OS choice between: Debian, gNewSense, and OpenSolaris

Posted by penyuan on Super User See other posts from Super User or by penyuan
Published on 2009-10-09T04:01:02Z Indexed on 2010/03/18 14:21 UTC
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Filed under:

operating-systems

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debian

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ubuntu

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opensolaris

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beginner

I am planning to migrate from Mac OS X and Windows to either a Unix or Linux distribution, i.e. I am a Linux/Unix beginner.

Right now the following caught my interest:

Debian: Well established with huge repository of 20000+ apps.
gNewSence: "Totally free" version of Ubuntu, so it should be more beginner friendly?
OpenSolaris: Also open-source, and built on "strong" Unix base.

I do mainly basic tasks such as web browsing, office work, maintaining big photo collection, and a little bit of programming.

Questions:

How "free" are each of these distributions compared to each other, is this whole freedom thing a big deal?
Will a binary labeled as for Ubuntu work on gNewSense?
What are simple IDEs for Debian and gNewSense?

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