[TriLUG] Follow-up: why do you run multiple distros?

Magnus magnus at trilug.org
Fri Apr 20 13:24:57 EDT 2007


Andrew Perrin wrote:
> All right, so I have a follow-up question. Why do y'all use different 
> distributions for different machines? Doesn't it get confusing?


I run RHEL on my work machines because it supports my server hardware 
far better than any other distro (except maybe SuSE, which is probably 
on par).

I run Ubuntu because after hearing so much buzz about it, I checked it 
out and found it to be very sensible and easy to customize to my liking. 
  Much easier than RHEL/CentOS (which is what I had been running 
previously).  Ubuntu does not yet have a lot of the enterprise 
functionality that I would need to run it on my servers at work.

I run OpenBSD on some of my systems because it is lightweight, secure, 
very easy to get up and running as a server platform.  The firewall that 
is built in has no peer.  I don't run it as much as I used to (used to 
run it all over the place) because it is a pain in the butt to patch and 
is missing some key functionality for my purposes.

As a professional system administrator, it would be foolish of me to run 
just one distribution everywhere.  If I only do Red Hat, I'm going to 
have a hard time interviewing at a Debian shop.  But with Ubuntu 
background, I can do just fine with Debian.  Likewise with OpenBSD 
background, I'm comfortable going into a *BSD shop.

I used to also have some Solaris kicking around but I have such disdain 
for it as an OS (I hate Solaris more than Windows even) and don't think 
it's necessary for my career anymore so I kicked it to the curb.



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