quote:
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"Am quite new Linux world which is growing badly big and Hmm confusing, Got this question at the moment:
What version of what Linux would fit best with 3D app including Maya, Nuke, Mayaman, prman And Massive ( Of course when I robbed a bank ),"
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okay, i'm going to chime in here just to back up knecht here. our suse friends are very enthusiastic about their fave distro, not unlike us debianites or fellow gentoo or redhat dweebs. So just to balance things out a bit ...
Knecht is correct.
Our Suse friends are correct too ( it's just that knecht is more correct >_> )
Look your starting out, it's all going to be confusing. The biggest problem you are going to run into is that as a ( I presume ) Windows user you have 14 years or so of training under your belt. Please don't forget that.
I deal with newbs every day that come to linux and go 'but this was so easy on windows ... waaah', they forget just how ingrained they are in the Windows world (14 years of slavery changes the mental process). Things seem harder at first but after about a year of tooling around most people go 'holy [censored], this is far easier than on windows' ... and for most things it is, I won't go into details, but by the time you are experienced in the desktop environments will have yet again moved forward in featuresets making things even easier.
The second problem you will run into is the 'google it factor'. We are working on it slowly, but because the Linux world puts the power in the hands of the user, most people figure out very quickly that it's more fun to 'create / code' than it is to document. In a roundabout way you are expected to be 'born with the knowledge' as some have commented, but what that in practice refers to the idea that the online world is a global mental core dump, a sort of conglomorate backup memory storage device of all our knowledge (not exactly true but more so every day). There is an underlying expectation that you access this core dump of human knowledge ( it's skewed very much in favour of computer related fields, and as such, Linux in a way is evolving as a result and in conjunction with this real time core dump of knowledge ... a co-symbiosis of sorts) first before asking questions in forums, irc, etc.. In other words, you already do have the knowledge, you just need to 'remember it' via google. Neat huh?
Okay, admittedly the information could me more organized and thorough, but that will come in time. I'm hoping to spin a perspective on some of your upcomming experiences. Nothing wrong with asking, just when you get an 'rtfm' type of response, think of the paragraph earlier, it's what they are obtusely referring to.
Thirdly, in the end Linux is Linux. All your needs can be met with almost any Linux distribution. You know what? You can build your own Linux distro from scratch to match the specs of your software by following these sites:
www.linuxfromscratch.org <-- linux from scratch
http://lfs.crash404.com/blfs/news.html <-- beyond linux from scratch
Pretty damn cool eh?
Okay, do this as a newb: download every goddamned distro you can. Go ahead and run Suse, Gentoo, Mandrake, Redhat, or anything else.
Then at the end try Debian. You will see very quickly why Debian is a remarkable distro. As of right now, Debian ( Sarge version about to be released, last debian official release had something like 9, 000 packages) has 15, 000 precompiled packages, that are all tested, all updated and all dependencies resolved for you. To install a package you just do 'apt-get install '. There is a gui called Synaptic to let you select and install packages and their dependencies If you want. To install .deb files you download from various online resources you can just do 'dpkg -i packagename.deb' ... etc. Super easy.
Debian is also ported to something like 11 or so architectures. so thats 15, 000 pieces of precompiled, tested, secured and dependency resolved on:
aplha
arm
hppa
i386
ia64
m68k
mips
mipsel
powerpc
s390
sparc
What most people fail to realize how huge of a project Debian really is. It is bar none, THE BIGGEST, baddest mofo distro out there, and all the dependency hell you will run into on the rpm based distros doesn't exist, AT ALL. Sure glitches exist, hell its one of the biggest software projects on the planet, but it's pretty darned good. What you should start to realize is that almost all of the software in all of the other distros is already precompiled, pretested, dependency resolved and present Debian. There is of course software particular to Redhat or Suse but the percentage points of that is something like in a handfull of % at most.
This however, is simultaneously ( appologies to any Matrix fans for the reference ) Debians greatest strength and greatest weakness ... while simultaneosly the largest and arguably one of the simplest distros to use, the last Debian official release was something like 3 years ago. It's is one bitch of a project to get volunteers to package, test, debug 15 000 pieces of software simultaneously on 11 platforms while reingeneering a whole bunch of things. Let me put it to you into perspective - that would be like Microsoft actually porting all of their products combined, three times over, to 11 different platforms not one, and releasing all of them simultaneously on a regular basis ... staggers the goddamned imagination frankly. Of course Debian developers are only packaging and debugging and porting, not actually coding the software from scratch but it is still a project of incredible proportions. Some discussion is going on about moving to Debian to a time based release process like Gnome, some like the idea some don't, but it doesn't matter for you at this point.
Try all of them young padawan, try Debian, if you like it great, if not whatever. Choose what works for you, all of them are fine choices.
You know where my vote stands.
