On Friday, July 2, 2021 at 12:45:32 AM UTC-7 trl wrote:
It reminded me of some SciFi fantasy thing like Bilbo or Frodo holding the Ring. So "Keeper of the iso's"
Have mostly used a /boot directory to multiboot-with-GRUB various stable Linux distros with their kernels and initrd's in that single hard drive directory, so in pseudo LOTR-speak, that's certainly "One /boot directory to Rule Them All" ;-D
I could carry one CD with like supergrub for those people with machines that can't boot USB directly.
Quoting what I wrote previously :
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There is also the tiny Plop Boot Manager ISO -- see https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/full.html -- which can be burned to a CD and used to boot USB thumbdrives in machines with older BIOS'es without the ability to directly boot such USB drives.
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I don't distro-hop at all so I don't know what to include. Knoppix is a good suggestion, Aaron. But I was expecting you to mention some of the distros you use. I think you have mentioned Antix and Duvean. Do you think I should include those?
Am again deferring to others such as Rick M, Michael P, and others on which distros you "should" include (besides the tiny Plop Boot Manager ISO and Knoppix.) Further quoting Rick M's more extensive distro writeup within the Linux Tire-Kicking Department section of his must-read
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/kicking.html
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Which Linux distribution should I get? Which distribution is friendliest to new users? Should I get Ubuntu?
Linux poses three distinct challenges: building, administering, and using the system. You might be ecstatic with a Linux system constructed and configured for you, but will (if you're an "ease of use" person) probably be unhappy with the unfamiliar challenge of loading any operating system on Intel-type PCs. (MS-Windows is typically mis-perceived as "easy to install" by those who never install OSes, and who use whatever comes pre-loaded.)
You can buy pre-assembled, pre-configured Linux systems from many vendors. Those I know of in the San Francisco Bay Area are included in my Other Local Linux Resources list. Please note that all of them do mail-order business.
The questions of which distribution is "best" and which is "friendliest" are both inherently debatable: Most opinions you'll hear will be both bigoted and based on incomplete, out-of-date information concerning most (or, often, nearly all) alternatives.
Anyone who tries to give you an easy answer to either question is trying to sell you something.
You, for your part, should think long and carefully before you ask such questions: Are you even serious about trying Linux at all? How are you going to distinguish between competent, relevant answers and blasts of hot air from people barely less ill-informed than you are?
No, you should not automatically gravitate towards Ubuntu, just because that distribution is best-known in the USA. (Before 2011, this FAQ item used to say "you should not automatically gravitate towards Red Hat" rather than "Ubuntu", but the distribution relentlessly touted to the masses changes from year to year.) One of the glories of Linux is the richness of choices that you can sample many of at low cost. Consider trying several of them consecutively.
I personally strongly prefer the Devuan (and formerly Debian) distribution, especially for servers. However, newcomers should consider starting with Bodhi Linux, Linux Mint, Ultimate Edition, MEPIS Linux, or PCLinuxOS, for desktop Linux machines (not Devuan/Debian).
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Don't want at all to be that "bigoted" person who -- "based on incomplete, out-of-date information" -- "tries to give you an easy answer" to [the question of which distro is "best" and which is "friendliest"] or "is trying to sell you something" ;-o
OTOH, if this helps you and others, have myself been using a limited set of stable and decidedly *non*-newcomer Linux distros for different machines, a few of which are also used as VirtualBox virtual machines/vm's (see https://www.virtualbox.org/.)
FWIW, the vast majority of vbox vm's I've most recently used are either *BSD-based "distros" or rolling-release Linux distros such as Debian Testing, Arch-based distros, and various Ubuntu-based distros other than Ubuntu itself. Other vbox vm's in the past have also been such distros as AntiX, VoidLinux, Kali, ... etc etc.
Note that Michael P has previously discussed and actively demonstrated his extensive use of virtualized machine setups other than VirtualBox, e.g., KVM with libvirt (https://wiki.debian.org/KVM ), as well as a more focused emphasis specifically on Debian (also see http://bad.debian.net/.)