Fedora or not Fedora...thats the question

[Basher52]

In a previous thread Void told me that Fedora is way better than RH9 as i use now(still) and that I should go for that...
but ive recently heard from linuxguru's in my close vicinity that i should go for SUSE instead...
can you guys tell me why they are saying this?
(i know its not easy for you to know that, but you may perhaps understand why...i dont)

B52

[Void Main]

I'll bet if you ask those people which distro they have more experience with they will say SuSE and it's surely the reason they are telling you that. Basically I won't tell you any distro is any better than any other. What I can tell you is that I have a lot of experience with a lot of distributions since before there was such a thing as a distribution (started with Linux in early '92 and was already a UNIX admin).

I can tell you that there are several that I would consider good, as in have a lot of work put into them to make sure everything works well. SuSE certainly is one, Debian is one, Red Hat/Fedora is one, Slackware is one, and there are several more. Each one is somewhat different in the way things are configured (not a lot) and each might have their own system configuration tools.

I learned a while back that it really doesn't matter which distribution you pick but it is a worthy cause to pick one and stick with it. The more time you spend on one the less tinkering you have to do and the more work you can get done. I happened to pick Red Hat for various reasons back when they first came out. When I upgrade from one version to the next I *know* how things are configured and it takes just a few seconds to get things back into running order. Now if instead I were to switch from Red Hat to another distro I have never used it would take some time to get used to the differences but eventually I would become just as productive in that distro as I am in Red Hat distros.

They all use the same productivity software so that really isn't an issue (Apache, PHP, MySQL, KDE, Gnome, etc, etc). One of the main reasons I picked Red Hat as my primary OS is because it's default configurations are nearly identical to my perferences and requires very little tweaking on my part after installation time.

The only reason I personally would recommend Red Hat to someone else is because that is what I am most familiar with and what I can provide the most help on. For instance, if you enjoy getting help from me, I would be in the best position to help you if you were running Red Hat/Fedora as well. I can duplicate your issue easily and solve it whereas I am not going to install another distro just to help someone solve a little problem.

So what it all boils down to is take any recommendation you get from *anyone* (including me) with a grain of salt. I would suggest that if you have the time that you install several of the most popular ones and spend some time in each of them, if you have problems, try and get them resolved from whereever you can find help. You'll make up your own mind which one is best for you.

P.S. I don't know that I would say that Fedora "blows away" RH9 (even though I might have). I just don't see any reason for not keeping up with the current software if at all possible. It takes me very litle time to upgrade a home system from RH9->Fedora.