Which distro do you find works the best ?

AstarothMastemaRavenclaw

I have been distro-hopping for about a year now, and tried the following: Opensuse, Ubuntu, PClinuxOS, Chakra, Crunchbang, Linux Mint, Sabayon, Bodhi Linux, Jolicloud, Kuki Linux, Debian, Vector, Peppermint, and I have tried to install Pardus, but never got the live USB working .

So I personally find that out of the distros I tried, Linux Mint and Crunchbang are the best . Although I have high expectations for Pardus, I have yet to try it ..

What are your opinions of the subject of linux distros ?

mfillpot

I perfer distros that make little assumptions and require you to do the configuration. My favorites are slackware, gentoo and LFS. Although I am running ubuntu 11.04 on some machines now and I am starting to like the unity interface, if it wasn't for the ubuntu core which can't blacklist anything, I may consider making that my normal distro for my family to work with.

jabirali

I too prefer flexible distributions that make few assumptions about what you want. For personal computers - netbooks, laptops and desktop computers - I prefer ArchLinux. The package management tool pacman is superb, and the distribution has both official binary repositories and a source repository maintained by the community. It doesn't configure anything for you, but should you ever be in doubt about how to perform a certain task, the wiki is quite good. It's a rolling-release distribution, so there are no stable releases; just a current and a testing branch. For a personal computer this is great, but it might not be ideal for servers.

If you have the patience, Gentoo also fills the desktop niche quite good. It feels awesome to have a system that is tailored to your software requirements and hardware with USE/MAKE-flags, albeit it does require some time for maintenance and compiling. For servers, I believe Debian is the best choice. These distributions all require some time and effort to setup though, so if I need something quick to get working, I usually go for Mint or Ubuntu for desktop machines and laptops, and Jolicloud for netbooks.

saqman2060

I personally like ubuntu, debian and archlinux. Ubuntu is easy to customize in my opinion and has a very good support community. I can add and remove things this little trouble. Debian because is it very light weight and it is what ubuntu is based on. Any distro based on debian I trust.

Archlinux allows you to customize you system from the ground up and allows you to understand the inner workings of a linux system, that and slackware which teaches you the true meaning of linux.

My family is running zorin OS 4, "ubuntu 10.10". It is fully loaded and works best for windows users. Also not heavy on resources.

AstarothMastemaRavenclaw

For a while I was extremely interested in Arch, but once I tried installing it from a usb on my netbook, I didn't understand a thing LOL . Well, now that I think of it, I am certain I was having trouble with the network modules .

Anyway, I got a taste of pacman in Chakra, and if it wasn't for Chakra nearly eating my baby, I would have stuck with it .
Currently, I am happily running Linux Mint KDE .. for now .

On my other rather obsolete laptop, the only distro I tried that didn't make it freeze was CrunchBang, and honestly, it is sexy .

I agree that debian-based is most reliable, but I would like to get to explore Arch after I understand Linux more intensely .
I also would like to explore Sorcerer-based distros, but I don't know if they are any good .

saqman2060

If you want to learn linux more intensely, try slackware 13.1 and read the pdf that is package with the .iso file. If you burn to usb or cd, just explore the drive and look for the .pdf file. Using this and arch and you will learn a lot.

Happy distro searching.

atreyu

@Ravenclaw,
Like others have said, I like more control and less "user-friendliness" too, whatever the distro may be. I currently mainly use the Fedora/RH/CentOS family (I find them very amenable to software development), but I like to keep my options open. I use a lot of Debian-based distros for the embedded stuff that I work on and I really like aspects of that, too - mainly the stability and simplicity.

I've heard a lot of good stuff about CrunchBang - always meant to try that one out.

Never heard of Sorcerer-based distros, now that sounds sexy - googling now...

asedt

The distro that I used most is Linux Mint, I like the out of the box experience, after install you don't have to do anything, "everything" just works. So It's the lazy choice.

I now have Linux Mint 10 installed and start to see some things I don't like now. There is a few bugs and things like the MSE that can't be uninstalled, if you don't hack, and some of the default appearance that I don't like. I will test 11 and if some of the stuff is not fixed I will probably switch if I find something I like more. (OMG there is 7 plugins to Firefox as default, luck Firefox has safe mode so you can disable stuff)

*everything = Browsing, Music, Movies, Flash, Office, IM etc

marc

atreyu wrote:

Never heard of Sorcerer-based distros, now that sounds sexy - googling now...

Never actually tried them. If I ever wanted to go to source based distros I would've gone FreeBSD or Gentoo...

asedt

What Sorcerer based distros exist?

Sorcerer: http://sorcerer.silverice.org/
Linux-Lunar: http://www.lunar-linux.org/
SourceMage: http://www.sourcemage.org/


I found these three from: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=package-management

Sorcerer, which existed even before Gentoo Linux was conceived, uses Bash scripts to "cast spells" or download, install and compile packages. Sorcerer was later forked into Lunar Linux and Source Mage GNU/Linux, both of which are included in the table below. Unfortunately, Sorcerer doesn't offer much in terms of online documentation so it has been omitted for now.

atreyu

asedt wrote:

What Sorcerer based distros exist?

Sorcerer: http://sorcerer.silverice.org/
Linux-Lunar: http://www.lunar-linux.org/
SourceMage: http://www.sourcemage.org/


I found these three from: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=package-management

Sorcerer, which existed even before Gentoo Linux was conceived, uses Bash scripts to "cast spells" or download, install and compile packages. Sorcerer was later forked into Lunar Linux and Source Mage GNU/Linux, both of which are included in the table below. Unfortunately, Sorcerer doesn't offer much in terms of online documentation so it has been omitted for now.

Yeah, just check out the Wiki entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcerer_%28operating_system%29
...pretty out there. You "cast spells" on your system, instead of "rpm -ivh package.rpm" or "apt-get install packagename". I must say it LOOKS cool, though. I'd rather go w/Gentoo, too, though, or maybe Linux From Scratch - which I've done before and was a great lesson in learning the ins and outs of Linux.

AstarothMastemaRavenclaw

As of today I tried Pardus 2011 (took me a while to get the usb install working) and I can say that it is an amazing distro, though I cannot seem to make wireless work . It was a very eye-catching and solid distro . If I had more generic hardware it would be my distro of choice .

I will keep the .iso for later use should I figure out a way to fix this issue, but for now I am going back to Mint . Even Mint 11 is getting "unkept" like Ubuntu now, in my opinion . Mint 11 has problems with my hardware which Mint 10 did not .

Am considering Slackware . Seems easier than Arch for some reason . (I once tried to install Arch linux and I could not even set up LAN networking ..)

saqman2060

I can agree with the ubuntu starting to have problems. They moved to unity with 11.04 and did not make the OS very impressive. I will be installing gnome3 if I can.

Mint 10 works good and so far, not had one problem--maybe I am just careful. If mint 10 works stick with it. I liked ubuntu 10.10 better than 11.04 anyway.

Arch is when it is time for a new challenge. If you up to it, see how well you do.
Try using wicd to setup wireless networking. If you can connect via wire, then you can install wicd online. Hope everything works out.

AstarothMastemaRavenclaw

I actually just gave arch a try again tonight . I found that the "installation guides" were not as explanatory as they claimed to be . So I reinstalled Mint, but left about 23GB's of free space for testing distros rather than installing over and over .

I also bought myself a nifty 16GB usb and was wondering which distros are good to use from usb ?
Was thinking about creating a multiboot usb of some sort .

jabirali

AstarothMastemaRavenclaw wrote:

I also bought myself a nifty 16GB usb and was wondering which distros are good to use from usb ?

This kind of depends on what you will use the distribution for, as any recent distribution can be made to run from a USB pen. Since many USB devices are quite slow, something lightweight like Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux would probably be ideal though :-)

saqman2060

Any distro can be installed on a usb drive. Pick the one that you like most. don't think you can make a dualboot usb. You can install distros on a VM client like virtualbox to try out multiple distros.

Goineasy9

Actually, I have heard of of folks dual and triple booting off of a usb. I was never really interested in the process, so I didn't keep links, but in theory, it is possible. Installing directly onto the usb and partitioning it before the installation with something like ext2, as long as you have enough room, and can make enough partitions large enough, I'd say it was possible. When I installed Sid onto a 4gb stick with persistence a few years back, I just had to make sure that I installed grub to the mbr of the stick. Once grub is written to the mbr, if you created extra partitions during the first install, you could add another distro. I really haven't done a live usb install for some time so I might be way off base, but, I have read of others doing it. Maybe Auntie Google can find those threads.

AstarothMastemaRavenclaw

Ubuntu/variants are falling down a hole .
MEPIS does not allow the creation of a /var partition . (A shame, I love[d] MEPIS ..)

I am giving Fedora 15 a try because I very much like Gnome 3 .

*EDIT*

Forget Fedora . I found no workaround for the black screen of death, and I cannot get my wireless card to work, though I do like rpm from what I have seen of it .
I am giving OpenSUSE a spin .

ben

Don't forget SLAX (one of the Slackware's sons),
if you just want it in your favorite USB key it's really easy to install and customize as well. I've never used it heavily for years since few months ago, I've had few projects with live distros and live filesystems in RAM and I've started with it again. It's really easy to install/configure if you're using an USB stick.

For servers and HA systems I always keep source based distros (when time is an option) or I prefer long term distributions where stability is a must

RickSMO

I preffer Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, it works with my video card drivers and i've had the best luck using wine with it as well.