Good evening,

I have used every version of Windows since Win2000. On Dec.28.10, I decided to make the switch to Linux. I have been very happy in my new world of CLI's and such.

I have been running elementary OS "Jupiter" for a few months now, but it is time for a change. I have looked at my options and singled out two:

- Debian 6.04
- Scientific Linux 6.2

Which of these is more reliable? Which has a better community backing it for support? In short, which should I use?

Thank you,

Lawrence

Both are reliable. Both have excellent support communities. The Debian community is quite the larger, but with Scientific you also get benefit from the CentOS and huge Fedora and Red-Hat groups.

I think you need to look at some of the most important things you do with them, and ask which has the best tools for that function available in their repositories.

If you do pretty standard stuff, even that may not make the choice. In which case, flip a coin. They are all good, just not all equally good for exactly the same things.

Can you tell us more about your needs? Server/desktop/laptop/netbook? Applications you must-have? And so forth...

Personally I have used both of those distros extensively, and it is pretty much a coin toss; they are both excellent.

Thank you for your quick reply. I don't really have must-have applications, but here are some things I have installed at the moment I find myself using a lot, listed by package name:

gtk-recordmydesktop
rhythmbox
audacity
gedit
filezilla
openoffice.org
brasero
gnomebaker
vlc
winff

My computer's specs can be found here: http://lix.in/-b5a080 Take a look if you have any further questions, or feel free to ask directly.

Speaking from experience, audacity and vlc are slightly easier to install in Debian than in Scientific/CentOS/RedHat.

Your Broadcom wireless will not work out-of-the-box with either distro, see the appropriate Wiki for how-to.

Test-driving a Live CD of both distros might help you make up your mind.

both
it comes down to what your software was primarily designed on
i use software built for RHEL6 on rhel6 servers so i use SL6