What's your favorite distro?

I've been playing around with several desktop distros lately such as Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora (KDE/Gnome), Mandriva, Mint, OpenSUSE (KDE/Gnome), PCLinuxOS, Puppy, and SimplyMEPIS for my desktop needs (all 32-bit). I've tested them on VMWare/VirtualBox. I wanted to try out Debian, but the file size is huge! Some other time maybe.

First impressions:

I'm no software developer or a Linux guru when it comes to Linux so I wanted a distro that was user-friendly, simple and elegant, and one that works out of the box. That said, my favorite distro is Mint followed by Ubuntu. Mint's GUI is very user-friendly and I just love the "unique" main menu, which I renamed as "Start". Mint is the only distro that has a different "Start" menu layout (the others use the same old KDE and Gnome main menu layout). Mint's "Start" menu is easier to navigate and requires less clicking, and very organized (better than Windows 7). Boots around ~25 sec and shuts down in ~10 sec in VMWare.

Second favorite is Ubuntu. Boots up in 18 sec and shuts down in 8 sec (that's fast!). Ubuntu was my very first distro I've tried out. It feels very light just like Mint. I don't have that feeling that something is running in the background and bogging my system down. Ubuntu has been very stable on my PC so far. Everything works out of the box, even the side scroll works! Ubuntu was chosen because of its large user support, and because I actually requested the LiveCD at no extra cost. Ubuntu is a great distro for beginners in Linux.

Next up are the distros dedicated to multimedia, Ubuntu Studio and 64 Studio. I'm a music producer and I love making music. These two are the top multimedia distros on the list. I couldn't test these to its full potential in VMWare/VirtualBox because these virtual machines can't handle it. I'll need to run this directly from my PC instead. I'll come back to this later.

What is your favorite distro(s)?

 

*Throws a water balloon at this thread and watches as it explodes into a cloud of steam*

I like arch.

 

Arch for me too

 

Ubuntu for me !

 

I use Scientific Linux (essentially Red Hat Enterprise Linux). I've tried Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and Mandriva, but they're not quite compatible with some of the stuff I use for work out-of-the-box and I don't see enough of an improvement over RHEL for me to bother making them compatible.

 

Just download the first CD for Debian.

Anyway my favorite distros are Fedora, Ubuntu and Arch.

 

I use ubuntu both versions : desktop & server as it is so simple

 

I use Ubuntu, and btw you can install the MintMenu in Ubuntu easy peasy.....

 

Debian. Gives me the control and flexibility I need while not eating up all my time playing with my distro. Not to mention the rolling releases preventing the constant reinstall of the distro come upgrade time.

 

Slackware and Ubuntu

 

I have played around a little with Ubuntu 9.04 and the previous 8-something, but I was never able to get either fully working (small problems mostly). I thought it was a pretty good operating system, I just don't have the time to monkey-patch it all day to get it working.

 

If Debian was my couch it'd have a sweet groove goin on...

+1 for Debian

 

Before whatever that companys name was took over SUSE and then kicked us out until they released OpenSUSE, i liked SUSE.

I unfortunately have issues with anything debian based and last time i tried ubuntu had a horrible time getting my compiler installed. The system update software killed itself, was unable to install alien and the 30+ deb's versus the 3 rpm's made it a night mare i ran screaming from.

I currently dont have a favorite distro, using YDL on the PS3 and Fedora on the webserver.

 

Arch for me.

 

Yeah. That takeover of SUSE from that *cough* company was just pure evil

 

I don't see how Novell is evil. Mono will/has convert(ed) loads of programmers to linux. That can't be a bad thing. And the deal with MS was just to promote interoptability with Windows, therefore making linux easier to switch to and use.

 

Hm... I'm not flaming you here, but maybe you haven't seen this?

http://boycottnovell.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page#Introduction

 

I've read everything that blog has to say Been following it for awhile.

 

Mono may have converted .Net Programmers to linux, they shouldnt have been using .net to begin with lol. I love to hate them fan boys. If you ask me their just a little lazy.

My biggest beef was the first thing they did was to NOT release a free version. Had to wait a decent amount of time to get off 9.1, may have not been such a big deal to you all. OpenSUSE finally came around though.

Unfortunatly for me my compilers linux version was fail and due to GCC changing every 5 seconds it wont install on anything modern (more than 5 days after the compiler came out). There is an alternative to my compiler and while I have been learning to use it on both windows and nix and cross compiling it puts out very large executables.

 

Oh well. Developing a new OS takes time.

Well, you can't tell a .Net developer not to use .Net/Mono, after all he would loose his job . I'm all for free software. I use swfdec and most of my music is in ogg or flac.

 

eComstation is the best distro.

 

Not open source. Not linux. Not a distro.

 

ROFL

 

I used OS/2 about, what, 15 years ago? Is that crap still around? lol

 

I've tried several distros and I'm now using opensuse on two machines. One old Dell P4 machine and one PackardBell Dot netbook. The reason I decided for opensuse is that it worked the best on both machines. The installation worked fine and the hardware worked almost direcly. The other distros such as Ubuntu had problems with the hardware.

opensuse also seems to be the most professional distro in my opinion which has the most "get things done" feel, just like windows rather than being a geektoy for those who love configuring things all day long. Yast is a very useful tool when it comes to configuring the OS, rather than finding out tons of script setups and syntaxes in config files. Most people just don't have time for that, especially when it is used professionally.

I must say from a corporate point of view, Linux has actually come quite far in order to replace Windows as a workstation. Most due to the fact that openoffice is one of the best open source project out there which can replace MS office for most companies.

 

Not sure what its used by now but yeah its still around ibm sold it off or whatever. ATM's used it for the longest time and german banks. Diebold i think used it.

 

In order of preference:

1. Arch
2. Gentoo
3. LFS

 

wow.....thanks for info...I thought that was dead years ago...I gave it up because although I could run windows programs in OS/2, I couldn't get sound from those programs at the time....also, my machine completely borked at one boot up..I called OS/2 tech support and they said I had to reinstall....OS/2 came off, and windows 3.1 went back on....

 

Is Arch really all that good? What's so good about it? It would be nice if anyone could fill me in before I install Ubuntu again....

 

I'm running crunchbang#! on my Acer Aspire One, and I like it a lot. It's fast, slick, and it works. My only other Linux experiences are Fedora 8 and Linpus though, so I might not really be in a position to say much.

 

Speed, customizability. A great repo full of up to date software and a great package manager. Wonderful documentation. Lots of things.

 

Meh, already on Ubuntu. You took too long to respond. And none of that means anything to me if it includes more work. =P

 

Mine would be Kubuntu, but... I haven't used Linux for a while now.

 

Err.. if you have a decent broadband connection at home (and I assume you do, since you're in FL), you could have Arch + Gnome/KDE/XFCE up and running in about 30-45 minutes. TBH, my fully loaded KDE/Arch setup runs a lot faster and smoother than a default installation of Kubuntu on another machine with the same configuration.

 

ubuntu for me

 

It's not much work.
At this point I can have a full system up and running in 20 minutes - 1/2 hour.

 

Arch is also a pretty good experience to install.

If you have the time for it (like, a spare day or afternoon), follow the beginner's install tutorial and set it up. You will end up learning a very lot about Linux systems and how they get set up It's not that hard, and you will feel that, by the end, "your" distro will have your personal look on it and you will most likely not have to reinstall your OS for a long time.

Plus, you learn how to fix possible errors during the installation. Have you ever had problems with the X.org server not initializing correctly?
I have had them while I used Ubuntu. When that happened, i would most likely have to reinstall it all.
Now, when (if) it crashes, I at least have a clue on how to disable it, look for a log and find a solution.

Requirements: will to do it until it is done, reasonable skills with the search engine.

 

I keep coming back to ubuntu and ubuntu-based distros.

 

I still got a ton of distros to try out on my real PC. I can't seem to install some of them via hard disk using a program called Unetbootin. I'll try Arch once I gain enough knowledge and also have the time to read the tutorial. I'm gonna make Arch Studio!

 

I used to face a passel of similar post-installation issues but have found the perfect solution. If Xorg doesn't work right off the bat, reboot the computer with a Puppy live CD and get to the user interface window. Backup the Arch xorg.conf file from /sd(n)/etc/X11 [n=partition on which Arch is installed] and copy the Puppy generated xorg.conf from /etc/X11 to the arch /etc/X11 folder. Reboot and your Arch Xorg should start right up. IMO, Puppy does a brilliant job at auto generating a perfect xorg configuration file.

The only issue I've noticed thus far is that Puppy uses the "ati" driver for AMD/ATi graphics cards in xorg.conf that must be changed to "radeon", "radeonhd" or "fglrx" depending on whether you want to use the open source ATi, the Novell driver or the proprietary Catalyst driver in Arch.

 

Have a couple based on need.

For X on a capable PC: I have tried nearly all but basically over the years have focused on Suse & Fedora. In more recent time I have fallen victim to Ubuntu. Ubuntu is just so damn easy to install, configure, and manage. The days of hacking package confs is just not as "cool" as it used to be; to me anyway.

For X on a low end PC/Lappy: One of my recent favorites has been Vector (Lite or Light the LXDE one) which is built on Slack and is extremely fast with a very small memory footprint (LXDE). But here come Ubuntu again. I recently switched from Vector to XUbuntu (XFCE) which has been a rather pleasant surprise, slightly larger memory footprint but it works. However, I still maintain that Vector is extremely fast on old hardware and I continue to use it on a 800MHZ/512MB laptop.

For a server on any hardware: It's been Debian of late. But of course Debian keeps newly released packages slightly out of reach; for good reason. So I also use Arch when I need to develop on newer versions of a package such as Python or something like that.

Anyway, I have had quite a bit of time off over the past 6 months and I have tried more than half of the distros listed on the DistroWatch ranking board.

 

i too keep coming back to ubuntu. i prefer gnome and ubuntu just seems to have the right balance of pros vs cons for me.

 

I prefer Kubuntu. KDE has developed nicely since the 4.1 release, and GNOME simply lacks the functionality and flexibility that I look for in OSS.

 

I noticed a typo when i installed nvidia drivers in Ubuntu. Who should I report it to?

 

If you installed it using a graphical tool in Ubuntu, it sounds like maybe a One Hundred Paper Cuts type of thing.

If you used the official NVIDIA installer... nV News Forums. Start a thread called 'spelling error in installer' or something. One of the NVIDIA employees should see it an acknowledge it soonish.