[PLUG] Selecting a Distribution (was: Solved: <Soon> New Computer)

[Rich Shepard]

On Tue, 9 Mar 2010, Rich Shepard wrote:

>   This brings up a related question: what criteria do you (collectively,
> not just Marvin) use in selecting a distribution? Does the choice depend
> on the system being used personally compared with professionally (knowing,
> supporting, and recommending distributions?)

   Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this topic. Most everyone follows
Paul's line of thinking to a greater or lesser degree.

   I originally picked Red Hat (in 1996) because it was recommended by a
Powell's Tech Book Store salesman as locally more popular than was Slackware
at the time. I stuck with that from 4.0 through 7.3 when I switched to
Slackware for the stability, upgrade ease (which has deteriorated somewhat
in the last few releases), and being far enough back from the bleeding edge
that I didn't need to pay a lot of attention to it.

   On my wife's laptops I replaced Slackware with Xubuntu only because the
latter more easily recognized the ancient hardware and had everything
working. While I don't particularly like having to be familiar with two
distributions, it's working OK here.

   I'm still undecided on whether to install the 64-bit version of
Slackware-13.0 on my AMD Athlon X2 server/workstation. I don't know that it
buys me anything of value (to me) for such a small network, and it would
probably be different from the 32-bit version on my notebook.

Rich