Which Linux Distribution Do You Prefer?

[Lucky Bob]

(Figured it was time to be part of the solution, not the problem)

So, which Linux distro works for you?

Personally, I've only ever used SuSE and Red Hat. While SuSE was pretty cool, there was just something about the look and feel of it that put me off a bit. I don't know if it was the lizard, or what. :)

Red Hat 9 is the one I currently use on my older laptop, but it's since been abandoned by Red Hat itself. A real shame. I've been looking into the Fedora project, but I think I might go with Mandrake due to its built-in partitioning feature.

I've heard a lot about Slackware and Debian, but I also hear that they have a slightly higher learning curve. Which is okay for me, but since I'm still at home for the short term, I don't think it'll fly with the rest of the family.

Comments?

(BTW, since there are so many distros out there, I only included the popular ones I could think of off the top of my head in the poll. If you have another personal favorite, do tell.)

[Magwheel]

Can we keep this poll open for a little while? Like, a year? I haven't installed Linux on this computer yet. I've tried several times on my old one, but never succeeded. I think it was mandrake.

As far as which one I'm going to try: Mandrake, because I've heard good things, and I liked what I've seen of it. We used it in college for a few minutes :rolleyes: Or maybe RedHat. I'll have to do some more reading. As soon as I finish a project I'm doing on this (Toshiba laptop), and get some repair work done (stupid shorting USB ports :mad:!), I'll start experimenting with Linux! :p


A friend of mine has a copy of Corel Linux, but.... meh. I don't think I've ever heard anything good or bad about it.

[Jaguar]

Though I don't use Linux much anymore, I've preferred RedHat.

[Psycho Fox]

Well Mandrake is a good entry level Linux, Slackware and Debian are a good old school Linux but I have to say go with the distro everyone in the linux community is talking about now a days Knoppix (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html) as you can have copy on a network and all the clients boot of it

[Liger Zero]

I've only touched upon Mandrake, back around 7.1. Didn't really appeal to me, being a gamer.

[OnlyJedi]

I've used a bunch in my time. I first experimented with Slackware years ago (I think around 1997...), but never really became interested after having problems with X. Then, around 2002, I set up a dual-boot with RedHat. Again, I didn't use it much, as there were problems with Java Swing, which I needed for a programming class. Around the beginning of 2003, I switched to Mandrake. From that point on, I was hooked. After only a month, I wiped my WinXP drive and forever after was a 100% Linux user.

Anyways, after the school year ended and I returned home, I decided to experiment with other Linux distros (thanking myself for installing my home directory under a seperate partition ;) ). I tried Debian Stable, but was upset when I realized just how outdated it was...I guess they *really* mean stable.

So I turned to Gentoo. (http://www.gentoo.org) I had heard about it a bit from my college - apparently some of the creators of Gentoo are alumi - but was always concerned about the compile time on my pitiful 800MHz processor. Once I upgraded to an AMD 2800+ with a gig of RAM, however, I saw nothing to hold me back.

I started from a stage one tarball, and installed. I've been in love with Gentoo ever since. Though not for the faint-of-heart (as you must hand-configure alot of the system), the online-documentation is superb, bested only perhaps by their online forums. I've never had a problem I couldn't solve by searching through their forums. Installation of programs is fairly simple, for a source-based system, with the portage system. Just type "emerge programname" and the program and all dependencies are downloaded, compiled, and installed.

[Stewie]

Of the one I've used (Red Hat), Red Hat is my favorite. For what I use it for, I can't think that any other version that would work better.

LuckyBob spells trouble.

[Romanesque]

I currently have Mandrake installed, though I've used Debian and RedHat (as well as straight up Unix) in a few computer labs. I plan on trying Gentoo if I can ever afford another system upgrade. I've heard good things about it. ;-)

For now, I'm having plenty of fun with Mandrake.

--Romey