I forget where the original thread is, but some guy on my listserv posted this huge rant and I thought it might be helpful:

> Looks like most people suggested Gentoo Linux...
>
> Thanks for all the replies!

I'm a big gentoo fan and have been for a few years, and I have some
opinions to offer, too.

I said opinions, please take them with a grain of salt. Your experience
may certainly differ, and there's no research data to back any of this
up, and asking about the best distro among Linux geeks is sort of like
asking which is the one true religion among differing fundamentalist
factions.

Opinions! These are opinions! Please quit trying to root my boxes!

(Now that this is out of the way...)

I would suggest, if you can find the time, to sit down and run through
the installs and through a typical "time to update packages" event in a
couple or three distros before you make a decision.

Here's my experience with a few common distros:

RedHat
Everyone loves to hate it, it seems, and RPM hell was, yes, hell.
But as people have mentioned, YUM (and my personal fave, Red Carpet,
which comes with the Ximian Desktop) resolve this mess. Easier to
install than the others, a little more (likely) unnecessary bits than
other distros tend to have.
To its credit, the packages are quite up-to-date, the official
documentation for the distro itself is by far the best out there, and
the distro does a good deal of hand holding for new admins.
RedHat has the best installer, the easiest configuration and
customization, and the second most up-to-date packages available.
Assuming you use nothing but the official compiled packages to update
updates are simple. Package maintenance tools are simple (there are but
a couple you really need to know), and the learning curve is gentle.

Debian
Debian is very, very nice for single purpose boxes which you need to
make a *lot* of. It's very easy to update if you're using nothing but
official packages, but be prepared to use old (even if updated) patches
for almost everything. Debian will *not* update a package in their core
distribution for many months, and sometimes years, after it's an
accepted standard version, once the bugs have been mostly shaken out.
For me, this was a little frustrating because I found myself needing
things not included in the older versions of software in a lot of cases,
and ended up compiling almost everything but the base system from
scratch to resolve the dependency issues.
Debian moves a lot of things around from where the software
developers originally put them (fair enough because software developers
like to put their stuff in /usr/lib/myprogram/ or some such, instead of
the generally recognized standard places... /usr/bin for binaries,
/usr/sbin for server binaries, /opt for vendor (precompiled) software
distributed without the option of source code, etc.), which can make
following the software documentation and conforming it to your Debian
install a little confusing at times until you get accustomed to where
things are. Basic setup scripts help with the most generic settings for
many packages.
Package maintenance tools are the worst, not because they're
inherently wrong, but because there are so many little ones to do small
pieces of the larger picture. This is true with both the core tools
(dpkg-based) and the wrapper tools (apt, etc.). If I want to search for
a package name, I need one tool. If I want to install it, another. If I
want to configure it, a third. If I want to rebuild it, a fourth (or
fifth, some packages have their own tools). Not horrific, but as a new
admin you'll find yourself typing "apt-get search package" a few times
before "apt-cache search package" sinks in. Also, because I generally
tend to need to compile a lot of things by hand, I end up having no
package maintenance system for large portions of the software I install
on servers (which is the real reason for the worst rating here... I've
ended up doing it all yourself).
On a recent mail server build, the core pieces of which were
Postfix, Perl and Spam-Assassin (for Amavis-D), procmail, and
courier-imap, all of these (plus about 50 perl libraries) had to be
built by hand, because they were all outdated enough to be too
problematic for the pieces which *needed* to be new (Spam-Assassin,
particularly) to work together at all.
Debian has the second best installer, the third best configuration
(due slightly to the we-moved-things-around stuff), and the worst
package maintenance (apt is a massive improvement over bare RPM, but
only when it's an option). If you use nothing but precompiled packages
in your server, maintenance moves to number one... but a mix can be
frustrating, since .deb's are (in my experience) just as bad about
conflict resolution as RPM's are, requiring some under-the-hood
tinkering with the package management configurations and filters to get
hand-rolled and pre-rolled packages to play nicely together.
I use Debian for servers right now (somewhat grudgingly, I'd be
much happier if they're release the next version since it's been over 2
years since the last stable release), and for "I just need to set up a
quick box to do <insert task here>" situations where appropriate.

Gentoo is the cool kid on the block. It's got the hardest
installation (although there's a nice step-by-step walkthrough, none of
the other distros *require* you to build a kernel). Not the best distro
for novices, the absolute best distro for learning about Linux, in
general. Also, in my experience, the very best distro for resolving
problems, because the user community is extremely active and posts their
experiences, problems, and solutions to forums.gentoo.org.
Package freshness and installation is where Gentoo really shines; it
has new packages released continuously, tested to work with the latest
versions of dependent packages. The one thing a lot of people hate about
Gentoo is the custom compilation of pretty much everything for your box
(although you can get precompiled packages for most things, if you look).
The thing is, they've managed to automate the compilation process so
that compiling and installing apache is as simple as 'emerge -i apache',
instead of all the APACI and module goofing that one has to do when they
usually build from source. Takes considerably more time to build a
machine than any other distro (due to compilation times), but when
you're done, you have the most recent versions of pretty much
everything, compiled with the options you specify (done centrally for
the whole machine, so every package which supports 'foo' can see that
they should include (or exclude, if you wish) 'foo' in one central place).
Gentoo is the worst installer (not because of problems, but because
there's not much there, it's mostly tar and shell scripts,
intentionally. I would guess that the official 1.4 release has more in
the way of installers now, but it's been a while since I did an
installation from scratch), the packages are generally put into the
places you would expect (with a few exceptions to change glaring
I'm-the-developer-and-I'll-install-where-I-damn-well-please issues), and
the absolute dream-team of update and package management tools. Anyone
who's used the BSD ports system will laud it over RPM/DEB packages; this
is the same principle, but the tools (of which you really need one, and
if you start writing your own custom packages, two) are awesome. The
drawback is, of course, compilation time... but in the day and age where
a kernel build is 5 mins, it's not as bad as people might insinuate.
If you want to build something by hand in a completely different
manner than the gentoo folks, or if you have a drop-in replacement for a
dependency, no worries, gentoo is fantastic about letting official
packages and your own work together, an option to emerge (the package
tool) inserts your-package-or-dependency-name-here into the system's
installed-packages database. Done.
I'd hesitate using it as a server, but many people report good
success with it as a server platform (here on campus, as well). It's the
ultimate desktop distro IMO though.

Regardless of what distro you choose, you will likely end up compiling a
lot of things by hand, especially as this is a web server, specifically
I can guess Apache will (maybe not to start, but likely eventually) get
compiled by hand, as will many of the support libraries for Apache, Perl
and PHP.

I've also use SUSE (older versions), Mandrake, slackware, Knoppix
(Debian on steroids on a CD, yay), TurboLinux, and CorelLinux (now
called something else and owned by a Canadian company), but none of
these are really the best candidate for server installs for varied reasons.

Hope this helps, and sincere regrets if my opinions offend anyone who
feels beholden to one distro or another. It's all good, feel the love,
yadda yadda...

Cheers,

-mh.
--
Mark Hazen, Systems Specialist
Office of International Education
208 Barrow Hall, The University of Georgia
(706) 542-7903

Nice Post!