A new Linux recommendation

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:

> Is there a really good, complete, workable Linux distro that can be
> downloaded ?
> 
> Recommendations, pros/cons, what ever, I want to hear.

If you want complete, SuSE is the way to go. It includes just about 
every piece of Linux software you might ever want. Now that SuSE has 
decided to go to an open model for their desktop distribution, it can be 
freely downloaded from the Internet (http://www.opensuse.org/), though 
the downloadable version is not quite as complete as the retail package. 
(The additional packages are still available from their FTP server, 
however.) Right now, 9.3 and the first release candidate for 10.0 are 
available.

Starting with 10.0, the downloadable versions will include only software 
that is fully open source, so things like the Adobe Reader, Macromedia 
Flash Player, and Sun Java will not be there. They will all be 
installable through YaST, just as the nVidia drivers and Microsoft fonts 
are now.

I've been using SuSE since version 6, both on desktop and server 
systems. I've grown comfortable with YaST, and it has gotten much more 
complete over the years. You can now do things like NFS server setup and 
basic Apache administration with it, as well as the usual things like 
user and group setup.

If you're looking for a more turnkey desktop Linux, I 
second/third/whatever the love for Ubuntu. It has the best hardware 
detection around (both x86 and PowerPC versions), the installation 
process is painless (though it's text-based, so it's not as pretty as 
some of the competition), and it installs everything a typical desktop 
Linux user would want automatically. (Some more things, like Emacs and 
the kernel sources, come on the distribution CD but aren't installed 
automatically.) The full range of Debian packages is available for 
Ubuntu, so you can expand it into a server platform if you want, but you 
won't get a central administration tool like YaST for that.

Finally, if you're looking to install Linux on a Macintosh, Ubuntu is 
far and away the best choice right now. Yellow Dog doesn't seem to be 
actively maintained any more. OpenSUSE 10 will have PPC support, but the 
release candidate isn't yet ready for prime time on a Mac. (Most 
notably, it doesn't know how to partition the hard disk or install the 
boot loader, so you have to do those things manually. And its video 
detection didn't work properly on the Power Mac G4 I tried it on. 
Ubuntu, on the other hand, Just Worked.) Debian Sarge is another 
possibility, but I don't like the glacial update cycle of Debian.