'Nix Distro of Choice

[Flippy the Squirrel]

As I've previously mentioned somewhere in the vast wasteland of my closing in on 700 posts, I'm a big fan of Gentoo Linux, as it was the distro I learned to most on, and it seems to embody that pioneer spirit I so enjoy in bleeding edge computing.

That having been said, I'll never recommend a Linux newbie use Gentoo, 'cause it could only end in tears. It can be rough to install, and it requires some fairly constant tweaking to keep it running smoothly (if you update software regularly, anyways.)

For those less-seasoned users, I suggest Ubuntu, because it's an easy install and seems to work pretty well on a wide variety of systems.

So, what distro(s) do you prefer, and why?

 

[delrio]

Gentoo is a ROYAL pain in the rear to install, but it's a nice one to use once you've done it.

I still prefer Open SuSE 9 and 10, though. 9 is the first Linux I ever used, and it's what made me love Linux.

 

[RESPAWN]

I tend to jump around a bit with my Linux distros. I haven't actually used Linux for anything serious since college, so I like to try out a new distro every 9 - 12 months. That said, I am absolutely loving Ubuntu for its simplicity. Ubuntu is so easy a cave... er, my mom can use it. Seriously, I sat her down in front of the laptop and she was up and surfing the net and playing solitare almost immediately. And the install process was so simple that I would even trust her to be able to install it on her own. And the package management system is a cinch to use, but I think most major distros have pretty highly developed package management systems these days. I've got PCLinux OS installed on another box around here, but I'm out of monitors to hook it up to, so the machine is sitting in a closet right now.

(BTW Delrio, does YAST2 actually work properly these days? The last time I installed SuSE, it was 9.something and YAST2 was still acting a fool when trying to configure some of my hardware.)

 

[delrio]

Respawn, YaST2 is still really funked up. They fixed it up pretty well, though, so now it's tolerable to use. Still a pain in the rear to find what you need in it, but whatever. It's usable. A good alternative that many people use for software in SuSE is the Smart Package Manager. It does rpm, deb, probably a lot of other stuff you can throw at it... it's fairly stable, as well. It's a bit difficult to initially set up, but it's easy from there on out.

 

[SogeKing]

I'm not a big fan of Linux, but I have used some distros of linux. I have Ubuntu linux installed on this machine (dual boot with XP). I've tried to get Fedora Core 7 to work with my parent's laptop, but I couldn't get the wireless card to work (using NDISWRAPPER), and at school (UNLV) our computer science labs use Red Hat Linux.