Hi, I have heard Fedora is the best supported distro. This would mean, also for programs dealing with business and students' needs?

Is Fedora the choice distro for business use? I have been advised to stick to one distro. I think when Fedora 9 comes out I think I will install it.

I am newbie to Linux.

Define "business use"?

"Best supported" is a pretty bold statement. Community support is rather difficult to measure, but surely it's good for many distributions - and community support isn't easily comparable to commercial support, which might be better for some business-related things.

You sure should stick to one distribution, because that way you consume less time for making tweaks here and there and can focus on that specific distribution - in the best case you can then forget about the actual operating system and only focus on what you really need to do, now how (as in "where do I get that software and how do I configure it?").

If you're unsure, you need to test yourself. You can't rely others' opinions because they don't reflect your own needs - therefore you should pick up a few choices based on the facts about them, try them all for some time, decide which one suits you*best and stick to that. Luckily for you there are live-cd versions available for many distributions so you can test them out easily, without needing to install anything.

And if you're already using some operating system, you can do your work with it without much trouble, you don't have time to waste in playing with things and so on, you should just stick to that operating system. If it's leisure, you should try and play, and if it's business, you shouldn't need to think about which operating system: it's the one that works for you, not vice versa.

Business, small business maths, forecasts, break even points, spreadsheets, databases, business letters, product design images are important, online research, business plans, looking at lab results, graphs, upgradeable and compatible to send to other business men and their computers. I'd like later to make a portable external hard drive copy which I can travel with. Or maybe a laptop.

Fedora's support is now only for about 1 year. Which means in order to continue to get updates (of any kind) you have to install a new version every year. Fedora is (basically) Red Hat's development version. RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux)5.0 was based on Fedora Core 6(FC6). The Problem with RHEL is that you need a license(pay $) to get updates, but it is supported for 5 years. Centos is RHEL with the logos removed. It is free to download and update. I run F8 on my main desktop and Centos 5.1 on my servers.

One could view RHEL, Centos, and Fedora as a family. If you know how to do X on one, it is pretty close to do it on any of them. While some would say Linux is Linux and the preceding statement applies to all distros, it is almost always more complicated than that.

Good points by B0uncer, espcially the "commercial support" part.


Simplifying things most on your list are about making use of data. For instance name, address, location information on leads ain't what you want, you want a CRM layer on top of it to make it usable, the bodytext of a letter isn't it but how you present it (templates, format conversion) and a business card means nothing unless you can OCR it and add it to your CRM. Most of that can be handled by Open Source software and regardless of distribution. Problems arise when encountering proprietary formats and when formats aren't supported in full. For instance OpenOffice.org can handle Mcrsft Excel, but I'm sure there's some features it can't (yet). You can test that by installing OpenOffice.org on a Mcrsft workstation and just using it. Or take the dive and install a GNU/Linux distribution next to your current OS and just use it. Granted, it'll take some acclimatisation because it'll not be as polished an experience as you had with Mcrsft but with perseverance and a little help from LQ you could just do fine.

Thanks. Also what is meant by CRM and OCR?

And Cent OS, what does logos do, and why is Cent called an "Enterprise" distro?

OCR optical character recognition. Take a scanned page (a picture) and turn the letters on the picture into text.

CRM customer relations management.

Logo a special design, used as a trademark in advertising and promotion.


Enterprise as in corporate. In this case extremely stable, bulletproof, etc.

Novatian, just about ALL of the distros will run the software to do all you've mentioned. What makes the distros different is mostly configuration issues. How you install software, for example, or perform system administrator tasks.

Really, only a few very specialized distros WON'T and they could be MADE to.

Wouldn't really be that same distro any more, but if you had to, you could.


Support (community or commercial), configuration, and personal ease-of-use are what separate the distros - not WHAT you can do with them.

So, find one you like and run with it!

See this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ations-640634/