linux distro for an office?

[mahela007]

What is the most suitable linux distribution for an office?

[fingal]

What is the most suitable linux distribution for an office?

Funny you should ask that because I've been wondering about the same thing myself. I would think something with a familiar GUI for end users who are used to Windows.

You could set up almost any mainstream distro to look user friendly. This might be worth reading; it's a few years old, but obviously you have a lot of things to consider when setting up Linux at work.

[i92guboj]

What is the most suitable linux distribution for an office?

Any distro that is up to date would do ok. Fast updates can be a necessity on such environments. If it's the case, then source distros are out of the question. But most distros are binary anyway.

[Freston]

There is VectorLinux SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) that is build for the purpose. It is still at version 5.8 (based on Slackware 11) and work is being done to get it to version 5.9 (based on Slackware 12). I personally like the 5.9 branch better, but VL5.8-SOHO was my workhorse for months and I loved it. It's very reliable, fast and light.

But it depends highly on which demands you have for an office system. Is it a big office with a lot of confidential information or is it a small office that could suffice with semi-stand alone machines and a dedicated printer/fax server? Or is there a lot of emphasis on centralization? Then maybe Red Hat (or CentOS), SuSE, what have you. Is the office perhaps part of the national security system? Then OpenBSD may be more appropriate :-p

Can you narrow down your question?

[Dapper Dan]

We asked ourselves that very question just a few months ago.

Our goal was to decide on a distro that had a familiar desktop environment, a sizable support community with lots of documentation, a large number of easily installable packages and a distro that was good with hardware detection and configuration. We ultimately decided Kubuntu was the best distro for our purposes. Your requirements may differ.