What's the best distribution?

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 03:24:44PM -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Red Hat is the market leader. Some people refer to Linux 8.0 when
> they really mean Red Hat.

I have mentioned "Linux" to civilians, gotten a blank look, then said
"Red Hat" and gotten recognition.  That's a market leader.

> Debian is popular with the technical people and those who are very
> much Open Source oriented.

A coworker and I tried to install Debian and to our non-Debian eyes we
had a hell of a time making sense of it.  

An alternative way to play with Debian is via the Knoppix CD
(knoppix.org).  Knoppix is a free distribution that boots and runs off
of a CD.  It makes a great rescue disk, but it is also a damn nice
distribution in general.  Until very recent revisions (Klaus Knopper
seems to put out an update every few days--this is a work in progress)
one was stuck with the CD-based edition, but now there is an install
script that will put it on your hard disk.  This is still a little
rough, but it works.  At the moment Knoppix is best when run off the
CD.


-kb