[mythtv-users] Linux distros.

[Ben Bucksch]

Note that you're touching a traditional flame war. See this as my 
personal opinion.

Edward Wildgoose wrote:

>The two favourites from those in the know usually seem to be debian and gentoo
>
I use Debian since about 2 years and I am getting quite sick of it. 
apt-get and debconf is nice, but "stable" is constantly too old and 
"unstable" is unstable, you have to fix things about once a month, and 
get about 30MB of packages each day, and I don't want that, I don't have 
time for constantly fixing things.
Hardware install is a *pain* on Debian.
Debian is also very late about security updates when compared to Red Hat.
Debian might be good for traditional servers (web, NFS, etc.) which run 
basically unchanged for 2 years, but that's about it IMHO.

>Most of the other distro's are horses for courses and somewhat similar.  Suse and Mandrake seem to win on the desktop, Redhat is the best know (in the UK at least).  I don't know if there is anything to   split them - read the review on the net.
>
I recently tried suse and found it very nice, apart from the fact that 
the installer wants to fry your existing partitions by default and that 
not all devices are recognized, but most are. I recently saw that I can 
even run the first-time installer remotely via SSH or VNC (the latter 
failed for me, though), something not even Debian offers. The next time 
Debian unstable breaks in a major way (and it will), I might switch.

Compared to SuSe, Red Hat seemed unprofessional und unpolished. I don't 
know Mandrake, but it's hard to imagine that they would do anything 
better than SuSe. A plus for Red Hat is that it's completely 
open-source, they release everything, while SuSe's installer is not, you 
only have "permission to copy" for private use or something like that.

In the end, they are all "just" flavors of Linux, it's just a matter of 
taste. (Not to discredit the massive amount of work they cost.)