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Old 05-06-2012, 03:20 PM   #1
Martial-law
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Post Best stable distros based on Debian, CentOs, Slackware and FreeBSD?


Hello,


I am looking for the distros based on Debian stable, CentOs, Slackware and FreeBSD which are most stable, yet easy to use and the best in all other aspects. Its difficult to just use Debian, CentOs, Slackware and FreeBSD because it would need high skills. I am a newbie and up till now I have come to the conclusion that these four distros are the most stable and the best. So distros based on them which are user friendly yet do not compromise the stability and all the good aspects would be the best option to begin using Linux. So kindly inform.
 
Old 05-06-2012, 03:43 PM   #2
PrinceCruise
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Welcome to LQ.
Honestly I don't get the exact reasons behind reluctance of not using the distros you mentioned.Have you tried any one of these before by hand?
I'd sincerely suggest you to first try them/any of either in as a VM or in a spare machine, you might get your thoughts of 'required high skills' reorganized.
You can get an a fully functional desktop, ready for use (With minor setting up) as a home workstation or server with these distros, without requiring really high skills of *NIX, just little patience.


Or, if you already have made up your mind on this, try LMDE(Mint-debian) or PCBSD(FreeBSD+nice GUI) or Mepis(Debian Stable). (And BTW CentOS itself is based on Redhat)

Won't mention Slackware, there are some things better be used original.

Regards.

Last edited by PrinceCruise; 05-06-2012 at 03:45 PM.
 
Old 05-06-2012, 10:15 PM   #3
catkin
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Salix is a more GUI-orientated distro, based on Slackware.
 
Old 05-06-2012, 10:48 PM   #4
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Errrr. Kanotix or Mepis or Semplice or Crunchbang or LMDE or Siduction or Antix for Debian Live though some I recommend isn't too stable, (depends on default windows manager and repo preferences). Some are testing based. Some Unstable based.

Scientific Linux for CentOS maybe. Or PCLOS. Or Open Suse.

Don't have any exerience with BSD based distros.

I pay attention to this guys blog also.

http://extonlinux.wordpress.com/

besides DistroWatch.
 
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Old 05-07-2012, 10:21 AM   #5
DavidMcCann
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Salix is very friendly, especially if you get the live CD rather than the plain installer. The pdf guide is good, too. It addes extra software, but most comes straight out of the Slackware repository.

Mepis has an excellent installer, with pop-up help. It's not quite Debian stable; as an annual release (Debian is alternate years) they don't always wait for a new version of a program to make it from Testing to Stable, but they are very careful what they accept.

They make a good pair, one with Xfce as default, the other with KDE: the most sensible and stable of GUIs. They also have similar package management tools, apt-get and slapt-get.

CentOS is not really difficult, if you are content with what's on the DVD. The only problem is setting priorities for extra repositories if you're not (see CentOS website). My trials and errors suggest 1 for CentOS, 2 for EPEL, 3 for RPMforge, and 4 for atrpms.

BSD of any variety is a very different thing to Linux. Don't try to juggle too many things, or you'll start confusing them!

Last edited by DavidMcCann; 05-07-2012 at 10:23 AM.
 
Old 05-07-2012, 10:26 AM   #6
snowday
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Martial-law View Post
Hello,


I am looking for the distros based on Debian stable, CentOs, Slackware and FreeBSD which are most stable, yet easy to use and the best in all other aspects. Its difficult to just use Debian, CentOs, Slackware and FreeBSD because it would need high skills. I am a newbie and up till now I have come to the conclusion that these four distros are the most stable and the best. So distros based on them which are user friendly yet do not compromise the stability and all the good aspects would be the best option to begin using Linux. So kindly inform.
My vote is choose one of these three: Debian, CentOS, and Slackware (I'm not a BSD user so no recommendation there). If you must use a derivative for some reason, Ubuntu and Mint are the two most popular.

It is right to expect a learning curve; Linux has a different definition of "user friendly" than Windows or Mac. Do you have a teacher/mentor to help you learn?
 
Old 05-07-2012, 11:15 AM   #7
TobiSGD
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Quote:
Originally Posted by snowpine View Post
If you must use a derivative for some reason, Ubuntu and Mint are the two most popular.
The most popular, but they do not fulfill the OP's requirements:
Quote:
which are most stable, yet easy to use and the best in all other aspects.
Quote:
So distros based on them which are user friendly yet do not compromise the stability and all the good aspects would be the best option to begin using Linux.
I still think that from the mentioned distros Debian is the one that is the best for beginners that want an easy distribution, may be together with CentOS, while Slackware has a slightly steeper learning curve and with FreeBSD being a totally different thing.
 
Old 05-07-2012, 11:22 AM   #8
snowday
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TobiSGD View Post
The most popular, but they do not fulfill the OP's requirements:
Can you elaborate? I found Ubuntu and Mint to be stable and very easy to use in my experience. If your experience was otherwise then please share.

Obviously I think Debian is a better choice, but the OP seems convinced Debian is "too hard" and desirous of a Debian derivative (such as Ubuntu or Mint) to "get the feet wet."
 
Old 05-07-2012, 11:33 AM   #9
Martial-law
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Some people say that Mepis is in fact Debian Stable. But even if it is not pure Debian stable, for me it would be sufficient to know if it is as stable as Debian. I am looking for stable deriatives of Debian, CentOs and Slackware. I have deleted FreeBSD from the list. As it is not Linux. I have also searched for the deriatives for the three distros and come to this conclusion:


1- Debian 6 Squeeze based: Simply Mepis, Saline OS, Solus OS, Snow Linux. Kindly comment on them if you have used them. Regarding Ubuntu and its deriatives, though they are Debian testing based; they are far from stable.


2- Slackware: The best which everyone recommends is Salix OS. Is it as stable as Slackware? Also is there any other like this?


3- CentOs: Though it itself is a deriative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it is a not commercial like Red Hat and is freely available for everyone to use. I have read that it is as stable as RHEL and is exactly the same thing. But one thing which discourages is that it is just an OS for enterprises. Its not a general purpose OS like Debian and Slackware and their deriatives. I am very surprised that no one tried to create a user friendly, general purpose deriative of CentOs which works out of the box. Are there some legal problems?


Also since I am here I would definitely use the pure Debian 6, Slackware and CentOs with your help and guidance once I use the deriatives.

Last edited by Martial-law; 05-07-2012 at 11:35 AM.
 
Old 05-07-2012, 11:48 AM   #10
TobiSGD
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Quote:
Originally Posted by snowpine View Post
Can you elaborate? I found Ubuntu and Mint to be stable and very easy to use in my experience. If your experience was otherwise then please share.
Of course, I used Ubuntu form 8.04 to 9.10 and have made the experience that every new release was a bit more buggy and less stable than the one before. Also, I came to the conclusion, when looking at bug-reports and forums that the developers were at all times more concentrated to develop the new release than fixing bugs in older releases (I can't blame them for that, with such a short and fixed release cycle i doubt that they had other possibilities). That (and some other things in Canonical's policy) caused me to change to Debian when 10.04 was released buggy. Man, that was a LTS release, which they have intended for business users.
Even Canonical recommends not to upgrade to 12.04 until the first point release, which is basically the same as saying: Wait, we know that we have released an unstable OS, give us time to fix it before you even try to use it.
When even Canonical is not recommending their OS for users that want a stable system then I won't do it either. Since Mint only adds a few packages of their own repositories and otherwise use Ubuntu's software I doubt that it will be much more stable.
To the easy to use part, yes, both are easy to use for a beginner, nothing to complain about here.
For the third part, "do not compromise the stability and all the good aspects", stability is already ruled out, so let's come to all the good aspects. The good aspects of those OSes are that they all are very stable, very well tested, with CentOS being compatible to a de-facto industrial standard (RHEL), are not very demanding when it comes to hardware resources and I think some more that don't come to my mind now.
 
Old 05-07-2012, 12:04 PM   #11
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I still don't know why Debian is said to be hard. In my experience I had to do the same things to get Ubuntu installed as I did Debian. With Ubuntu you still have to mess around getting CODECs working, for example, and adding the Debian multimedia repository is hardly difficult. Smilarly, restricted drivers install is still a manual stwp under Ubuntu even if it is a bit quicker than the ticking boxes and changing packaged under Debian.
Once the install is done, which perhaps takes a couple more steps under Debian, you are left with a system which takes exactly yhe same skills to use and keep up to date as Ubuntu.
Mint is, granted, quicker to install due to the non-free stuff but, again, once installed it takes the same knowledge to ise and keep up to date as Debian.
To my mind if you've a non-techie person who wants or needs to install Linux, and you can't be there to help, then Mint is probably a good way to go. If you've any IT knowledge and you can follow instructions then you may as well use Debian.
The only drawback I can think of selecting Debian Stable over Ubuntu or Mint is you will be stuck with older packages. This is great for stability but if, like me, you like to try new stuff you can end up using Sid.
 
Old 05-07-2012, 12:41 PM   #12
snowday
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Interesting comments TobiSGD. To be honest I haven't used Ubuntu much since 9.04, from what you are saying, it sounds like you think the product has gone downhill. Ubuntu was a great introduction to Linux for me back in 2007, I'd be sad if that is no longer the case in 2012.
 
Old 05-07-2012, 01:11 PM   #13
TobiSGD
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I myself started with Ubuntu, too, was a great experience for me, but I really have seen it going downhill, which for me was the reason to change. In the beginning Ubuntu really was a kind of 'easy beginner distro', but IMHO that has shifted to 'MacOS X/Windows-rival distro' and with that shift they have sadly adopted some of the flaws of their rivals. That is also the reason (besides some other things in Canonical's policy like the tries of vendor lock-in, the weird contributors contract and the astonishing general behavior as have they have invented Linux without even mentioning Linux) why I refrain from recommending Ubuntu to beginners and more likely recommend Mepis or other beginner friendly distros.

Just my conclusion from what I have seen, of course other people will see that totally different.
 
Old 05-08-2012, 04:59 AM   #14
Martial-law
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DavidMcCann View Post
Mepis has an excellent installer, with pop-up help. It's not quite Debian stable; as an annual release (Debian is alternate years) they don't always wait for a new version of a program to make it from Testing to Stable, but they are very careful what they accept.

DavidMcCann,


Kindly clarify why Mepis is not quite Debian stable as everywhere it is mentioned that it is based on Debian stable and some say that Mepis IS Debian stable. I could not understand your above mentioned information for Mepis.
 
Old 05-08-2012, 05:14 AM   #15
Martial-law
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After searching I found the best deriative for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and that is Scientific Linux. I would prefer it over CentOs. Anyway, I think I should just begin with Debian 6 Squeeze as some of you have advised. I have downloaded the 8 DVDs for Debian 6. I know that the first one is for installing the system. Kindly inform me about the remaining 7. Are they required to be installed with the first DVD just after the OS installation or they can be kept after installing the OS and used later whenever to install the required apps?
 
  


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