Which Linux distro?

[neuroking]

Yes, yes the eternal question. But I have an extra drive and in the spirit of returning to academia, I thought I would get opinions. I've used SuSE, Mandrake, and Red Hat in the past, but nothing for the last 3 years.

So, what's your poison, and 2 sentences why... :)

[spankers]

Debian for me.
1. Ease of administration and upgrade (APT repositories beat RPM's hands down).
2. Larger selection of software in the distro than most others. (Except Gentoo)

On the downside, the Debian installer is among the worst in the world. The level of expertise required is a bit too high to make it mainstream.

I started out with Red Hat 5. From my experience, Red Hat/Fedora is a solid distro but it seems a bit porky to me in comparison to Debian.

[llbbl]

You can use APT to update Red Hat ;) How can it be porky if you have a larger selection of software in the distro?

I wonder how many different packages are really available for Debian that aren't for Red Hat.

The Enterprise RH comes with like 8-9 CD"s full of stuff. :)

[spankers]

How can it be porky I was saying that RH/Fedora seems a bit porky. Boot time for Fedora FC2 was slow compared to Debian. FC2 was the last time I tried Fedora.
I wonder how many different packages are really available for Debian that aren't for Red Hat.
The Enterprise RH comes with like 8-9 CD"s full of stuff. My comment was targeted more towards Fedora as most 'normal' users will not be using Enterprise Linux. Fedora 4 seems to be slimming down the number of packages even more... Xfce4 has been removed due to perceived duplication to the GNOME effort. This has biased me against Fedora as Xfce4 is my favorate DE to date.

What it really comes down to is that I have a personal bias toward Debian... it may not be entirely rational. :)

[dang]

ubuntu is a newer distro based on debian that is supposedly updated much more often, easier to install, even has a live cd so you can try it out first.

[llbbl]

http://www.xfce.org/index.php?page=screenshots&lang=en

Looks pretty cool, I haven't tried it. I like GNOME the best so far ;)

[llbbl]

http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity

Ubuntu is climbin the charts !

[dang]

a review:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9650

For over six years I have been hunting for a Linux distro that would allow me to replace my Windows installation...but none of them really worked--until now. I recently came across the first distro that satisfied all my requirements: Ubuntu....Ubuntu is a recent distribution that is based on Debian unstable. From reading many online posts, it appears that a large number of Debian developers are Ubuntu users. From most perspectives, Ubuntu is Debian, but with added improvements and more testing.

Cool thing is http://www.ubuntu.com all the mirrors support bit torrent too.

[spankers]

Oops... forgot about Ubuntu. dang, have you tried it yet?

[dang]

actually, no. i was going to install it on my dev box when i built a new one, but i just recovered my old install to make it easier. I'm still using suse 9.1. However, i'm downloading the live cd now to play with. After the new site is up i might replace suse with it.

[llbbl]

Linux distros are like Pop singers. They all are pretty much the same thing, but packaged differently ;)

Oh btw it is a well known fact that ur geekyness correlates directly with how well ranked the distro you are using is on distrowatch :P

[dang]

so the lower the rank the more geek you are? :)

My first distro was redhat 3 i think...

[llbbl]

ok let me reword that :)

[openbsd-flipp]

i always likes slackware, fedora is nice but a bit on the heavy side for my uses, suse is starting get better, unabutu lasted a few week on my desktop but it always reverts to bsd.

[spankers]

i always likes slackware, fedora is nice but a bit on the heavy side for my uses, suse is starting get better, unabutu lasted a few week on my desktop but it always reverts to bsd. Distro whore! :)

[dang]

os if ubuntu lasted a week, is that good?

[llbbl]

flipp reinstalls OS's for fun, so he is a unique case. if you are looking for a good distro to use for a workstation than probably any distro would work, but mandrake, fedora or ubuntu would be top picks, i think. it really depends on what you want to use the machine for.

[znaps]

I like Slackware because there is less 'fluff' with it. It's not for newbies, but you don't need to be a rocket scientist either.

[llbbl]

how they come up with that name?

"made by slackers"

or

"without all the slack"

several connotations to the word slack.

[znaps]

Apparently it came from the newsgroup alt.slack