Other Distro's you'd recommend?

[Detonate]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

I used Fedora for years, still like it. It's a rpm distro from the Red Hat folks. Kind of where they try things out before springing it on their paying Red Hast customers. Great support forum. Lots of CLI tools for configuration. Main reason I switched is because the package manager, YUM, is sooo slowww. Especially if you use the GUI. Haven't tried it in a couple of years, so maybe they have fixed it now. You have a lot more power over the initial install, with the package selection. Fedora defaults to the LVM file system, but allows you to choose Ext2 or Ext3 if you wish. Great distro.

[houndhen]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

At present I have PCLOS, Freespire, Mepis, and Kubuntu installed. Haven't spent much time with PCLOS lately. Really like Mepis. it seems to be really stable and easy to use. I just installed Freespire. I have been mostly checking out Kubuntu. Have to get used to using sudo. Kubuntu seems real easy to break or mess up but the community has been great in helping me recover. I had Mint installed an replaced it with Freespire. It has been a great learning experience for the last 6 months since I started trying to learn Linux.

[grouchyhermit]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

I like puppy. It's not quite as newbie friendly as Kubuntu but it's still a good os for an older computer.

[MoonRise]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

I like puppy. It's not quite as newbie friendly as Kubuntu but it's still a good os for an older computer.

I agree. It also installs to a mem stick with ease.

[Detonate]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

An interesting article I ran across today that offers a review and comparison on several different distros.

http://tinyurl.com/6ahjza

[CVPunk]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

when I am at work and bored I have live cd's of Knoppix, Mandriva 2008.1, Damn Small Linux, and TinyMe to play with. At home I have OpenGEU, and Edubuntu (for my daughters), as well as my Kubuntu 8.04 KDE4 box.
I actually loaded TinyMe on a co-workers old laptop. It's not bad. It's like a light weight version of PCLOS.

[StarWolf]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

Well as far as bsd goes the easy one to work with is pc-bsd . I put that on my hard drive only issue was i had to use the gag boot loader . also it took me a while to realize that the hard drives could be chosen as 1 &2 once the gag boot loader found it it was easy to use even as a dual boot . only draw back is it doesnt leave the choice of a dual boot loader. I hadissues with my nvidia card and the fact it couldn't see my windows drive (i don't know that i forumed there to find out how) but all said and done its a out of the box try it distro takes to live cds so you can install everything . second CD is for things like firefox and open office. Hope this helps :-)


starbear

[capnmoney]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

If you start to get bored with how easy Kubuntu is to install and configure I'd recommend ArchLinux. Their packaging system is awesome, you can configure your own system from the ground up, and it takes advantage of i686 architecture. www.archlinux.org

[sithlord48]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

the linux distro i use depends on the hardware i am trying to run it on ..
i have a G3 MAC w/ ubuntu 6.10 on it (PPC build naturally)
i have a laptop w/ kubuntu 8.10 on it <- love it
i have a desktop w/ kubuntu 8.04 on it <- gf won't let me change it she is "used to it"
i have DSlinux on my ds (nintendo DS)
i had yellowdog on my ps3 (took it off cause i never used it)

as you can see i have mostly (k)ubuntu machines.
i must have about 100 diffrent distros installers/live disks laying around (even a copy of redhat 2 or 3)
check out http://linux.org look around the distros section theres at least 1000 distros out there and depending on ur target machine some will work better then others.

[toad]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

I farted around with Suse ere I came across Debian. Been with it ever since and even relatively loyal, having only hopped across to Mepis (great forum, too!) and Kubuntu.

The most important things for me in a distro are: *.deb and KDE

[Primoz]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

I tried PCLinuxOS, I have DSL on CD, I installed Open SuSE for one day until it crashed during update (I guess I have bad luck).
The same thing happened when I installed PC-BSD for one day, before it had an kernel panic (probably because I used XFS or ZFS instead of Ext3).
I installed Fedora 11 KDE on VirtualBox again crashed during update (but I do have just one core processor).
I installed Arch Linux, it was the only other that worked like a "charm" even though I installed it on some really old computer (not my) which had only 800Mhz and 4GB disk... It worked quite well, well KDE was a bit slow but for the hardware it was quite good.
But then I had to format it and install Windows on it, so it could be sold to anyone who might want it.
But if I would be asked which to chooose any other Linux then Kubuntu it would probably Arch, you learn a lot, and with help of Wiki it's not that hard to install it. It took me just two tries. The first time I was a bit in a hurry and forgot to create an user and root. So I couldn't log in to it...

[kbunt]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

I think Debian is good. If they polished it up a bit more, it would easily be the best one.

[toad]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

I've just installed Arch - blindingly fast, great documentation and KDE4.1 apparently solid. Plus you get to grips with what is under the hood and no six monthly release hell. I am sold! Well, at least for the desktop...

[MoonRise]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

I'll look at that. I've tried DreamLinux. I like the XFCE version and thought it very well put together. Puppy remains my primary Distro for Windows system recoveries and USB mem stick play. With all my gripes, Kubuntu remains my number one for "production" systems. I'll try Arch though. No sense in not looking at alternatives.

[Telengard]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

Depends on what you need from your system:

Debian if you need a stable, reliable server or workstation.

Slackware if you demand absolute mastery over your system and you enjoy tinkering. Only downside I'm aware of is that the package manager doesn't do dependency checking AFAIK.

Knoppix if you need a slick live CD with powerful tools and a nice UI.

I'd like to recommend Fedora, but I can't. My encounters on their official support channels left me with the impression that they don't have much patience for inexperienced users. I'd still say it's a very nice distro, or at least it was, and worth trying if you can solve any problems on your own without help.