Is there really a "Best" Linux distribution?

[bigbear]

I got this question at a customers location recently, he has been doing some online investigation of Linux after hearing some discussion of it from an employee of his who uses it at home and from preliminary discussion with me.

Best is a relative term. People are too accustomed to proprietary competition, which while it can be healthy if done fairly and ethically, is more often than not done very wrong and becomes a popularity contest or spin points.

Some Linux distributions are assembled with a certain type of user or environment in mind. Others are monolithic and encompass everything Linux has to offer, leaving it to user to fine tune it to their needs.

The nice thing about distributions that have been 'tailor made' so to speak, is that there isn't much extra work that needs to be done on the end users part. Most of the software and 'tweaks' for that pre-determined purpose have been made already. If you're needs are about the same as those that a distro has been pre-tweaked for, you might find that distro to be the best for your needs.

The benefits from this are multiple. You as an end user are able to be productive sooner, with less modification on your end. This saves time spent on configuration and testing a plethora of software to see if it is what you need.

A monolithic distribution may be better suited to your needs as you require specific customization and have the resources available to put your own installations together as they are needed, unique to the environment or user it will be installed for.

To be honest, even the "pre-fab" distros may require some extra customization to meet your exact needs and requirements, just fewer as the bulk of what is already there is satisfactory.

Some distributions that are 'pre-fab' include Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Mint, Sabayon, and many others. These are usually targeted to the home user and include a plethora of multi-media and entertainment apps as well as generalized productivity apps.

Most of the pre-fab distributions have smaller repositories and maintain fewer packages (software) than the monolithic distros partly due to team size and partly due to their goal of streamlining or targeting the distro.

Monolithic distributions include Debian, Arch, Gentoo, some might even include opensuse and Mandriva as well, although they offer install media with pre-fab configuration, they are very generalized and tend more toward basics that you can build around.

The monolithic distributions have huge package (software) repositories and maintain as much software as possible within them to give users the benefit of choice.

If you are not sure which version or distribution of Linux to try, feel free to post on the forum and ask for recommendations based on your needs and resources. We would love to see you get a successful start using Linux, which is the best overall as far as we are concerned.

Big Bear

[igor948]

I've been "playing around" with different distros since 2001. My son brought home a Mandrake CD from high school and said, "Dad, check this out!" He almost immediately lost interest, but I didn't. I have a PC that I keep around just for installing and uninstalling distros that catch my attention on DistroWatch. There are so many distros that are custom-made that there is certainly something for everyone's taste out there.

I like KDE. Since I have been pursuing my degrees for the last six years, I just wanted something that I could install and use with ZERO learning curve. A distro where everything "just worked" out of the box. I originally started playing with MEPIS many years ago, but after realizing that my laptop wireless would not work without great effort (this was around 2003 or 2004), I bailed out and started distro hopping. I eventually landed on PCLOS (around version 0.94) because I liked their KDE implementation. I have tried others since, but seem to keep coming back to PCLOS. It is because of using PCLOS that I ended up finding the BEL project. Though I trolled the boards daily soaking up any knowledge that I could, I was still distracted by my studies to really get into the "guts" of any distro.

I am hoping that I can make time to build a PC using BLFS (Basic Linux from Scratch) to help me understand more about the OS and kernel. I don't know whether I will have the patience or time. I am ready to have some fun and LEARN more about GNU/Linux. But the bottom line for me, is that I need immediate functionality...I can always learn the intricacies later.

I think that there is no BEST Linux distro for everyone....but there is a best Linux distro for the individual. I never quit trying different distros.