Well, I've chosen a new distro ...

[Michael Hipp]

(This is just FYI, for anyone that might be interested.)

The age-old question: Which distro to use?

I've been losing sleep over this decision for more than a year now since Red 
Hat announced they no longer wanted my money. So, to make a long story short, 
I'm hereafter devoting my efforts to using and learning...

   oo-BOON-too

That's Ubuntu to those of you that aren't hip to the correct pronunciation.

I'll be converting my clients' LAN servers to Ubuntu over the next couple of 
months. I've built one server for myself for in-house use and will be slowly 
moving production stuff over to it from the severely borked FC3 box so I can 
eventually give it a fresh install of Ubuntu. So far it is working great as a 
server and as a desktop. Clean and simple.

I did a couple of test upgrades from the current release "Warty" to the alpha 
"Hoary" just to try it out.  The upgrade instructions, in toto, are:

sudo sed -e 's/warty/hoary/' -i /etc/apt/sources.list && sudo apt-get update 
&& sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

... and go do something productive for an hour.

I boiled my decision criteria down to these (in no particular order):
  1. Be equally adept as a desktop and a server (with server usage being a 
"supported" option)
  2. Be modern and reasonably up-to-date (kernel 2.6, Xorg, Gnome 2.6+)
  3. Provide a default desktop install that is attractive, well-designed, and 
well integrated
  4. Have an installer that will get a reasonably complete system running in 
1-2 hours with a minimum of manual labor
  5. Have binary updates available from the distro provider suitable for 
automated install and available for a specified life-cycle
  6. Provide in-place upgrades on a running system as a "supported" and normal 
way of keeping the distro current
  7. Have a software repository that is deep, wide and unified
  8. Have a strong and growing support community
  9. Be free as in "free lunch"
10. Be in the top 12 list on DistroWatch.com for the last 3 months.

I gave strong consideration to:
- Fedora Core
- Debian
- Mepis
- Xandros
- Gentoo
- Libranet
- Ubuntu

All of the distros mentioned excel at many of the criteria. But ultimately 
Ubuntu is the only one that passed all criteria with relative ease. The risk 
with Ubuntu is that it is a very young project and no proven track record. But 
it appears they are serious about it and have the resources to succeed. And, 
if the worst should happen, it is a relatively short trip from there to Debian 
or some other Debian-based distro.

I don't really believe in luck but if you wanted to wish some of it on me I 
wouldn't be offended :-)

Michael