Which Distro?

[losingle]

Re: Which Distro?

I have been checking out the kde/64 bit distros over the holiday. And agree with most everything said on this discussion. I would add that while Suse was long been my favorite and now would choose Kubuntu or Sabayon. The Mandriva I loaded was 2010.2 and clearly Mandriva should not have released it as the repos (PLF not listed in support). Opensuse/Mandriva kissing cousins don't mount other distros automatically as Kubuntu and Sabayon do. I was quite surprised by Sabayon a gentoo distro while its equo/emerge dual repos are confusing once you get it configured it does quite well despite a slow boot.

[charles052]

Re: Which Distro?

I love it when someone asks for an opinion and professional advice and before you can say anything, you read the following posts and everyone has already said everything you would say. Therefore, making the need to post mute.

Good job!

I'm with the rest of the guys here. I love Kubuntu, It just works! I hate Windows and, sadly, dislike Ubuntu too (I had unfixable technical issues with the last 3 releases). I actually dreaded installing XP even on a virtual machine, although XP is still the best Windows OS.

I like OpenSUSE too, but, like Ubuntu, I had some issues with it too. Mostly SUSE not being able to see my Windows install.

I truly believe that Kubuntu is the best Distro out there right now. Might not be the most popular, but the best.

[losingle]

Re: Which Distro?

How does distrowatch grade the distros? I just tried Chakra which is high on the list, but doesn't measure up to Kubuntu in anyway. Starting with the installer bugs. (had to use g-parted to partition my disk), many apps crash including kmail, (which works everywhere).
This was the just released "stable" version. I use OpenOffice because of I have many ms docs to work with their "bundles" repo apps will not install office suites including libreoffice. Koffice installs from cinstall but is an older version lacking ms docs integration. This distro shows some promise but is obviously in some transition. The forum is reponsive but I think a lot is going on with the repos right now.

[claydoh]

Re: Which Distro?

distrowatch stats are simply page hits on each particular distro's page on the site. Which obviously can give some idea on the relative popularity of a distro, but also can lead (and most likely has) to hiking up the numbers artificially if a distro has shall we say, some overzealous fans.

But it is really the only metric we have to gauge anything by, really.

Chakra is nice, and being arch based means a little extra work for the end user in some ways, and really is a small distro, and is still fairly young in its current iteration. It probably rank high as there may be more mentions of it on the web, which can lead to more page hits, as well as the fact that they have had quite a few releases the past few months - which would prompt more news of it on the web as well

[CraigPaleo]

Re: Which Distro?

PCLinuxOS is the least troublesome RPM distro but only because they keep a total lock-down on what you can or cannot install. This leaves you with far fewer choices when it comes to software. If you install anything from outside their own repo, you are dropped from any forum support, period.

I've tried PCLinuxOS. I thought it was a nice distro and was use to Synaptic. I liked a lot of things about it but the thing that left a bad taste in my mouth was the community and the moderation of it.

When I told them I'd learned about PCLOS on Ubuntu forums and had been using Kubuntu, I got a response similar to, "You're allowed to talk about other distros there? I wouldn't do that here if I were you. Look at the stickies!" Lo and behold, I looked at the sticky and indeed, you weren't allowed to promote OR DISCUSS any other distro.

Please do not use our forums to discuss other distributions or
market your favorite distro. Post such as these will be removed. We have discontinued
the Other OS discussion category.

#14 http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index...16982#msg16982

[oshunluvr]

Re: Which Distro?

Yeah, it's a very fascist forum. Too bad too because it's a good distro and there are a lot of knowledgeable people on it.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Which Distro?

....
although XP is still the best Windows OS.
....

That was my opinion through out the VISTA fiasco and well into the Win7 release. My experience with Win95, Win98, NT3.5, NT4, W2K and XP at work convinced me that XP was the best OS Microsoft ever made.

At work, they tried VISTA on three brand new machines from DELL that came with VISTA Professional pre-installed on them. Because of early reports of problems the MS techies used the machines to see if VISTA would stand up. They, with all their knowledge, training and skill in using and maintaining Microsoft OSs, could not keep those three laptops running. They all failed within 30 minutes of booting, and after several failures they had to do a recovery or re-install of VISTA. So, eventually, they used their bulk XP license to upgrade those three VISTA machines to running XP.

My personal experience with VISTA was with this Sony VAIO VGN-FW140E notebook. I played with it a while to see if VISTA had improved since our IT department failures. It had not. Rather than run dual boot mode I scrubbed VISTA off this machine and made Mandriva the sole OS in Sept of 2008. In Feb 2009 I switched to Kubuntu.

When Win7 first came out I heard some horror stories and some folks who had problems with it asked me to replace it with Linux, which I did. This last XMas I bought an Acer Aspire One A-0521 netbook computer for my Wife. It came with Win7 pre-installed. I anticipated replacing it with Kubuntu but decided to use wubi.exe to install Kubuntu and keep Win7 around "just in case". Knowing Windows extreme susceptibility to malware I installed MS Security Essentials on it (because it is free and no subscription is required to keep updates coming). That Win7 installation boots quick and is fast and stable. The access control has been tweaked to be just short of annoying.

This last weekend a friend brought a DELL 17" Studio laptop to me and asked me to fix its VISTA installation. He has special needs which Linux cannot fullfil. VISTA had 173 infections, 3 of which were keyboard loggers. Even the phantom recovery partition was infected, as was the MBR. Rather than reinstall VISTA I recommended Win7. I had never installed Win7 before and was surprised to see that the installation is almost visually and methodically identical to a Kubuntu install. It took 35 minutes and a couple reboots to put Win7 on it, then another hour or so to add MS SE, Flash, Java, FF, Skype and the special software.

I'll be quite frank: IF Win95 had been as fast and stable as Win7 I would never have found it necessary to look for another OS and would never have found Linux.

Today, however, the most important part of the "perfect" OS metric is vulnerability. I use Microsoft Security Essentials on my wife's Acer, but she rarely used Win7 so it is hard to say how good MS SE is in blocking the bad stuff. While Win7 is making a lot of Windows users happy because it is a better XP than XP, a lot of Win7 users are failing to keep their AV subscriptions up to date. Also, before an AV product can be updated with the signature of a newly appearing virus or Trojan, some machines have to be infected, the malware identified and samples sent to the AV houses so they can determine the signature and add it to their vaccine. (Too bad if you are one of those unlucky users.) THEN, the user has to update their AV installation with the new vaccine. Those last two facts still make using Windows an iffy thing, regardless of how fast and stable it is, especially for online financial work. The situation is made WORSE by Microsoft having bludgeoned AV houses and security experts into silence with threats of lawsuits IF they release information about security holes they've discovered. So, the AV houses and security experts give the info to Microsoft, and then remain silent about it. Microsoft sets on the info until it suits their bottom line to fix the problem. Then they have the gall to announce the hole and the patch on the same day, and then claim zero day fixes. So, between the time that the holes are discovered and Microsoft releases a patch, if ever, Windows users are still vulnerable to infections and loss of personal info. Since the bad guys already know about most of the holes because they discover and use them, keeping the hole secret only helps the bad guys and Microsoft, and leaves Microsoft users hanging, slowly twisting in the winds of adversity. THAT is the reason why, even with Win7 running MS SE, I would NEVER use any version of Windows to do online banking or shopping.

[axel668]

Re: Which Distro?

Omg, this question is probably as old as Linux itself ... let me give you an overview of the most important KDE distros (assuming that's what you want, hanging out in the Kubuntu Forum).

Kubuntu: Best compromise between up to date and stable, "vanilla" KDE, 100% Ubuntu compatible (which is the de- facto standard on the Linux desktop and thus widely supported)

Debian KDE / Kubuntu LTS: More focus on stability at the cost of older package versions, use this if you experience issues with Kubuntu Current

Mint KDE: Based on Kubuntu but different software selection - use this if you want more Gnome tools in you KDE desktop (FF, Thunderbird, Gimp, Ooo, ...)

SUSE / Mandriva / Mepis: Offer some nice customizations, use this if you got issues with Kubuntu or if you don't like the "vanilla" KDE setup

Arch: The bleeding edge, as much a hobby as an Operating system (but not in a bad way ...), use this if you want the latest packages first and got a weekend to spare from time to time to fix your system