Now that RedHat has decided to not share its stable distribution for free to the community but leave the experimental stuff to its Fedora project, I'm thinking of switching to another distro that has the same ease of use and stability of RedHat.

So what distro do you recommend?

I'm currently looking into Gentoo Linux so is there someone who can give me their opinion? The 'build from source' concept, while sounding great, also means that it takes time to compile. From my experience of building Mozilla from the sources and the good hour that takes, it seems rather time inefficient to be building everything.

Also had a thought of moving away from the commercially hijacked Linux and try out FreeBSD or maybe Darwin. I dont know....

If you're looking to learn, then I would suggest/recommend http://www.linuxfromscratch.org. It's sort of a proto-Gentoo idea that will almost definitely get you intimately familiar with some of the workings of Linux.

I'm also in the hunt for a Linux distro at the moment. I've used Red Hat and Mandrake in the past, but both of these now seem to have lost the plot.

I recently tried Debian, but found the install a pain. It seems easy at first apart from some very plain text install screens, but to actually get it installed, and all devices running is another matter entirely. Not impossible, but a bit painful.

I'm now playing with some Debian variants that appear to offer the benefits of Debian and apt-get, with automated installation so you get a full system system up and running with minimal input from the user. My early impressions of Knoppix, Mepis, Gnoppix and Morphix have all been favourable so far. These are basically live CD versions of Debian unstable, but they appear to detect and correctly configure a lot of stuff automatically, such as 3D accelerated cards, network settings etc. They can all then be installed to hard disk rather than run from CD and seem to work quite well as a way to get a configured Debian system up and running quickly. Once they are running, you can then apt-get and tweak to your hearts content if you are looking for other packages not bundled with the system.

I imagine for power Debian users, this is a lame way to do it, but it's hellishly convenient, and helps novices get around editing their config files to get it all to work.

I agree that Gentoo looks interesting, and reports are that the finished product is fast, but I'm not so sure whether I can be bothered waiting for it all to compile also.

I'd be interested to hear how you go.

Don't be afraid of Gentoo: It has excellent documentation for every step involved in a "Workstation-Install" and provides GRP packages for those who don't want to waste CPU cycles on compiling. In terms of Newbie-friendlieness it's a lot better than Debian, since the Documentation is very well written and easy to follow (as opposed to Debian's).
Knoppix or other alternative Debian installers (Bonzai Linux, Libranet etc.) are another option and overall Debian does show more maturity than Gentoo, but in the end it's more a matter of taste than anything else.

dev0

Just out of curiosity, how would one install Knoppix to hard disk? I couldn't find anything at the Knoppix website on this, altho maybe I didn't dig deep enough in the FAQ. Is there a different distro for HD use, or only the "live CD" distro?

Reason I ask is that Linux is now in my forseeable future (don't know how long, but the future is now visible to me)... at first I'll probably play with Knoppix more booting from CD but would like to know how to install it to HD, if it's possible.

Or maybe will go with Debian eventually, but Knoppix has my interest as perhaps the easiest install available.

It comes with a tool called knoppix-installer, which will guide you through the installation process.

dev0

I use and would recommend Debian.

Firstly, apt-get is great. It makes installation and removal of software a pleasure. You might want to look at one of the more modern apt frontends too. I use aptitude but there are many good ones. Secondly, you can choose betweeen stable, testing or unstable depending on how bleeding edge you want to be. Thirdly, the Debian community is very helpful, friendly and willing to accept people who are new to their distro.

Debian is not without it's problems. The first couple of hours setting up and installing is a pain in the butt. All software is compiled for the 386, so it's not as optimised as could be. However, you can always compile your own packages from the sources (apt can handle this automatically).

I have tried Gentoo, but I found having to wait for sources to compile every time I need some software a real pain. If you have a ninja PC it shouldn't be a problem though. It's a nice distro though, so it might be worth a look.

I just installed Slackware in less than half a day, piece of cake. I'm writing this on my fresh Slackware desktop, listening to music and compiling wxPython, while I just had XP this morning. I'm pretty happy with it, especially since I can (partially) share my Mozilla profile between Windows and Linux.

But in the past I've used SuSE, RedHat and Gentoo and in my opinion SuSE is the most complete, but Gentoo is quite nice too (if you're willing to put in a lot of time compiling).

I forgot: Knoppix is indeed very nice too, although I never installed it to my harddisk (just ran it from the CD, which boots surprisingly fast).

Gentoo is my distro of choice, but it is not for everyone. Indeed, some things are faster, and the gentoo-sources kernel is quite nice (includes some performance improvements back-ported from 2.6). Many things are not any faster (be sure to ABX your speed impressions). Portage is awesome. I've heard apt is very nice too, but I have little experience with Debian myself. Anything is better than RPM.

Gentoo is somewhat masochistic. It is assumed, for example, that you won't be afraid of configuring and compiling your own kernel. For some people (e.g. me), that's no big deal; I've done it lots of times before. Other people get scared off by the process. Really though, it's not actually hard once you've done it once or twice. I could never go back to having a one-size-fits-all monstrous modular kernel with a big messy initrd, etc.

Gentoo is _much_ less mashochistic than LFS. If I want to update everything on my system that has updates available for it, it's just one command. There's basically NO package management at all in LFS.

Some big packages (KDE, XFree, Mozilla OpenOffice) are pretty monstrous to compile. For most of those though, you have a choice of installing binary GRP packages so you can be up and running right away. You can then compile newer/custom versions in the background and still have a useable computer (portage can be configured to automatically nice itself, I'm compiling something in the background all the time.)

The nice thing is that your system is very customized. You can load it up with tons of crap or leave it quite barebones. Every compile is done with your chosen set of options (via USE variables). The RC script system is very slick (superior to redhat style). The forums and mailing lists are exceptinoally useful, and the community is quite friendly. The documentation is also very good. I recommend reading up on the Gentoo RC system and the portage docs beforehand if you decide to jump in.

Something else you might want to look at is the Agnula project:
http://agnula.org/
From their front-page:

I have no experience with their distributions, but it looks interesting.

I bit the bullet and went for Morphix last night, a variant of Knoppix. Fired up the Gnome Heavy GUI iso as a Live CD, checked that sound, network, internet, ATAPI CDRW support and my Geforce2 were up and away (which they were with no input from me), and then clicked on the "Install to Hardi disk icon".

30 minutes later, I rebooted into a full operational Debian install. Sweet.

I then apt-get installed a couple of packages I was after (Firebird!), did an apt-get upgrade and all is well. It is now happily in residence alongside my existing Windows XP install on a separate hard disk, complete with LILO multiboot menu etc.

For those not familiar wiith it, Morphix is a Live CD variant of Knoppix, but has better Install to Harddisk support, and has a wider range of isos to choose from, such as Light GUI, Heavy GUI, Gamer, and KDE.

Not that it really matters which one you pick though, thanks to apt-get install.

For the Gentoo users out there, I heard that it typically takes 2 - 3 days to get a Gentoo install up and running if you compile from source. Is that true?

I would hope that's REALLY not the case for Gentoo, at least, assuming you want a minimalist installation on your machine. I run linux as a router and have installed LFS as Phong and I have described. Since I can install LFS in LESS than a day, I would hope that one could install Gentoo in the same amount of time.

I asked after seeing a comment on www.distrowatch.com (can't recall where but I think it was inside a Debian or Libranet review) where the guy states that the Gentoo install (using source obviously for general desktop use) took him three full days. Probably depends on what you call a day. 8 hours, 24 hours, overnight compiling?

The idea of rolling your own from source does have a certain appeal, and I imagine if you know what you are doing you will get a highly optimised system. In my case where I share the PC with my Windows only Wife ™ such frigging around wasn't an option. For me the whoa to go in 30 minutes with Debian via Morphix was ideal.

Back to Phongs comments, my understanding is that apt and portage are neck and neck with ease of use, handling dependencies, etc. And they both leave RPM for dead.

To download a package, install it, including all dependencies, you type apt-get install pakagename at the command line. Hey presto, all done.
To update all of your installed packages to the latest versions, including dependencies, you type apt-get upgrade. Some Debian freaks run this on a daily basis as an automated task to keep their system completely current.
To update your entire distro, you type apt-get dist-upgrade. This will literally download and update your entire Debian distro based on the packages you have installed. I've never tried this, out of sheer fear, but it sounds kinda neat

I've installed Gentoo over 5 times with various different hardware, and it typically takes about a day and a half to compile everything from scratch including XFree86 and KDE. If you cannot wait that long but want the full speed and features of Gentoo, just install the GRP binary packages first, get your Gentoo system up and running in 2 hours. Then do an "emerge -e world" to get everything recompiled under your favourite settings while you can still work on the machine (of course, having a preemptible kernel helps here so your work isn't affected by all the compiling).

*removed*

The project actually seems to be moving forward, but IMHO you will be better off using an all-purpose Distro and building multimedia related packages yourself or getting them from places like the Rarewares apt rep or freshrpms.

Three days is definately on the long side, but possible for a slow system (I'm thinking 500Mhz vicinity). My Athlon 1.2 took about one day (including KDE and X, which I did overnight). A faster system or a smaller set of chosen packages would be naturally shorter. If you install from the GRP binaries, it would probably be just a couple hours, tops.