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5 Ways to Decide on a Linux Distribution

Posted by khess on · 5 comments
DaniWeb; By Ken Hess
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What do you look for in a corporate-capable distribution? Prejudices and opinions aside, at some point in your career you'll be asked to select a viable Linux distribution for your corporate network. How will you choose? Will you use the same distribution that you use at home or will you do some research and find something that's corporate-ready? Are you up to the task? Do you know what to look for in a distribution to support a corporate environment?

Prejudices and opinions aside, at some point in your career you'll be asked to select a viable Linux distribution for your corporate network. How will you choose? Will you use the same distribution that you use at home or will you do some research and find something that's corporate-ready? Are you up to the task? Do you know what to look for in a distribution to support a corporate environment?

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Comments (5)

Is it just me, or is an article titled "5 ways to decide on a Linux distribution," that mentions not a single distribution by name somewhat less than helpful.

If we know enough to read between the lines and get, " 'commercial support' means only Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Suse Enterprise Linux and maybe, possibly, just maybe Ubuntu qualify," why not just come out and say it?

Lumping everything under the "server" category is also a bit too general. File servers, Web servers, print servers ... routers and gateways, firewalls ... and then you have desktops of various types. I imagine there are many different ways to go for each of these uses. You might really need RHEL for a forward-facing Web server (although my shop seems to be moving away from RHEL to CentOS; guess we have a deep enough bench to deal with it ...), but for a print server or even a desktop, it's probably not so critical to have RH a phone call away.

In a related matter, that DaniWeb "join our group" popup that appears before the article displays is annoying. (FF isn't blocking it for some reason.)
His approach does seem to be one size fits all. It certainly wasn't written for the home desktop user who won't care about technical support, or the very small business user who is likely to use a local consultant. Some distros are well suited to certain niches while others are not. The hardware a company uses will also influence the choice.

This article is right up there with his "Fedora isn't relevant" piece. If it was in print it would be suitable for recycling and use as ferret litter or bird cage liner.
> In a related matter, that DaniWeb "join our group" popup that appears before the article displays is annoying. (FF isn't blocking it for some reason.)

Tell me about it, Steven. I've gotten to the point I'm avoiding DaniWeb articles.

And it's not even 5 ways to choose a distribution. It's 5 things a business might want to consider when choosing a distribution. That's not even close to the same thing. And as you point out, there are some things you need support for, but there are many for which you don't.
Quoting: If we know enough to read between the lines and get, " 'commercial support' means only Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Suse Enterprise Linux and maybe, possibly, just maybe Ubuntu qualify," why not just come out and say it?


Or Oracle. Mandriva. Vector. Turbo. Debian (HP). Xandros. Yellow Dog (PPC). ClarkConnect.

Probably more.

Not to mention a growing number of VAR-type businesses supporting Linux, and often concentrating on the free ones like CentOS, Debian or Ubuntu.
@ Steven I have both noscript and Adblock enabled and I don't get the popup. I think it's noscript that actually does the trick

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