal is to grow a community. Once, the problem was the infamous winmodem and that has long been relegated to the graveyard; what is the problem today that would cause someone to choose something that is specifically labeled as UNSTABLE when entering what for almost everyone is an entirely different approach to computing? At most, Ubuntu might have gotten an honorable mention sic UNDER Debian but nothing more. Slackware and Red Hat/Fedora have their own defenders and I will leave their defense to them. I have used Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Suze, and others at one time or another (to talk about something, some experience is needed) and all I can say is that for those who like it, more power to you; however, there are far, far, better distros around.
If Ubuntu deserves mention in some form is that they have taken a marketing approach that might best be described as Apple for Open Source. One last thing: there are some obscure distros out there focused on particular fields and they may well be great indeed; however, do yourself a favor and join the Linux community with something with a large and widespread support community and when you know enough to take the plunge to the obscure distro dedicated to your particular interest, do it first in a non production environment so you can ask around when you get stuck. Ron, the sooner flash dies the better for everyone.
I think Facebook now supports HTML 5 and if you uninstall flash and you can view the videos then send flash packing. Hi, All Very interesting discussion here, i was into Linux in the early years but couldn`t master it, to a lack of Education, he he, my very first PC was C64 which was fun as it came with the book that showed you everything about it, then went to windows as it was straight forward, now i find windows full of In-bedded spyware although disabling mostly everything that i can not to affect the operating system. So now i want to try Linux again starting with Ubuntu as it probably serve as an easier program to operate, but knowing this will have to go to the heavier stuff as Ubuntu gets to be the more popular program is evenly more easier to compromise. I suppose programs nowadays can be fortified so much. Even these educated Spammers admitted to me there s only so much protection on the world wide web from companies, that can be also compromised. So no ones really safe.
Cheers n Beers.