Which distros should I consider ?

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On Thursday 13 July 2006 11:22 am, Matej Cepl wrote:
> Jerry Feldman wrote:
> > This is a distro to watch as Mark Shuttleworth has some very specific
> > plans.
>
> and
>
> > I suspect that it will, in the long run, not use Debian bits.
>
> Can you elaborate on/evidence both of these claims, please? Just curious
That was not a claim but a suspicion. 
I was recently in a meeting where Mark was the presenter. Where I have my 
suspicions is that he and his community want to go in certain directions, 
and may not want to wait for Debian or may differ from the direction Debian 
is going. We saw this with Mandrake. Initially, they took the Red Hat bits 
and added their value proposition, but they subsequently decided to build 
an independent distribution. Based on Mark's previous accomplishments and 
his wealth, I suspect that he will be able to steer Ubuntu into the 
enterprise. Right now in the US, Red Hat owns the enterprise Linux segment 
with Novell as a second fiddle. SUSE and Mandrivia tends to have more 
support in Europe. 

But, the bottom line of the question, "Which distros should I consider ?" is 
a matter of personal preference. Some distros install better on different 
hardware. I've had Fedora work well in some cases and fail in some, and 
likewise SUSE. We use Red Hat and Fedora on our BLU servers because that is 
what JABR preferred. I started with SuSE after I had problems with Debian a 
number of years ago when SUSE was very similarly managed to Tru64 Unix. 
But, if there were some business reason for me to use Fedora, I have no 
problem. 

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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