Which Linux Flavor?

[blafla]

Ubuntu is a good distro. It's user-friendly and if you don't tweak it to much with 3D gadgets like compiz, it's very stable.
Imho, Debian or any debian based distro is fine.

[tharrell]

Been doing my annual catch-up-on-distros routine, and have been wrestling with getting any of my wireless cards working on a stock CentOS distro (playing with CentOS just because a potential employer uses it, even though I'm pretty familiar with FC).

Basically the same package dependency cluster**** as Fedora Core, but fewer RPMs that work out of the box, and a God-awful installation config that lets you select precisely zero drivers or kernel extensions for inclusion.

So yeah, same story as other quasi-supported distros. The doc wiki tells you to download and compile the realtek rtl818x drivers, but apparently that's been deprecated in 5.4 as wifi support is native in the kernel, but apparently it was omitted from all non PAE-plus versions of the kernel, so you'll have to compile a new kernel with explicit support blah blah.

Installation of the stock developer options omitted about half of the necessary libraries and headers to be able to compile anything, and I really don't feel like debugging dependencies for gcc or the kernel tonight.

Fun times. I'll give it another hour of scouring google for answers before I revert back to something Debian flavored. Haven't tried Ubuntu in a while.

--T

[Gentle Fury]

been loving my android phone...does that count? lol

Edit:

Hate my Android phone...everything stopped working now its buggy as all hell.

[tharrell]

As a follow-up to my little CentOS rant, I went and installed Ubuntu 9.1 on my little test laptop.

Must say, the installation process and initial config put any other distro I've used to shame. All 3 wireless cards I've got were recognized without any tweaking, on-board volume and media controls were recognized, all necessary libraries to install "real" software are there by default. They've even enabled the "restricted" non-free software repositories with binary X drivers by default now... and it recognizes the trackpad as a proper trackpad -- no driver compiles just to turn off tapping!

All in all, I'm pretty darned impressed... didn't even have to hack Xorg.conf to get hardware acceleration in Gnome.

So yeah, it's an easy install that just works. Maybe that rubs some folks the wrong way... I'm sure some folks love dealing with library dependencies and Xorg hardware drivers, compiling random things and blowing the better part of a weekend getting a stable workstation. I can do it, but time is money.

Curious how far forward SuSe and RHEL have come in the last year or so. As far as I'm concerned the Ubuntu install and package managers are the gold standards now.

--T

[Gentle Fury]

As a follow-up to my little CentOS rant, I went and installed Ubuntu 9.1 on my little test laptop.

Must say, the installation process and initial config put any other distro I've used to shame. All 3 wireless cards I've got were recognized without any tweaking, on-board volume and media controls were recognized, all necessary libraries to install "real" software are there by default. They've even enabled the "restricted" non-free software repositories with binary X drivers by default now... and it recognizes the trackpad as a proper trackpad -- no driver compiles just to turn off tapping!

All in all, I'm pretty darned impressed... didn't even have to hack Xorg.conf to get hardware acceleration in Gnome.

So yeah, it's an easy install that just works. Maybe that rubs some folks the wrong way... I'm sure some folks love dealing with library dependencies and Xorg hardware drivers, compiling random things and blowing the better part of a weekend getting a stable workstation. I can do it, but time is money.

Curious how far forward SuSe and RHEL have come in the last year or so. As far as I'm concerned the Ubuntu install and package managers are the gold standards now.

--T

I've been a fan of Ubuntu for years for this very reason. It is the only distro that I could install and get to work without setting it up. That is invaluable. Who would not want that???

[ganzou]

I voted fedora because that is what I have used ever since RH went enterprise and started charging $$. But a few months back I installed Ubuntu and liked how it is very user friendly, I would have kept the distro but I had several viewport issues with maya and houdini. 3D apps in linux are very picky on the hardware and distro version. Same hardware ran great with fedora.

[ga01]

I would vote Linux Mint (I use it as my internet computer) as is less bloated than Ununtu,or Arch Linux for the hardcore linux use (blazing fast, as simple as you might need) , so, my vote goes for CentOs , good old trustfull.

[vand]

ArtistX v0.8 rocks

[joro126]

I've used Ubuntu, but I plan on switching to CentOS because a lot of companies use this. Here's a link to some interesting data for you guys.

http://studiosysadmins.com/wiki/disp...ratingsystems/

I may end up just doing LFS to gain a better understanding of Linux though.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

[beaker]

I've used Ubuntu, but I plan on switching to CentOS because a lot of companies use this. Here's a link to some interesting data for you guys.

http://studiosysadmins.com/wiki/disp...ratingsystems/

A bunch of companies use CentOS only because they have a Flame, so it is only a few machines if that. Most of the companies using Centos are also listed as using another distributions which is probably their primary one.

[tharrell]

A bunch of companies use CentOS only because they have a Flame, so it is only a few machines if that. Most of the companies using Centos are also listed as using another distributions which is probably their primary one.

A bunch of companies use CentOS because it's also very close to RHEL binary-wise, without the support cost, so Maya/Nuke etc etc are close to "supported".

Unfortunately KDE is KDE no matter which distro you're stuck with ;-)

Kinda, more or less, works. Once you get used to the absurd issues with copy & paste and the absolutely horrendous Linux file browser in Maya if you're not allowed to open a command port...

--T

[beaker]

A bunch of companies use CentOS because it's also very close to RHEL binary-wise, without the support cost, so Maya/Nuke etc etc are close to "supported".

I'm just speaking from experience from working at many of the companies on the list who run CentOS.

BTW, I think your mixing up your terms. Binary compatibility is a term meant for the cpu architecture(i386, i586, i686, x86, x64, etc...) not the linux distribution. I can run RHEL RPM files in any distribution if the above is the same.

[bfloch]

This is pretty useful:
http://serverfault.com/questions/53954/centos-vs-ubuntu

There must be quite a lot grannies around ...

[electricpig]

Any reason not to use Yellow Dog CUDA if you've a Quadro card, with it being a Red Hat flavour?

Anyone using this, and on an Intel MacPro with Nuke?