I'm a huge fan of Fedora (ok, I lie, I love Slackware and Gentoo too). Fedora (and Red Hat) have always worked correctly for me. I don't have an issue going for proprietary drivers if need be (used to use madwifi, fglrx), and I also prefer using non proprietary formats (although I do install mp3 from livna, dispite prefering Ogg Vorbis).

So why not Ubuntu? I've always had issues with Ubuntu on my desktop and laptop. Upgrades break the system, broken features, tries to fetch "restricted" drivers and codecs on its own and fails (*cough*flash*/cough*, *cough*fglrx*/cough*).

Why not Debian? Not that I have anything against Debian, I ran it on my laptop for almost a year, just....Debian Stable is a bit too stale for my liking, and I prefer using stuff marked stable for the prying eyes of others.

One more strike against Ubuntu - lack of support on other archs. I use IA-32 (x86), PPC, and MIPS, and Ubuntu sorta left the PPC arch behind, and doesn't support MIPS (Debian and Red Hat don't support MIPS either, I use Gentoo and IRIX on the MIPS boxen).

I only have a faw distros i like and who works good for me...
- Ubuntu, Mandriva, Mepis, and Kanotix.
Others i like to try are, Fedora, and Yellow Dog on me Apple.http://linuxquestions.cachefly.net/i...s_lq/icon7.gif

Fedora, Most people only look at the user level, but when we go to the administration level i think ill settle for fedore any time. The others are user level/Desktop oriented but when it comes to the core issues, Fedora takes the flag.

DOSJockey382: I try to explain my choices in the first post. I included the two biggest distributions Debian and Red Hat - and then in the poll only, said their two derrivites included as well just if you had to pick one of the 4.

This is becomming a flame war, and it seems like Debian is edging away in the vote- but red hat/fedora are being supported in the thread itself.

Command for command, are they very similar? And, is the Debian no commercial linkages the reason most academic institutions go for Red Hat and Fedora?

Probably more commercial institutions use a RedHat company distro
simply for support. Debian offers no support, afaik.

So, as a student - do the basic commands differ between the two base distros? otehr than the obvious in the different package management apps (yum and apt)

There's different tools for setting up init.d and some different tools for starting and stopping services. But most of the basic linux/unix commands are the same since they both use bash. Basically anything that's used for administrative purposes like package management, service configuration, network configuration, etc. are probably different. Any normal bash type thing you'd do is the same.

yes, Ubuntu is dependent on Debian, so the question is moot. I'm with debian testing (lenny) and find it more stable than the windows system in my organisation (which is the best commercial world had to offer). In fact, I'm not sure there's been a single crash/bluescreen in 3 year of use.

The main (only?) problem with debian has been on new software using synaptic: this works like a dream virtually all of the time, but occasionally, on a major update, it reports it can't get the necessary packages from the mirrors. These are mainstream packages, and I check up on the official repositories and keep the preferences up-to-date, so it's mysterious. I try again the following day, and it seems to work then. These repositories don't go to sleep for the night, do they?

Ubuntu probably has its justification with hardware support: the purist attitude of some Linux developers seems almost intended to keep Linux a niche product. Then again we must be grateful for the tremendous work they do. WLAN is the main bugbear: it's something I've never managed to get working, but in the end decided I preferred to work without it. I didn't exhaust all the possibilities (i.e. ndiswrapper looked intimidating). Otherwise hardware recognition has been very good, and udev has brought great improvements with drives.

Many thanks to all who have contributed!
Peter

I voted Debian...

Synaptic works...

JR

"Which fruit would you pick up, if there were only blue and purple apples and cyan and red pears?"

Quite a useless poll if you ask me (not that you would) :) I'd try to build a mixture of the two (four) distribution bases to - if nothing else - get more options.

Red Hat can be built from source you know...(that's what CentOS is, after all)

My meaning was only building software from source, rather than
using the 'Debian Democracy' package managers ... useless IMHO.

I will neavuh, eavuh allow anything RedHat to touch a drive here.

I'm surprised to hear this? Maybe it depends on your application. I was an RH/Fedora fanatic for 6 years and then switched to Ubuntu as the latter gave far easier access to so called "restricted licencing" software. I see Ubuntu as the desktop Linux for non-geeks, and I believe it is about 95% there. As a sysadmin I'm keen to get users to move across. The package list for this distro is immense and includes a large number of very high quality applications for a wide range of things that home and office users would want. The support base is fantastic. Many forum users give detailed instructions for fixing all sorts of problems, in a way that non-geeks can follow. I admit losing my temper with it a few times, particularly after an upgrade, but not often.

Fedora I continue to use as a server and it is rock stable. I wouldn't consider using Ubuntu in that role but there is no reason why it could not be stripped down to remove unnecessary overhead. It is being used successfully stripped of a window manager as a MythTV box.

As for differences between distros, well I think they will smooth themselves out over time as developers share great ideas with one another. The real issues facing any distro seem to be political rather than technical these days.

Out of curiosity, why the rampage against Red Hat? With as many things as they've contributed to GNU and Linux, GNU/Linux wouldn't be what they are today without Red Hat.