Yeah that's what I meant too say

Some more food for thought:
http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-compat.en.html
3.2 How compatible is Debian with other distributions of Linux?

Debian developers communicate with other Linux distribution creators in an effort to maintain binary compatibility across Linux distributions. Most commercial Linux products run as well under Debian as they do on the system upon which they were built.

Debian GNU/Linux adheres to the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. However, there is room for interpretation in some of the rules within this standard, so there may be slight differences between a Debian system and other Linux systems.
3.3 How source code compatible is Debian with other Unix systems?

For most applications Linux source code is compatible with other Unix systems. It supports almost everything that is available in System V Unix systems and the free and commercial BSD-derived systems. However in the Unix business such claim has nearly no value because there is no way to prove it. In the software development area complete compatibility is required instead of compatibility in "about most" cases. So years ago the need for standards arose, and nowadays POSIX.1 (IEEE Standard 1003.1-1990) is one of the major standards for source code compatibility in Unix-like operating systems.


I don't believe this thread is about lessons easily learnt ... but more about learning them ONCE, no matter the difficulty.

There is no way-- if what you say is in fact the request-- that it can fulfilled-- because of distribution design.The modification from standard on most binary distros is such that you specifically cannot use what you learn easily on other distros-- but if you know the 'standard', you can figure out what needs to be done, and then you only have to figure out how the distro does it, but you don't have to figure out what is being done in the first place.

I always appreciated the Mandrake Control Center for this reason-- when I went into DiskDrake and made changes, when saving them, it popped up a dialog saying, "Save changes to /etc/fstab?".

So now I knew that in order to make changes to my drive mounting configuration, the data was contained in the /etc/fstab file (even though I didn't know how to edit it, because DiskDrake did it for me).

So when I went to Debian/Slack/Gentoo, I at least knew what the file for this standard Linux process was called, and only had to learn the proper syntax for editing it.

Just try that with SuSE (where you literally cannot edit /etc/fstab directly, because YAST will overwrite your settings for you, thank you very much).

You cannot compile a kernel under SuSE/Mandrake/RedHat. Well, you can.... but it will probably break, because SuSE/Mandrake/RedHat have a bunch of custom patches applied to their kernels, which you have probably not manually applied (because if you know where to get the SuSE/Mandrake/RedHat kernel patchsets, you're a better "man" than I am-- and that assumes you know how to manually patch a kernel, which a SuSE/Mandrake/RedHat user probably does not, because SuSE/Mandrake/RedHat are designed to avoid you having to do these things).

The only reason Debian escapes this is because so many people use Debian that the variations are well documented-- how many READMEs in source tarballs give modifications for a Debian compile? A lot (almost all of them, if they need it). How many such source tarballs give specific compile instructions for Mandrake or RedHat/Fedora? None that I've ever seen-- because a) you're not "supposed" to be compiling under these distributions anyway, and 2) if you are, you know enough about how to compile, and the variations of Mandriva/Fedora/Suse to not need instruction anyway.

But under Slack, you don't need special instructions, because the general instructions work fine. Because everything is where it's supposed to be, and everything does what it's supposed to do, without modification.

If the OP wants to transfer his or her knowledge to a modified distro, then he or she would be better served by learning that distro in the first place and foregoing the others (in the "if you use SuSE, you learn SuSE" train of thought), but that does not seem to be what the OP wants, having asked for the most standardized distribution.

We have no argument - see my first post.
Regardless, it is good advice.
When you are comfortable with "your" distro, you are better equipped to to move to another and be able to find your way around. I jumped from RH as a first distro to Gentoo - a big learning curve but surmountable.
Now I can even handle Slack ...

I think perhaps the question should be which distro conforms the best to the LSB (Linux Standards Base).

Two linux's being nearly identical may be so, merely because the they are both derivatives of the same source.
There are two ways that services are started. Either BSD or System V.
The more fundamental differents is historical. Whether a distro is RPM based or Debian based.

In my opinion, one common feature which should be supported is using PAM for authentication. This would eliminate Slackware for the list.

You may need to exclude Mandrake/Mandriva also, because they used a patched kernel which would couldn't be called standard. However the convenience of being able to support more devices out of the box is a plus for other users.

For you, but not for everyone. That's a gigantic learning curve, especially if you don't know anything really at all to start with (let's face it, you don't learn much about basic system processes using RedHat. In fact, that's why I really hated RedHat; I had been a Mandrake user, and I couldn't figure out how to do anything-- even what little I knew from using Mandrake-- under RedHat 9. The experience was so awful that I won't touch any form of RH ever again, no matter how 'great' everyone says Fedora 4 is. But then again, I wouldn't trust a distro that uses gcc 4.0 as standard when everybody else is still working out the kinks against it....).

In any case, some of us don't want to take mighty leaps (or don't have time to), but feel more comfortable taking that learning curve in smaller steps.

In those terms, from easiest to hardest, the processes would be:

1) Choose a modified distro, learn how to use it, and stick with it permanently. One shortish learning curve (how to use SuSE), and you're done.

2) Choose a standard distro (which pretty much means Slack), learn how to use it, then switch to a modified distro (Two shortish learning curves; learn the 'standard' way of doing things, then learn to modify it for the modified distro's processes).

3) Choose a heavily modified distro, then switch to another heavily modified distro (two long learning curves, because you never learn the basic, standard way of doing anything-- you learn how to install/modify/configure RedHat, then you teach yourself how to install/modify/configure SuSE, but if you don't know how to install/configure/modify Linux, you're basically reinventing the wheel-- twice).

The 'problem', such as it is, is that

a) Linux is always Linux, so the same things always need to be done, no matter what cosmetic modifications may be made to the process; i.e., the boot process is the same for all distributions, and no matter what any given distribution may call the init files, or where it may place them, there will, under all distributions, be some kind of init file performing the same function as a differently named-and-placed init file under some other distribution, because the initialization process is the same-- because Linux is Linux . So it doesn't matter per se if your GRUB configuration file is named grub.conf or menu.lst-- if you're using GRUB, then you will have one or the other of those files, which will configure GRUB--- but if you don't know what a bootloader is, or that said bootloader has a config file, which will always be found in /boot, but may have one of two names, despite being the same file....you are going to be up the creek without a paddle if you need to figure out why Windows doesn't boot when you select it in the boot menu ;

b) the definition of Linux is that 'there's always more than one way to do it';

c) distributions exist because different people have different ideas of how b) impacts a) .

But a new user, who doesn't know what a) means in the first place, is not going to have much hope of managing c), because if they don't know any way to do it-- much less the 'standard Unix way'-- they are going to get confused by the infinite variations represented by b).... unless they have no interest in any of this at all (use SuSE, learn SuSE, to hell with 'learn Linux' is a perfectly valid usage profile).

But if said user does want to learn Linux, learning SuSE, or Linspire (heaven forfend), Gentoo, or even Mandriva is not going to teach you the basics of how a Linux system runs. Installing a kernel from an RPM doesn't teach you how to deal with a make menuconfig, or compile it. It doesn't teach you how to solve a kernel panic on boot, or what to do when you suddenly can't boot to X, and what files to edit with nano-- how many SuSE or Fedora users even know that nano (or pico) exists, or if you can boot to a console, you probably can fix the system and have no need to reformat and reinstall?

Even Gentoo to some extent doesn't teach you this-- because although I know how to edit my runlevel services, for example-- I "only" know how to do that using rc-update, and to edit the files in /etc/init.d and /etc/conf.d-- which are a Gentoo-specific locations and tools for the standard initialization processes. I have no idea what the same initialization files (which of course exist; the network has to be inititalized no matter what distro I use) would be called under Fedora or SuSE-- and under SuSE, I wouldn't know how to edit said files if X wouldn't start (because YAST is primarily an X-based tool, and I don't know offhand how to start the ncurses version. At least I know there is one, which is more than a lot of people can say).

It's a lot easier to learn how to drive a truck as opposed to a car if you know how to operate a vehicle in the first place-- unless you only want to drive a truck and will never operate any other kind of vehicle. In that case, you can learn to drive only the truck and all is well.

But if you want to be able to modify your specialized knowledge in an emergency, or you expect to want to perform variations on your knowledge, you have to have basic general knowledge. And that's what you get by learning from a standard. It provides a foundation from which you can vary. Using a variation as your foundation only succeeds until you come in contact with a different variation-- at which point one may not know which end is up, and that's just unnecessary stress.

What's the point in changing distros all the time, anyway ?
Read one general linux book, and one about your distro, period
.
linux being linux anyway, use the easiest you can find and look
at the others with a smile on your face

Too bad "easy" is a matter of opinion (what you consider 'easy' might be a complete PITA to me), and you can't really form an opinion until you've sampled enough of the environment (in this case, a couple of, or several, distributions) to determine what's easiest for you.

i have to say im biased toward debian but there is no such thing as a "standard" distro of linux. thats what makes linux in my eyes the best OS it has different flavors for different people. i have tried alot of different distros to get to the few i like. i also agree with one of the guys that said slackware is closest thing to unix but even than things that you find in menu for slackware may or wont be there for any other distro not based on slack. i would suggest if your new to linux try a few or bunch of distros and see what one you like best. there are certain commands that stay same from distro to distro like the ls command. but for the most part kde changes little from distro to distro and gnome changes very little from distro to distro. good luck

Welcome to LQ!

That would be Slackware...

My suggestion is for Debian.
Debian is getting closer to LSB (Linux Standard Base)
However use which ever distro you feel comfortable with and learn that one. Once you learn the basic's of Linux you will be able to find whatever you need no matter what the name is.

uberNUT69: why did you suggest netBSD?
jschiwal: you never suggested an alternative to the distros that you felt didnt qualify

why the references to "as close to unix as you can get"? is linux just a deviation from unix? if so why not just stick with unix?

im not looking for ease of use, just portability/adaptability to other distributions, i want to learn the linux, get inside it (which i see most of you caught on to)

NetBSD is much simpler than Linux to learn (IMHO), but still very powerfull.
It has the added advantage of running on a HUGE number of platforms.
As it is a BSD it's much closer to Unix than Linux is.
I suggest playing with NetBSD, perhaps before you choose whichever
Linux distro(s) as you will develop an appreciation of POSIX (and LSB).
An understanding of these standards makes it relatively simple to
adapt to almost any Linux distro on the fly.

eg. I spent $5 on a machine for NetBSD testing several years ago ...
a VAX with 128MB memory, 2 x 750MB disks and a processor equivalent
in speed to a P90. I learnt about NetBSD's simple packaging system,
networking, netbooting, root-over-nfs ... all sorts of issues ...
and developed a great deal of respect for VAXEN, online communities,
and open source devotees.
I learnt more useful concepts and practices from NetBSD in 3 months than
I had from the years of Redhat, Mandrake (and their ilk) previously.

In the previous millenium (in the dark ages before ADSL), I'd spend months
downloading the *latest* distro on dialup, just to try it out and see how it
differed from the others.
However, these days, I'd suggest you keep an eye on LiveCD's for
practice. While it's true that many of them are Debian-based (there's that word
again ppl!! ), I'm sure there are others (slax comes to mind).
Seeing how each LiveCD works will allow you to "keep up with the Jones's" and
learn new techniques as they evolve (eg. iptables->chains, devfs->udev ...)
and how they challenge each distro's philosophy.

Anyway, that's how I do it ... and it works for me.

ps. Although I recommend Debian for almost everything, it's essential
to have a bit of variety in your life

Debian based
Knoppix .. (Debian based) .. best Live CD, use Kantoix and install
Mepis .. pretty good wait for the new release
plain debian .. pretty good for experienced user
xandros .. ubuntu etc. (i care less about these as they have major warts)

Suse (rpm . it's own) pretty good NO multimedia

Mandrake (rpm it's own ) pretty good

Fedora/RH/Centos .. host of other based on either RH/or Fedora passable.

Gentoo and flavors .. nightmore
Slackware ( I think is good but I never tried it .. too much manangement overhead)

Rest is just blah blah blah ...

Slackware is probably the best distro because it's more similar to Unix, but when we change from Slackware to another distro, we see it is not similar in many ways... I think probably a Red Hat based, a distro who uses .rpm packages and a sysvinit boot, and KDE inside /usr folder...
Maybe Mandriva...
But stay to Slackware...