[Techtalk] Same old question -- which distro?

[caitlynmaire at earthlink.net]

Hi, Brenda,
> 
> Redhat 7 seems to be widely used... I keep hearing there are issues
> with Redhat 8... and the number of mailing list/newsgroup post I see
> about this or that not building with Suse makes me a little leary.

We use Red Hat 8.0 (with all the errata) extensively in my company in a
production environment.  Red Hat is used for everything from the
enterprise backup server to file servers to DNS/DHCP servers to web
servers.  There are grandiose plans beyond that for Red Hat here :)

I used to use Mandrake at home, including every version up to 8.2.  I
found it terribly buggy, shipped with many apps that just didn't work,
and with admin tools that were terribly resource intensive and often
unreliable.  Moving to Red Hat was easy.  I just made sure everything I
needed to keep was in my /home partition and didn't format it.  Assume
you will likely have to reinstall most third party apps, though.  We
also migrated one corporate server from Caldera.  Again, no problem.

I've also used Vector Linux (Slackware derivative) and found it to be
well thought out but not terribly user friendly.  It's fine for Linux
geeks, but not for corporate production use.  Support is limited at
best.  OTOH, it does work well.

Right now I think Red Hat has their act together and they seem to be
truly committed to the OpenSource movement.  I'd avoid SCO (formerly
Caldera) not because anything is terribly wrong with the distro, but
because the company seems determined to undermine the OpenSource
movement in general and claim intellectual property rights for anything
derived from the original Bell Labs UNIX, which they own.  I also am
uncomfortable with SCO, SuSe, and Connectiva because of their support
for United Linux and per seat licensing.  Yes, I know SuSe still offers
a free version.  Nonetheless, I dislike making proprietary code central
to a distribution.

Regards,
Caity