Chosing distribution

[tim_s]

Are you looking for a new experience?

Nothing is easier than Ubuntu / Mint in my opinion and thus if you want anything beyond this - you will need to get comfortable with the operating system. IF this is a work environment - than stick with Ubuntu as your demands for keeping the system stable / ability to return faults back into a running state do not get any easier.

The next level in my opinion will be as follows,

(Remember this is purely opinion and thus people will disagree or you may not have the same experiences)

Fedora

Great for an out of the box solution, the applications are comparable to Ubuntu in the fact all major applications are supported (Typically!) but it is a little more cutting edge and thus you have opportunities for issues. I have never had any issues repairing items as they are thrown my way.

Slackware

Great for fast deployment, as flexible as Fedora and the others but more "In your face" as you will need a little partition knowledge to get you through the setup. Once beyond this, the system will be up and running and rock solid. You may get hung-up on the lack of dependency checking during application installation but it will give you control. This could be a good choice if you are looking for the "Linux" experience.

Arch

I am a moderate fan of Arch, I believe in the project and I love how it is implemented. You will need some basic knowledge about Kernal modules and partitioning - You will see basic speed improvements and packages come per-compiled optimized for 64-bit machines. You will need to go through the process of setting up a graphical environment which may require you to read some information but the documentation is amazing.

I personally would not use a rolling distro in a work environment if your machine is mission critical.

Suse

This is the only distro in the list where I have had over 2 years experience. It's not for me but it is another direction you can go for.

--

Repetition of my comments

I know you have come looking for recommendations and I agree to some level the developers and the mission statements of each distro can impact how stable the machine is, however, I have had out of the box problems on all distro's and I have found any distro is repairable if you are willing to spend time to research the issue.

For me it is how the system is layed out and the over all goal of the project that chooses, which is right for my application. You only need to install the system once and then using it and maintaining is the long road to travel.

[tim_s]

Hi,

I do not want to bombard you with information but Linux is a personal choice.

For example I know xorangekiller (Not picking on you - just know you are active in this thread) enjoys using Debian but I am sure he tried a few different distros before settling (If he even has settled)

Day to day grind, applications, ease of maintaining, belief in the mission statement - I could not even guess why xorangekiller has chosen this distro. This works for him and his life style and he is happy. (P.s. Debian is not a bad distro at all)

I like Gentoo and that is my personal choice, the main complaint is usually focused on how challenging the installation process is, however, to me the installation is sensible - just not done automatically for you. Even so, the lengthy process is a one time ordeal and the o/s itself is fantastic for day to day use - sensible in my opinion.

Had you asked me 3 years ago, I would of probably recommended a different distro, I remember the first time I used Gentoo - the installation was easy, not something new to me but trying to use portage WOW, basic items did not need anything special but as soon as I wanted to install something like PS3 Media Server I was looping through dependencies - took me a second to figure out what all this information being thrown at me from the emerge command actually meant - to me I thought I was doing exactly what was asked of me.

Sometimes you just need to leave your comfort zone and play around with the different distros, nobody has ever lead me in the right direction on the forum - I needed to find what works for me through my own personal experiences.

[jaroli.tamas]

Thanks for you too :) My personal favourites were Debian, and Ubuntu (before Unity), and now I will try Arch. My idea is to make 3 different VBoxes, with the same config, and run a Debian, an Arch, and a Xubuntu, and test them, which is better for me :)

[tim_s]

Thanks for you too :) My personal favourites were Debian, and Ubuntu (before Unity), and now I will try Arch. My idea is to make 3 different VBoxes, with the same config, and run a Debian, an Arch, and a Xubuntu, and test them, which is better for me :)

Sounds like a great idea!

[guitmz]

cinnarch, fuduntu, mageia, fedora, debian, crunchbang, pretty much any distro... they all are customizable, they all are good :)

[jaroli.tamas]

Well. I installed Arch in VBox, with xfce and slim DM. My problem is slim doesnt start on startup eventought I already did the "systemctl enable slim.service" thing. Do you have any ideas?

[jaroli.tamas]

Sorry for double posting, I didn't find edit button.

My problem is I installed first lxdm and it worked, but its so ugly, so I decided to change to SLiM. I removed lxdm by pacman -Rs lxdm, then tried to install SLiM by pacman -S slim slim-themes archlinux-themes-slim, but it didn't work, cuz it didn't start automatically, only when I typed systemctl start slim.service. So I removed slim, then installed gdm, but the same happened. So I returned to lxdm, and tried to install a theme atleast, if its ugly. When I downloaded Allan Macrae's archlinux-lxdm-theme, extracted to /usr/share/lxdm/themes, and edited /etc/lxdm/lxdm.conf with nano, modified the theme line to archlinux-lxdm-theme, then reboot, and an empty black screen was the result. I couldn't do anything (thanks god I did this in VBox). Then i tried to install the "standard" archlinux-lxdm-theme via pacman, it worked, but not properly. The only thing I got is a white screen with a textfield for username/password, language selection, keyboard layout selection, but not custom background, etc...

Do you have any idea for any sollution?

Or what DM do you suggest for me for arch? Qingy, XDM, KDM and WDM are excluded.

Thanks in advance.

Edit: and ofc I tried systemctl enable <servicename>.service on each.

[KaoDome]

I just went through an installation of Arch in a VM.

After installing the system I update repositories info:

pacman -Syu[/CODE]

Installed an X server, a DE and SLiM (which is the one you want right? I don't actually use any, can't recommend there):

[CODE]pacman -S xorg-server xfce4 slim[/CODE]

Since I was using VMware software I also installed visual and input Xorg modules for it: [font=courier new,courier,monospace]xf86-video-vmware[/font] and [font=courier new,courier,monospace]xf86-input-vmmouse[/font]. Check the Xorg wiki entry for more info. Afterwards, I enabled SLiM:

[CODE]systemctl enable slim[/CODE]

Rebooted the machine and everything seems to be working, creating a non privileged user and log in was hassle free. Use [font=courier new,courier,monospace]useradd[/font] to create a new user and [font=courier new,courier,monospace]gpasswd[/font] to add it to several groups. After that login in a terminal as it and edit [font=courier new,courier,monospace]~/.xinitrc[/font] to add or uncomment the line for your DE (in this case it was that [font=courier new,courier,monospace]exec startxfce4[/font]), because SLiM seems to use that to launch your session.

Afterwards you should see something like this: http://imgur.com/cvcDDIK

You may wish to install [font=courier new,courier,monospace]bash-completion[/font] and [font=courier new,courier,monospace]pkgfile[/font] for auto-completion and the later tells you which package provides the command you want to use if it's not installed. And now it's time to customize your thing, install some fonts ([font=courier new,courier,monospace]ttf-dejavu[/font] seems fine), a browser, office suite, etc.

Hope that helps.

[jaroli.tamas]

I think, you misunderstood me ^^ xfce4 is working, also the autocompletion, etc. The only thing that isn't working is SLiM. I can start xfce by typing startxfce4 in terminal, but i wanna use slim as a login manager. And thats what isnt working, I wrote my problem above^^

[cork1958]

The only way I have found the ideal distro was to try them.

Yep,

The only way to go is to try them. With as many as it sounds like you've tried, doesn't sound like anything satisfies you, which is about how it has always been with me also! :)

Then again, that's half the fun of using Linux!!

[KaoDome]

No idea why it shouldn't work, as long as it's installed and enabled it pops up in my VM.

Since you had lxdm installed and activated before, did you disable its service prior to uninstalling the package? If you didn't you wouldn't be able to enable SLiM without manually removing the symlink, or installing LXDM again and disabling it.

If that's the case the easier would be to:

# rm /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service
# systemctl enable slim
# reboot
[/CODE]

Other than that I don't know what could be happening.

[Haggis Veteran]

So Jaroli what Distros have you tried so far then?

[jaroli.tamas]

@KaoDome

Thanks, I will try this. :)

@Haggis

Now I'm trying the Arch linux :) I like its speed and simplicity :) Its a challange for me :) To install everything manually :D

[jaroli.tamas]

@KaoDome thanks, this solved my problem ^^