My personal priorities have always been somewhat along these lines:
- Stability -- I can't stand crashing software, esp. the proprietary, closed source type
- Security -- This includes ease of security updates and patches, esp. since I have for one reason or another been stuck with dialup internet access far too often in my life. I have always considered that if I am going to recommend the usage of a FOSS OS at my place of employment , ease of security updates will take a high priority. Ironically, I have been mentally holding FOSS to a higher standard, since the existing proprietary OS's already in use at my place of employment are "in the lax" in the updating dept.
- Simplicity -- A reliance on text-based configuration and not too much "automagical" stuff going on. Eye-Candy is nice, but I'm not sure its worth it.
- A Sane, dependable choice for a business application or other meaningful work. By this I don't necesarily mean one of the big supported players in the spirit of RedHat or Novell.
I also dabbled with RedHat(pre-Fedora days) actually using it at my employment for routing and a fileserver, again on very modest hardware. I also used the Freesco routing distro in various roles.
Debian Stable is currently my most used distro and it pretty much allows me to meet the goals stated above.Secure-Apt is now standard and addresses some of the issues with downloading software from the Internet.For example, how do you know what you are downloading hasn't been trojaned, etc ... . Its also handy for updating machines not connected to a broadband connection. Just copy the .deb packages(previously downloaded via apt) to /var/cache/apt/archives on the target machine, and away you go.
I have dabbled in FreeBSD and will continue, although I have found it difficult to keep updated(third-party ports).Portaudit is a very handy utility for checking your currently installed ports for vulnerabilities. The core system is actually easy(to update) , even on dialup . You have the choice of binary updates via freebsd-update or CVS with direct compilation. The compilation of the kernel and userland I have found to be very straight-forward and for lack of a better word "awesome".I have found the structure of FreeBSD to be very organized and "sane", for example, all third party ports and configs are placed in /usr/local . A FreeBSD-based server is probably easier to update with regards to ports than a GUI-heavy workstation. As an example, firefox seems to require constant updating( goes with the turf in being a browser and all ), but with all the dependencies , etc ... constant re-compilation grows painful fast.With dialup it becomes almost unthinkable.Currently, at my place of employment , I am using a FreeBSD-based machine as a Network Security Monitor in the spirit of http://www.taosecurity.com/ . As an aside and giving credit, Mr. Bejtlich's(of taosecurity ) books and ideas are very worthy reading.
Ubuntu has been receiving a lot of attention lately, but I haven't had the time to explore it much. My thoughts are, Ubuntu is based on Debian, why not just go to the "pure root" ? Also, the Universe package repository, if I understand correctly, does not receive proper security and bug updates. Ubuntu is also dependent upon Canonical, whereas Debian is Community-based.
Recently, I noticed the Minix project has been resurrected and has some interesting ideas. Plan9 also has some interesting concepts.Probably too much to explore in my lifetime/intellect, but again its wonderful to have a choice. These choices also make the options of learning about computing much greater. I hope to contribute to the FOSS in the best way I can.
Reading over this post, I realize my writing skills, if I ever had any are rusty. Perhaps this blog will turn out to be one way of polishing them.