My (new) Favorite Linux Distro

About once a year or so I take a romp through the Linux forest to see what new trees have grown and check out the current residents. Its always an interesting time as I've always loved the Unix/Linux OS (Love? Ok....really admire) and would very much like to see it become the mainstream OS someday. Yeah, I know I know MS....blah blah blah. Anyway....

Most of the time I've stuck with Red Hat's offerings since they packed everything so well and there was so much support for it out in the world. This time, however I decided to give a few other distros a look and even tried a couple of them. Here's a brief rundown of those I looked at:

- Red Hat Fedora: Basically the same as the old Red Hat before the split. I was disappointed though that they switched from XFree86 to X.org X servers which ATI wasn't supporting yet. I've since learned I could make it work but haven't gone back to try it.

- Suse: I found this distro to be really impressive. It looks very easy for a novice and its very well put together. Kudos to Novell who are obviously planning a run for some desktop space. The only thing I didn't like about it was that it felt very "locked up". That's good for your average user but I wanted something a little more hacker friendly.

- Debian: I seriously looked at Debian as I've always heard good things about them. This distro's not company owned so its very "free" and its package management is top notch (from what I've heard). The downside is that development is very slow. The last "stable" release was a year or more ago.

- Slackware: I like Slakware's minimalist approach but I was looking for something a little more "packaged". I understand though that their latest release (v 10) is much easier to install and configure than their older releases.

and finally.....

- Gentoo: I had heard a little buzz about this distro as I read around the net so I went to gentoo.org to check it out. It was a bit difficult to understand what this package was aiming to do at first but now that I "grok" it I am a total convert. You see, Gentoo is what you call a "metadistribution" meaning that your installation is built, custom, around a very light and tiny base install. Everything you install (if you choose it to be) is compiled at the time of installation but rather than simple "untar and compile" methodologies of old (think Slackware) Gentoo maintains a package and dependency model similar to Red Hat's RPMs. You tell the system to install and compile a program say...The Gimp (# emerge gimp) and the system figures out what dependencies and configurations it will compile for. If it needs additional libraries or support programs it will download and compile those as well. Want to update your whole system...go ahead.... # emerge -e world. Very sweet.

In addition to discovering Gentoo I also discovered a new (to me) window manager called Fluxbox. Check out this schnazzy screenshot.

Oh, if only Windows had this kind of power, flexibility and beauty!