What's the Best Version of Linux?

Full disclosure: the following represents my personal opinion, based on nearly ten years of hands-on experience with most of the major versions of Linux. I am not now employed by any entity with any financial stake in Linux products or services, nor have any entities of that nature supported this blog post in any way, other than to provide Linux itself. Linux® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. I am a villager.

Enterprise Users

Now to answer the question. First and foremost, the best version of Linux depends on your needs. If you are in an enterprise setting, most likely you’ll want one of the major supported enterprise Linux distributions. While there are others, the two best known are Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise. I’ve used both of them, and have no strong preferences for one over the other. In many cases, the choice will depend on the hardware you have and which ones are supported by your hardware vendors.

Home / Small – Medium Business

For the remainder of this post, I’m going to assume that you’re either an individual home user or in a small – medium business. Still, the choice of a version will depend on your needs, and I can only offer my personal opinions.

Stable Server

For a stable server platform, the two most common choices are CentOS and Debian Stable. CentOS is a community-supported respin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For the most part it is compatible with RHEL, but it is supported by the CentOS community and has no connection with Red Hat. Debian Stable is a community-supported distribution.

The main difference between CentOS and Debian Stable is the packaging system. CentOS uses packages in the Red Hat Package Manager (rpm) format, and Debian Stable uses packages in the Debian format. In the past, the actual package management mechanisms for Debian Stable were significantly better in many ways than those for Red Hat, but those issues have largely been resolved over the years. The one area where Debian Stable retains an advantage is in the quantity of packages available. I know of no other Linux version that has a larger collection of packaged and tested software available from its main repositories than Debian.

Desktop / Laptop

Moving on to desktops / laptops, there are three major Linux versions, openSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora. All three have excellent community support and all three feature newer software than those versions I’ve mentioned previously. I’ve used them all, and they all provide excellent applications for the major desktop or laptop computer use cases:

• Internet browsing, email, messaging and social networking
• Voice Over IP (VOIP) / Telephony
• Word processing, spreadsheets, personal / small business information management
• Educational software
• Desktop publishing
• Multimedia players and multimedia production software
• Digital camera, scanner and other image processing
• Scientific and statistical computing and technical writing
• Games
• Server application development and testing

Using one of the three Linux desktop distributions, for the cost of a download and a blank CD or DVD, you can install applications that would cost thousands of dollars on a Windows or Macintosh system!

The choice among the three comes down to personal preferences. In my opinion, the key differences are in the community, system administration and the desktop look and feel. How do I rate the three major desktop Linux versions?

• Community: Here I give the nod to openSUSE by a sizeable margin. All three have comparable community support in terms of forums, friendliness to newbies, resources, documentation, etc. What sets openSUSE apart is two additional Novell projects – the openSUSE Build Service and SUSE Studio. openSUSE Build Service makes packaging and distribution of software easier for openSUSE than the other two, and SUSE Studio makes appliance construction a simple “point, click and ship” process.
• System administration: Here I would rate openSUSE slightly ahead of Fedora, and Fedora slightly ahead of Ubuntu. The openSUSE YaST tool set is comprehensive, and I very rarely need to drop to the command line to perform system administration. Fedora inherits all of the GUI adminstration tools of its Red Hat ancestry, and indeed is where some of those tools originate. On Ubuntu, I find I need to drop to the command line fairly often for functions that are in the GUI tool set on the other two. The once place where Ubuntu has a significant advantage is in setting up a dual-boot on a Windows system. For dual-booting Linux on a Windows system, Ubuntu’s “wubi” installer is much easier to use than the partitioning installers the other two offer.
• Desktop Look and Feel: Until openSUSE 11.2 was released, I rated this a dead tie, with a slight nod to openSUSE because I think the default green color scheme is easier on the eyes than Ubuntu’s brown and orange or Fedora’s deep blue. openSUSE 11.2 has changed all of that. openSUSE 11.2 includes Novell improvements to major open source projects like OpenOffice.org, Evolution, Mono and Moonlight. In addition, while Ubuntu and Fedora do make the KDE 4 desktop available, they default to Gnome and may require customization for some workflows.The KDE 4 desktop on openSUSE 11.2 is the best Linux desktop I’ve ever used. I’ve written about this previously, so I’ll refrain from further comment. So, for me, the best Linux version is openSUSE 11.2.

Summary

So that’s my opinion. This is a controversial topic, and I invite you to subscribe to this blog and comment.