[colug-432] Introduction and distro preference question

[Jon Miller]

dank2878 at gmail.com writes:

> Hi everyone,
Hello!

<snip>

> I've been hesitant to stray from APT package management, as that is all I've
> ever really used, but I read many good things about Arch (and others based
> on it.) I've read also that if you're at all interested in a Linux
> profession (something I'm open to down the line) you really should only be
> using RHEL/CentOS or Fedora.

While there is value in learning other distros, or more specifically getting
familiar with RPM, you can still accomplish that while sticking with your
preferred distro. I'd say switch when you're tired / curious. 

> So my question is what distro do you recommend for someone in my situation?
> I'm not trying to start a flame war, and I understand there is no "best"
> distro, only the one that works best for each individual or in each
> situation. I'm just looking for opinions from folks much more experienced
> than me about what you use (or have used) and the pros/cons of that choice.

I was going to suggest looking into an alternative window manager. Often
times the WM ends up eating a significant part of the memory and there are
alternatives out there that use much less memory. E.g. LXDE or you could get
adventurous and try out some tiling WMs[1] which also typically require much
less resources. Other than that, I'd suggest examining what else is using
your memory and decide / learn which services you don't need running and
disable them. I'm obviously focused on memory resources as I personally don't
run very CPU intensive tasks but just try to avoid active swapping.

-- 
Jon Miller

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager