Profesional Workstation Distro

limnam · 05-04-2014 10:45pm #1

Hey all,

I'm hoping I can extract some advice especially from users who's main desktop OS is a *NIX variant on choosing an OS for my main workstation in the office.

I currently admin a bunch of FreeBSD servers. So the day to day useage will be mail,web,perl/bash scripting. I also need to run a few VM images on the workstation which will be CentOS and FreeBSD based.

The machine itself will be a quad core xeon based proc 2.4 or so with plenty of RAM and an nvidia card. Maybe to help some background. I started using *NIX based system's 15 years or so ago and moved off Linux on the desktop to FreeBSD around 4.x. I returned to Linux on occasion to try out things like early Ubuntu releases.

Due to restrictions in previous jobs or just not been suitable I've been running WindowsXP and then on to Windows7 as the primary desktop OS for work and ended up into play.

The biggest asks for the chosen OS is that it's rock solid and doesn't take too much time to get to a productive desktop. FreeBSD has the stability but just consumes far too much time to get up and running on the desktop and maintain. I played with an Ubuntu based on unity very briefly. I don't want to rule it out as it was a few years ago but I didn't warm to unity.

I'm open to learning something completely new, but spare time is in very short supply right now.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Johnboy1951 · 06-04-2014 1:40am

Would CentOS not suit? ........ as you will be using it anyway it would help by getting familiar with one distro only.
It is rock solid .....

Stuxnet · 06-04-2014 3:52pm

CentOS or Debian, Id lean more towards Debian for desktop usage

limnam · 06-04-2014 4:00pm

Stuxnet wrote: »

CentOS or Debian, Id lean more towards Debian for desktop usage

CentOS is a possibility but i thought was more aimed at servers.

Vanilla Debian brings me into a similar situation as FreeBSD. It can be very time consuming to get it to productive desktop and tends to be a little behind all the time in terms of support for newer hardware.

From what I have read so far Mint might be the answer. But I was really hoping to hear from people who's main OS is *NIX based and their expirience with it as their main desktop OS, especially in a production enviroment rather than tinkering. What you use and why you use it etc.

syklops · 06-04-2014 6:37pm

limnam wrote: »

CentOS is a possibility but i thought was more aimed at servers.

Vanilla Debian brings me into a similar situation as FreeBSD. It can be very time consuming to get it to productive desktop and tends to be a little behind all the time in terms of support for newer hardware.

From what I have read so far Mint might be the answer. But I was really hoping to hear from people who's main OS is *NIX based and their expirience with it as their main desktop OS, especially in a production enviroment rather than tinkering. What you use and why you use it etc.

I've been using Fedora (with KDE as my desktop) as my work OS for ~4 years. If I need to reinstall or upgrade I can go from blank harddrive to usuable system in ~2 hours. Including wireless, power management, usual desktop environment, usual packages etc etc. The layout, system tools etc are the same as RHEL and CentOS so its nice being very familiar with them, but its more community based and desktop oriented than CentOS.

Standard Toaster · 06-04-2014 7:24pm

Fedora here too, can't fault it. LXDE spin. Nice.

syklops · 06-04-2014 8:06pm

Standard Toaster wrote: »

Fedora here too, can't fault it. LXDE spin. Nice.

What version of Fedora are you currently using?

Dum_Dum · 06-04-2014 9:02pm

limnam wrote: »

....The biggest asks for the chosen OS is that it's rock solid and doesn't take too much time to get to a productive desktop. FreeBSD has the stability but just consumes far too much time to get up and running on the desktop and maintain. I played with an Ubuntu based on unity very briefly. I don't want to rule it out as it was a few years ago but I didn't warm to unity. ....

pkgng is becoming more usable every day. The days of compiling using ports (especially X related ones) are over. I have no problems running xfce on FreeBSD. I enjoy the benefits of zfs snapshots, jails, zfs send/receive, GELI disk encryption - and it's snappy (even on mechanical hard drives).

PCBSD has a GUI for jails called warden as well as fs level encryption using PEFS

Stuxnet · 06-04-2014 11:10pm

limnam wrote: »

CentOS is a possibility but i thought was more aimed at servers.

True, but they have a desktop version as well, you would run the minimal version on a server.

limnam wrote: »

Vanilla Debian brings me into a similar situation as FreeBSD. It can be very time consuming to get it to productive desktop and tends to be a little behind all the time in terms of support for newer hardware.

Debian 7 is fairly recent, it rocks a recent kernel, it will work on the newest of desktop hardware without an issue, take a iso for a test spin, its your best bet for seeing what works with your current setup, plus the repos have everything you want

From what I have read so far Mint might be the answer. But I was really hoping to hear from people who's main OS is *NIX based and their experience with it as their main desktop OS, especially in a production environment rather than tinkering. What you use and why you use it etc.

Mint and them are fine, but they are aimed at the home desktop audience, you requested workstation, production environment, hence my choices to you. !!

Sure try them all, see what works best for you, everybody has different needs etc

Johnboy1951 · 07-04-2014 12:17am

Originally Posted by limnam
CentOS is a possibility but i thought was more aimed at servers.

CentOS was the first distro I put on the desktops of a friend for his business ..... about 9 years ago now it seems .... because it was rock solid and lacked any of the fancy things home desktop distros had even back then.

He used it for a couple of years and later moved to PCLinuxOS on the desktops, and has stayed with that distro ..... probably because he has me to throw questions at if he needs to (I also use PCLinuxOS on my home PCs).
He now uses it on his personal PCs and finds it much easier to maintain one distro on several machines than different distros for different purposes.

In your case I would try CentOS first with your choice of DE.
By all means give others a run too on livecd/LiveUSB.

excollier · 07-04-2014 8:21pm

KWheezy....most of the apps you will ever need, codecs etc....

opus · 08-04-2014 10:53am

Standard Toaster wrote: »

Fedora here too, can't fault it. LXDE spin. Nice.

Same for me, we've 50+ people using Fedora on their desktops at work. Fair mix of versions as well including one person who doesn't want to move from Fedora 10 as 'everything just works'

syklops · 08-04-2014 11:16am

opus wrote: »

Same for me, we've 50+ people using Fedora on their desktops at work. Fair mix of versions as well including one person who doesn't want to move from Fedora 10 as 'everything just works'

If its not broken don't fix it. My personal Laptop is still on 17 and also 'just works'. My work laptop is on 20 and I updated on saturday to try to improve the networkmanager and its not been right since.

Standard Toaster · 08-04-2014 12:15pm

syklops wrote: »

What version of Fedora are you currently using?

Version 20 on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M58p, no probs with wireless

I've a T61 I must get around to firing it on (Has RHEL 7 on it now)

opus wrote: »

Same for me, we've 50+ people using Fedora on their desktops at work. Fair mix of versions as well including one person who doesn't want to move from Fedora 10 as 'everything just works'

Any jobs going in your place!

syklops · 08-04-2014 3:45pm

Standard Toaster wrote: »

Version 20 on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M58p, no probs with wireless
I've a T61 I must get around to firing it on (Has RHEL 7 on it now)

Wireless wasn't my problem, and my personal laptop is also a thinkpad. Thinkpads "generally" work well with Fedora because Red Hat QA all have Thinkpads.

Standard Toaster · 09-04-2014 8:09am

syklops wrote: »

Wireless wasn't my problem, and my personal laptop is also a thinkpad. Thinkpads "generally" work well with Fedora because Red Hat QA all have Thinkpads.

Yeah I read that somewhere. Gonna see if I can push for a new X1 Carbon >.> T61 is a bit long in the tooth at this stage.

limnam · 09-04-2014 2:17pm

Thanks for all the replies. I think I'm going to go with Fedora. I'm currently using Mint on a spare desktop to see what it's like. I imagine kwheezy is something similar.

Regarding desktop managers. What are my best options for the older gnome like feel?

Kinet1c · 09-04-2014 3:00pm

I like LXDE.

Stuxnet · 09-04-2014 3:03pm

Im an i3 window manager man myself ! but MATE is a fork of the old gnome de

Fedora have thier own Fedora 20 Mate spin

https://spins.fedoraproject.org/mate-compiz/

opus · 10-04-2014 11:52am

The new Gnome design did my head in so I've been using Cinnamon for a while now.

Standard Toaster wrote: »

Any jobs going in your place!

Nah sorry I took the last one

breadfan1979 · 16-04-2014 4:56pm

hi there,
I have been using Kali Linux (based on Debian Wheezy) the last 2 years. It never broke, suspend, crashed itself. reliable since version 1.0.0.
Debian based are my preference. This one is dedicated for pentesters, but I am using it for day-to-day home usage and hoping to get into pentesting, hence the choice for it.
Current kernel is >=3.0 so stable and pretty new.
please check their website and a policies, as the repos are now non-free, so as far as I remember there may be some restrictions on commercial use...?
let me know if any issues with it.
take care.
Waldi

syklops · 16-04-2014 11:15pm

breadfan1979 wrote: »

hi there,
I have been using Kali Linux (based on Debian Wheezy) the last 2 years. It never broke, suspend, crashed itself. reliable since version 1.0.0.
Debian based are my preference. This one is dedicated for pentesters, but I am using it for day-to-day home usage and hoping to get into pentesting, hence the choice for it.
Current kernel is >=3.0 so stable and pretty new.
please check their website and a policies, as the repos are now non-free, so as far as I remember there may be some restrictions on commercial use...?
let me know if any issues with it.
take care.
Waldi

You've had better luck with Kali than me. For the most part Ive had either great versions(which you do not update!), or ones that didnt work, and the best advice from support was download the latest stable build.

As a budding Pen Tester, can I suggest you find a Linux Distro you like and learn to install and maintain your tools. Being able to download kali is great, but there will allways be tools that you need that don't come with the distro, or a tool you like needs one library version, while Kali uses a different one. Debian is very good. I like Fedora but it has its ups and downs. Im in the middle of a down at the moment. Avoid ubunut/mint while you are learning. Don't mean to sound condescending btw, just friendly advice.

Edit: Does anyone else use KDE in, well, Ireland?

breadfan1979 · 17-04-2014 9:49am

hi,
sorry to hear id didnt work out with Kali for you. as far as I read the posts you use Lenovo as well, so I am surprised it didnt go well. I use T410.

As experienced user and pen-tester, I guess you're right about Kali, but it's long time for me to reach the stage when I will need something more than 300 tools they provide in their distro. Kali is the distro I like and have trust in it. it's stable and usable as a daily OS.
I tested Fedora - what a crap is that?! I used F16. Half of the installations failed. USB install couldnt be done. Crashing, suspending.
if I would go for any rpm based Linux I would choose CentOS. I am using it on my home server without any issues, so perhaps would be similar as a Desktop.
btw: Kali uses Gnome, which doesnt make me very happy. I prefer KDE, although Enlightenment seem to rule now (only 128MB RAm is needed and rich for features). I wish I could adjust Kali to use with it (building Kali distro on my own was daunting task, so I skipped the idea).

I'd be glad to hear more about pen-testing and the job itself, so would be great if I could send you PM with few q's...?

BTW: heads-up, there's always Debian:)

Hotblack Desiato · 18-04-2014 11:13am

syklops wrote: »

Edit: Does anyone else use KDE in, well, Ireland?

Yes

but it seems that gnome and its variants are all that get mentioned around here for some reason.

Nobody's mentioned openSUSE either

less cutting edge and more stable than Fedora, huge range of packages, community repos, open build service, YaST gui/text mode admin tool, zypper dup (upgrade in place), evergreen (long term support), tumbleweed (rolling release), supports more desktop environments than most distros. You can select 'patterns' at install (or after install) for server, development, etc. by just ticking a box in YaST. it's not just a distro that's focused on having a nice looking desktop. Although it does have a particularly good implementation of KDE4

excollier · 18-04-2014 3:58pm

I am using K Wheezy, a KDE distro with just about everything any normal user could need included with the basic install. I only had to add Filezilla and GTKHash, check it out at :
http://www.kwheezy.com/en/

Johnboy1951 · 18-04-2014 7:31pm

Edit: Does anyone else use KDE in, well, Ireland?

Sure ..... never liked any of the others well enough to change ..... although Xfce would do in a pinch I guess.

h57xiucj2z946q · 18-04-2014 8:49pm

syklops wrote: »

Edit: Does anyone else use KDE in, well, Ireland?

I never really liked KDE for some reason, but do like GNOME and XFCE. I also like the OpenBox + Conky setups people have but I never had the patience to setup something like that, and its more suited to home use than for the office.

Oh I used to deal with CDE in work some years back, this was a pretty old skool desktop environment.

Johnboy1951 · 18-04-2014 11:31pm

Noa Rough Stereoscope wrote: »

I never really liked KDE for some reason, but do like GNOME and XFCE. I also like the OpenBox + Conky setups people have but I never had the patience to setup something like that, and its more suited to home use than for the office.

Oh I used to deal with CDE in work some years back, this was a pretty old skool desktop environment.

I use Conky on my desktop at home ...... monitoring processes, temps etc.

I believe CDE was the first DE I used when I changed to Linux ..... cannot be sure of the distro (it was 10+ years go), but it might have been Vector(?).

EDIT:
Seems I must be mis-remembering ..... as CDE was not GPL until ~2012 ...... wonder what I *think* I recall?

EDIT 2:
I remembered correctly this time ...... EDE

http://equinox-project.org/

Profesional Workstation Distro

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