Fedora, Debian or Gentoo

[Preston Crawford]

> I went through the same investigation, as I am sure many did.. My 
> conclusions were that Fedora was the way to go and should be given the 
> chance to prove itself (there are many doom sayers out there trying to 
> convince people that the porject is worthless)..

I agree.
 
> Gentoo was not a choice for me because again there was a learning curve, 
> and the idea of compiling packages from source does not sit well with 
> me.. I am not really confident in my ability to build systems, like PHP 
> for example with all its included libs and other command line options,  
> from source and have them run reliably..

I'd agree. I've been in distro-limbo, as I'm sure many of us have, since Red Hat's announcement, then SuSE's. I was a SuSE user and afraid of being abandoned or having the price raised or having stuff cut out of the core $80 professional package. So I went search. And I tried a source-based distro, of sorts. I tried FreeBSD. And while I liked it I found it to be too much of a pain to compile a bazillion things just to install something like Open Office, for example.
 
> The way I see it, its only through mre and more people getting involved 
> in the Fedora community that will make it a really strong distro.. I 
> just hope it does not become totally focused on the "Desktop" 
> application and forget about those of use who want to use it for servers 
> with no gui or bloat.. Minimal install with carefully selected server 
> options..
> 
> Later..

I couldn't agree more. Both on hoping the community takes off and hoping it stays generic. 

In terms of community, the thing that scared me about SuSE's announcement and Red Hat's is that there would be no good commercial distro out there to provide updates, etc. at a reasonable price and that the sands of cost would be constantly shifting. So after investigating my options I've come to the conclusion that the best thing I can do is use a good non-commercial distro that could develop a good community and basically say to he** with the commercial distros. Seriously. They don't want my money? They want to chase the enterprise? Go ahead. I'll take the gift that is Fedora (and it is a gift in that it is GPL and it's a good product) and enjoy using it for free. I gave you (Mandrake, SuSE, Red Hat) to the tune of hundreds of dollars. You don't want it anymore? That's fine. I'll use Fedora and hopefully we can make it an even better distro.

And I also hope it stays generic as well. I use my desktop both as a desktop and for doing servlet/jsp/apache/php development. So I'd like to see it stay the course. If not, guess I'll go shopping again.

I hope not, though.

Preston