It just came out.

Anyone have any opinions? Should I upgrade, or wait for 8.1? My experiences with initial whole-number releases haven't been encouraging, particularly with a new Gnu Compiler Collection.

There's a review here.

I've settled on Mandrake as my distribution. I'm really liking 9.0, so much so I made the plunge last weekend and started using it as my main OS. (I do web development, and I usually have at least one Windows and one *nix machine in the same room, so I still have my training wheels. But the Windows machine at home has been relegated to file server status for now.)

Ron

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Redhat 7.3 and 8.0 both have 2.4 kernels. However, there is an important difference if you have a newish athlon system. (If you see "contact Vojtech Pavlik " during boot or in dmesg's output, your system is "newish".)

On my system, the newer kernel gave me 10x the disk bandwidth and significantly less latency.

However, I just installed the kernel, not 8.0. The rpm is at ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.3/en/os/

The standard gcc in both 7.2 and 7.3 is a late 2.9x gcc, which is fairly broken. I've been happy with g++3 (an early gcc 3.0), which was on the 7.2 disks but not the 7.3 disks.

However, 8.0 comes with gcc 3.2. 3.2 is 3.1 plus an API change. I have no experience, but it's supposed to be superior in all respects to 3.0.

Well, I've been running a custom 2.4.18 for a while anyway, so kernels aren't pertinent. I don't do that many source builds, so I'm not sure it's worth the update for the library. I might wait for 8.1, based on experience.

I dunno, Rand. I've been using Debian for a while.
I recommend the latest "stable" distribution.

It has a much better dependency/upgrade system.

pgf

I use Debian on a couple of my machines (on my dedicated firewall and a test setup), but I need to stay on top of Redhat as well.

I've been running the beta of RH 8.0 for over a month now and I like it a lot. GCC 3.2 indeed isn't yet as solid as the later revs of 2.96-RH in RH 7.2 and 7.3, but it also can generate noticably faster code when pushed (at least for Pentium 4). And it's the first GCC to support the new common C++ ABI, which means distros based on it should be able to run binaries from each other more easily. I'll note that X11 in the beta was a bit wonky at times, and I don't know how much that's been cleared up in the final 8.0 yet. Generally at-ship jitters in Redhat nowadays are cleared up pretty quickly on up2date (aka Red Hat Network, which has become quite impressive).

Consider Gentoo instead of RedHat, Mandrake, or Debian. Seriously. It's s source based distribution which makes the initial install take quite some time, but you will end up with a Linux setup that's as close to the silicone as you'll ever get. The latest 1.4 version has the 2.4.19 kernel, gcc 3.2, KDE 3.03, and so forth, in spite of the bleeding edginess of it it is exceedingly stable. Maintaining it is a breeze since it uses the Portage package system, which is like the BSD ports system except on steroids. If you have a fast machine and a broadband connection it's the way to go.

I don't suppose this will help you much, but I've been having lots of fun with Fink, which is a very Debian-like package system for Unix applications on Mac OS X. Lots of people brag about Mac OS X being a Unix dialect, but few really exploit the fact; Fink makes it pretty easy.

(It will be easier when the 10.2/Jaguar-compatible version is officially released; for now, you have to do a little tweaking to get it to work on Jaguar, but it basically works if you don't mind building stuff from source.)

I get a kick out of seeing X11 and Mac applications sharing the same screen. It's even possible to hack in a certain degree of interoperability; I've gotten iPhoto to use GIMP as its external editor.