Distro for End-Users & Administration Ease?

[Admin]

I have been running Redhat 7.3-9.0 for the past couple of years. I use it for everything from end user systems, fileservers & X Servers. With Redhat stopping its RHN updates I am looking into alternate distros.

Here are my points to consider:
1. Ease of use for end users
2. Ease of Administration
3. Documentation
4. Support (Pay or Community based)
5. Hardware Support

I am looking into Fedora now, but would like to see what other people recommend.

Thanks.

[Kernel_Killer]

I myself would go with FreeBSD. It has all you are wanting. Easy install, easy admin, plenty of support from freelance forums, or commercial companies. You can install all your applications from the ports tree which includes up to 7600 or more applications. So far almost every hardware supported by Linux is supported by BSD, made even more simple to implement, and kernel compiles are easy and painless with a 3 step process.

The only reason I point at it, is it can fit all your needs for all types of systems. If you want to stick to Linux, you might give Debian a try, or at least move to Mandrake for the close to RH feel. Fedora Core just isn't something for production servers or anything that needs to be quite stable.

[bdl]

I myself would go with FreeBSD.

FreeBSD is a great BSD distro and offers rock solid stability and a large user base, but I don't think you bothered to read the first two conditions on the list; ease of use for end users, and easy administration. From someone coming from a background of using only RH, it's going to be somewhat of a learning curve from an administration standpoint. End user support, I suppose, can be as easy as you want to make it, but that relies on the sysadmin (with considerable knowledge of FreeBSD as a desktop platform) to be able to do it. As far as hardware support is concerned, FreeBSD doesn't quite match Linux support for newer hardware and peripherals.

Obviously, there is a compromise involved with everything. Mandrake and SuSE are good RPM based distros, and both offer what you're looking for, although I'm not certain where they stand on software updates. Debian has potentially the best package manager and update system, but is also (for the most part) a Linux distro for more experienced users, and while it might not be as easy to administer as RH (i.e. using GUI tools) there are some really good CLI based admin tools built into the distro. Slackware and Gentoo, get ready to compile everything (yes, this is a very glib statement, no pro- Slack or Gentoo rants please).

Have you considered RH Enterprise?

[Admin]

Thanks Kernel & bdl. I have pretty much scratched Fedora off my list. A couple other people also mentioned that it isn't a good solution for what I am doing.

I am not worried about configuration GUIs. I do 95% of my config using VI, the extra 5% I will just figure out when I get to it. I have been told that BSD moved all the config files out of /etc, that would be a little weird. Right now BSD is looking like it _may_ be getting some time on my test machine.

I purchased a copy of Redhat WS to test out, it is a bit limited in what you can do with it. ES seems like overkill for the X Servers, but would work well for the fileserver. _but_ if I am going to be switching out the X Servers to a new platform, why not switch the fileserver too (will be upgrading hardware at the same time)?

Debian sounds interesting, I will have to read a bit about it when I get some time.

[Belisarius]

Considering the breadth of the tasks you want accomplished, you might want to look at different distros for different purposes.

For instance, I like Slackware for running servers that I don't need to run X on, such as webservers or networking boxes. Slackware isn't pretty, but it's streamline and configuration files aren't generated messes. It's nice from a sysadmin point of view.

For desktops/fileservers, I tend to stick with RH. While it's not necessarily the friendliest distro, it's got the most support behind it. If you're going to come out with a program, you're going to support RH 99% of the time.

Why fileservers? Because my experiences with RAID is that drivers tend to be proprietary, and at least in the case of Promise tend to release only for RH.

Finally, if you want to keep you're current RH servers, but want up2date past EOL, check out Progeny. They'll provide your patches.

[safecracker]

I like NetBSD and Slack but using your needs I would probably go with something like college linux or FreeBSD, I don't exactly know what you concider ease of use because to me BSD and slack pose basicly no issue.

Have you concidered the comprimise between the 2 worlds, Debian?