[WBEL-users] Best Distro for a Developer / SysAdmin-wannabe Desktop?

[Richard Crawford]

On Wednesday 04 May 2005 16:09, Greg.Lehmann at csiro.au wrote:
> If you are a sysadmin wannbe then go for wide exposure to different
> distributions. SuSE and Red Hat are the biggest distros and most larger
> organisations will run one or both of them, so you might make yourslef
> more employable by knowing both. You can get SuSE professional for free.
> For development if you don't want to have to worry about chasing
> packages you are better going with a distro that comes with more
> packages. Debian probably wins there and if you want to stay close to
> the big 2 mentioned about then SuSE professional and Fedora Core will
> have more packages and therefore offer a bit more variety to you.

I second the recommendation that you expose yourself to SuSE and to Fedora 
Core.  I also recommend looking at and playing with some Debian based 
distros; Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntulinux.org) is my current favorite.  If you 
want some real fun (for sufficiently loose definitions of the term "fun"), 
try installing Gentoo.  Once you've installed Gentoo from Stage 2 tarballs 
based on a LiveCD onto an ancient Sparc64 based SunBlade 100, I think you can 
seriously kick back, light up a cigar, and call yourself a geek.

I also think it couldn't hurt to expose yourself to other Unices such as 
Solaris or HPUX (in my office, I maintain two Solaris 9 servers, a Gentoo 
server, and a Fedora Core 2 server which I plan to switch over to WBEL soon).  
Down the road, you might also want to look at FreeBSD and OpenBSD as well.  
OpenBSD has a solid and well-deserved reputation for being perhaps the most 
secure server platform out there.

Whether you use GNOME or KDE is really up to you.  I used to be a GNOME guy, 
but a few months ago I switched to KDE because I find it more flexible and 
better suits my needs (the Fish protocol, which allows me to open file 
manager windows to remote filesystems over SSH, is absolutely fantastic!).  
Other users, though, prefer the more minimalist approach of IceWM, some like 
Enlightenment, and others like to use just plain old X without a windowing 
manager on top of it (don't ask me how they do it).  It can take time to find 
out what you're most comfortable with; but the greatest thing about Linux, in 
my opinion, is that there *are* so many choices and so many different ways of 
doing them.

-- 
Richard S. Crawford
Programmer III
UC Davis Extension Distance Education Group
2901 K Street
Sacramento, CA  95816
(916)327-7793
http://unexdlc.ucdavis.edu
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