What are all these distributions and how should I choose one?

by Stuart Yeates on 28 April 2006

Introduction

This talk

This talk is not a detailed technical analysis.

This talk is not an ideological analysis of open source.

This talk will not cover VMWare, Xen or other systems which let you run Linux under virtualisation.

This talk will be be approximately half and hour followed by approximately half and hour of discussion.

In this talk

Your Priorities
Distributions
Scenarios
Sage Advice

Why is your department looking at Linux?

What are your motivations for looking at Linux? What do you hope to gain?

Why is your department looking at Linux?

Save money on licensing
Allow customisation
Leverage in-house skills
Leverage existing internal deployments
Leverage external deployments
Interoperate with peers
Run specific open source apps
Run specific commercial apps
Unify desktops, servers and instruments
Promote security
…

What does a distro do for the department ?

provides pre-packaged, pre-tested, pre-compiled software that just works out of the box
provides a single place to submit bug reports
provides support for users
provides a pool of users as potential user-developers
provides a pool of existing developers
provides a sense of community
embodies a set of priorities and trade-offs

Priorities

Stability
Security
Pedagogical concerns
Range of applications (particularly GUI apps)
Bleeding edge versions
Philosophical outlooks (“freeness”, “openness”, etc)
Internationalisation (modern and ancient languages)

Trade-offs

Latest and greatest features vs stability
Having it all done for you vs local customisation
Localised cost vs centralised cost
Security vs openness
Choice between frameworks and applications (KDE/Gnome)

These are fundamentally reflections of underlying software engineering issues.

Many distros resolve tensions by having variants.

Why so many distros?

New distros arise when someone (or some group) comes up with an innovation that is sufficiently cool / useful / productive to tempt people from the existing distros or tempt new users from other platforms.

Switching distros can involve very large amounts of work, so even when a new distro has very clear advantages, many users are very slow to switch.

Existing distros adopt features found useful in new distros.

What’s the same?

Common software (OpenOffice.org, Emacs, Firefox, Thunderbird, Apache, etc)
Common tools (bash, make, configure, ssh, etc)
Open standards (POSIX, HTTP, TCP/IP, LSB, etc)
Explicit projects (freedesktop.org, etc)

Choosing a Distro

Think

Choosing a Distro

Try LiveCDs (possibilities, hardware, etc)

Talk to local Linux people (beer)

Talk to your friends and colleagues

Talk to your local IT support

Debian

The distribution with the largest pool of developers
Huge range of software available
Strong ideological vision
Versions for BSD, Solaris and Linux kernels
Many different packages to fill most roles
No polished point and click installer for end-users
The most widely used at Oxford according to a recent survey

Gentoo

Optimised for the user’s machine
Flexible installation
Portage system (like FreeBSD ports system)
Full install and customisation lengthy

Knoppix

Live CD / Live DVD
Based on Debian
Good for testing to checking hardware support
Excellent for resetting root passwords
Excellent for rescuing unbootable systems
No install necessary
Unsuitable for conventional desktop or laptop use
Used in recovery situations at Oxford

Mandriva

Commercially supported distribution
Security funded by the French Ministry of Defence
Very good handling for internationalisation
Easy to install
Minority distro

Red Hat

Commercially supported distribution
Free and for-pay variants
Commonly supported for third party applications (Oracle, SAP, etc)
Widely used in grid and scientific computing
Relatively small number of packages ship as part of the distro
The second most widely used at Oxford according to a recent survey

Scientific Linux

Red-hat sans branding
Completely free
Red hat applications typically run but are not supported
Backed by CERN
Widely used in grid and scientific computing
Minority distro

SuSE (Novell)

Commercially supported distribution
Strong on desktop slickness
Covered by campus agreements with Novell
Easy to install
Minority distro

Ubuntu

Commercially supported Debian derivative
Faster release times than Debian
Sacrifices choice for better integration
Currently the focus of many new installs, especially end-user installs
Easy to install
Used in the OUCS OULD (Oxford University Linux Desktop)
In tension with Debian

Scenario I

Server
No licence fees
Red Hat range used by peers
Needs to run Red Hat binaries and scripts

Went with Scientific Linux

Scenario II

Desktop
Needs easy install
Others in the building moving towards Ubuntu
Wants Regular updates

Went with Ubuntu

Scenario III

Desktop
Computer science background
Already familiar with Debian community
Thinking to become a Debian developer

Went with Debian

Scenario IV

Desktop
Department was committed to Gentoo
IT staff gave informal support because it was what they used

Went with Gentoo

Scenario V

Server
Debian is ``to hand’’

Went with Debian

Priorities

The ones that matter most are the ones about people

Without a peers or commercial support to fall back on, you’re stuck one way or the other.

Sage Advice: 1

Don’t install a live distro (Knoppix, DSL, etc) to disk (unless you know why you want to)

Install the latest stable version (unless you know why you don’t want to)

Sage Advice: 2

Backup

Ask your peers

Use IRC and Google from a stable machine to debug and fix problems.

Local mirrors (mirror.ox.ac.uk, www.mirrorservice.org, mirror.ac.uk)

Link to end-user peer support, enable users to help themselves and help each other

Further Information

OUCS helpdesk (phone)
ITSS (mailing list, in person)
OxLUG (mailing list, IRC, in person)
Distribution-specific (mailing list, IRC, wikis, …)