Exciting geek poll

[babysimon]

I need to build my new employer's first Linux server. Initially just for CVS, but I want to increase the amount of stuff we do with it. I'm now faced with the traditional quandry of which distro to use. I use Debian at home, and like it, but I'm concerned about ease-of-use for anyone other than me. No-one else here has used Linux - half of the building is using MacOS 9...

[Poll #77362]

Obviously I'm not making decisions by LJ now, I'm just interested to know what you think.

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

What do you mean by "ease of use", when no-one's going to be sitting at it?

I don't believe the ease of use of Debian is any worse, but you have to maintain the damn thing, so you really don't want to be fighting with any other distro. Debian's biggest usability problem is a slightly longer learning curve for the initial install, but that's not a problem in this instance.

[babysimon]

You may be right. jigdo is running now, anyway. I just didn't know if the latest RH, MDK etc come with GUI server-admin tools - I know a lot of people here would appreciate that.

[josh-the-cat.livejournal.com]

Redhat 8.0 is about the easiest to use (imagine a Windows Linux distro) and Debian is the easiest to update. But...you can get apt for redhat now (Forget rpm's, they break increadibly easily)

[babysimon]

Yeah, that's what I thought. But as a KDE developer I have ideological problems with RH8, and what's the point in teaching distro-specific gui tools?

Grrrrrr. Bloody decisions.

[josh-the-cat.livejournal.com]

Whats wrong with linuxconf? Anyway, I always tend to put Afterstep (http://www.afterstep.org) on. Much faster. Much more configurable. Much more reliable.

[babysimon]

Than what? KDE? That's comparing a bicycle and a truck. Anyway, I've persuaded trishpiglet, ergotia and morgan99 to use KDE with no traumas. I don't think afterstep and xterm would have done the job.

[josh-the-cat.livejournal.com]

Well...I expect a Window Manager to manage windows and nothing else. Its a bit like the Vi vs Emacs discussion...

[trishpiglet.livejournal.com]

Yeah Josh even girls can do it : P xx

[conflux.livejournal.com]

Well I'm not a Linux expert but have to use it at work as RH is one of our supported platforms. I got so fed up with RH rpm hell that for our home server I went for Debian 3 but cunningly I've got Malc to do the tricky install for me. Mind you Malc's a bit of a command line purest so I had to ask him to even put X on it. I may add KDE myself if I end up doing a lot on it.

[elfgeek.livejournal.com]

I don't know much about Suse, but do *not* - I repeat: do not - under any circumstances use Red Hat, it is way too easy to hack into. I'd probably go with Mandrake or Debian, that I have heard many good things about. But Red Hat is just way too unsafe.

[babysimon]

And by "too easy to hack into" you mean...? I know old (5.x) versions came with a load of stuff enabled by default, SMTP open relays etc but I thought they'd cleaned up their act?