For those who do not have to make their living from it, beekeeping should first and foremost be fun and enjoyable.  In the human race, few would call "failure" fun and enjoyable.  For that reason, I strongly suggest that brand-new beekeepers forgo both long hives and top-bar hives until they have at least a couple of years of experience.

Now, top-bar hives can be a joy to work with.  However, they require some expertise as well as the ability to shrug off the disappointment when the beekeeper has a sticky-stinging mess because combs were built together despite the beekeepers best adherence to proper bee space in the design of hive and top-bars.  It is not for no reason that in developing countries top-bar hives are abandoned by most beekeepers as soon as they can afford "normal" equipment.  By all means try a top-bar hive or two, and perhaps convert your operation to 100% top-bars, but only after you have some experience with normal equipment, which is much easier for beginners to work with.

As for the long hives, they are interesting but also very difficult.  The difficulty is that bees "naturally" prefer to work upwards and will only work sideways when under stress.  This stress is likely to have them swarm before they expand to cover 20 frames set side-by-side.  The only long hives I have seen in operation were in France, and then the beekeeper said he kept them just for fun...which is ok.  I have had at least 5 beekeepers tell me that they have tried to manage bees in a long hive, and failed.  Again, it is not without reason that modern apiaries in Eastern Europe (where long hives seem to have originated) no longer use long hives for commercial production.

But to a beekeeper with some experience, a long hive can be fun.  For instance, this past spring, in Kansas, I saw a beekeeper running a two-queen long hive for comb honey production.  He had designed two 10-frame units that sat side by side, with a queen excluder in place of a wall.  Above, with access from each 10-frame unit, were regular Ross Round supers.  To prevent the queens from going up to the supers and then down the "other side", he also had a queen excluder under the Ross Round supers.  He claimed tremendous production, but it was too early in the season (first week of June) for me to see the results.  This sounds as if it would work.  Each queen had 10 frames for brood, which is more than enough, and the workers could follow their natural tendency to move up with stores.

Lloyd