Linux Distribution Chart

Reasons I use Arch:

“I use CentOS simply because of its reliability. It's also flexible, and very light—with it being light leaves more resources to actually do what you want. Hence, that's why I use it for all my servers.”

“I've had nothing but utterly awful experiences over ten years with RHEL, despite its high cost. I can see the point of CentOS if you need RH without the cost, but it's just revolting to work with and the documentation is terrible too, so I'd never run either by choice.”

“I use Debian for its stability, support and availability of third-party packages and programs.”

“Debian combines great sysadmin friendliness with a terrible release policy; Ubuntu takes its great design and adds sanity.”

“I now use Fedora because each successive version of Ubuntu caused different problems with my 3.5-year-old laptop (camera, sound, wireless, graphics). Each version would fix some problems and cause others. Fedora has been stable, fast and less trouble to set up than Ubuntu.”

“I like Gentoo for its extremely useful control over the system and love the flexibility. It appeals to the tweaker in me! All my systems, including laptops, run Gentoo! That's five systems in total! I have tried other distros, but nothing comes close to Gentoo. I loved portage so much, at some point in time, I ported it to Solaris. Now, with prefix support, anybody can use portage on Solaris, BSD or Mac OS. The Gentoo community is exemplary!”

“I've been using Windows for a long time, since Windows 95, and I've been an IT professional for about 9 years. Through it all, I've always been turned off to Linux. I didn't have time to try anything new. I was just trying to keep up with the changes in Windows. Just a month ago, a new coworker gave me a Linux Mint CD. I took it home and ran the live CD on one of my IBM laptops. I've been hooked ever since. I even changed my wife's laptop from XP to Mint. The bottom line is, Linux just works....I'm sold.”

“I use openSUSE because it always has just worked for me. It has a large selection of software available in repos and through the build service. Information is easily found on-line in the wiki and forums.”

“I love live CDs, but liked PCLOS Big Daddy so much, I felt the need to install it with a dual-boot of Windows at the time. By the time PCLOS 2007 came out, I'd gotten a newer computer and erased the Windows partition to put the exclusive Linux desktop on it. I haven't looked back since. I no longer dual-booted. The other people I know who have PCLinuxOS tend not to be techie types that you see at work, but more like teenagers and housewives and early-adopter-gadgety folk around here—not the Computer Crowd, as much as the people with lots of cool toys. They don't dual-boot either. When VirtualBox came to Synaptic repos years ago, I put my Windows XP install disk in there to test it out and made a video of Linux running Windows better than Windows. I ended up taking the virtual Windows off though, because I never used it. PCLinuxOS rules.”