The Definitive "WHICH LINUX DISTRO?" Thread

By matrixstylez
in Linux

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What distro do you use?  

609 members have voted

  1. 1. What distro do you use?

    • Mandrake
      111
    • Fedora/Red Hat
      145
    • Knoppix
      26
    • Debian
      44
    • Gentoo
      117
    • SUSE
      69
    • Slackware
      54
    • LindowsOS/Lycoris
      8
    • PCLinuxOS
      3
    • Other
      32

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Grand Master

Fred Derf Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted
what do you think is the best disto available today, what are you using or what is you favourite distro you've tried as yet?

Go here and look at their top 10.

I like Knoppix and/or Debian. Once they're installed to the HD then they're basically the same.

Veteran

kongit

Posted
Posted

My personal favorite is gentoo. But that takes a while to install. It took me four hours today to install gnome and its dependencies. But I find it to be noticeably faster than the other distros. Slackware is good, but compared to the completeness available in other distros it is lacking, but for function, stability, and ease of hard-core editting of settings makes it trump most other distros. I think that fedora core 1 or suse would be really good for a user that doesn't want to put a lot of effort into their linux. Don't get fedora core 2 test 1, and I suggest against mandrake 10 until the main release. Both of those had many bugs for me compared to the others. For personal use I would choose redhat 9 and ximian desktop if I wasn't using gentoo.

Grand Master

MulletRobZ

Posted
Posted

Don't go for Mandrake 10.0 whatever you do! That OS is a lot buggier than what some people may expect and some of the updates (especially the scanner updates) will prevent you from operating your system. I don't know what Mandrake 9.2 is like, but Mandrake 9.0 didn't have too many problems. The only thing with virtually any version of Mandrake is that the latest NVidia drivers will not work by using the normal procedures (install the drivers and then edit the XF86Config-4 file so nv now reads nvidia). This is because Mandrake modifies the kernel to heck, and this is not good if you wish to upgrade the kernel later on.

Slackware 9.0 is extremely good and so is Slackware 9.1, but here's some advice for Slackware 9.1: Do not install the CUPS drivers included on the Slackware CD. Download them off the Internet, install them via source, add cupsd to /etc/rc.d/rc.local (and run this as root), and set up the printer via the KPrinter wizard. The reason is that for some strange reason, if the CUPS drivers found on the Slackware CD are used and the service is designated for startup, the printer would not work for any non-KDE applications. Therefore, my vote for the best distribution goes to Slackware.

Fedora Core 2 Test 1 is not bad as well, but will cause the printer to fail once you add TrueType fonts to fonts:/. Fedora Core 1 most likely does not have this problem. And Knoppix is excellent if you don't want to install Linux, but want to boot it off the CD-ROM.

Grand Master

CaKeY

Posted
Posted
The only thing with virtually any version of Mandrake is that the latest NVidia drivers will not work by using the normal procedures (install the drivers and then edit the XF86Config-4 file so nv now reads nvidia). This is because Mandrake modifies the kernel to heck, and this is not good if you wish to upgrade the kernel later on.

Where do you get your information? :huh: I installed the 53.41's with no problem. The kernel is fine too. Every major distro uses a custom kernel. You can always recompile it or use a standard one from kernel.org.

Grand Master

MulletRobZ

Posted
Posted
Where do you get your information? :huh: I installed the 53.41's with no problem. The kernel is fine too. Every major distro uses a custom kernel. You can always recompile it or use a standard one from kernel.org.

Hello? I tested Mandrake since 8.0, but only since 9.0 if you take my video card into consideration. I never had luck getting the latest NVidia drivers to work on my system if I have MandrakeLinux installed. I do not know what the heck is going on, but that's my scenario. I'm back to Slackware 9.1 and I had no problems getting NVidia 53.36 to work, which would mean 53.41 would also work fine. As for the kernel, Slackware used the raw kernel and I'm not sure about the Fedora Test Release, but I did not notice any prefixes added to the kernel source as compared to Mandrake (eg. 2.6.3-7mdk). In Slackware's case, they probably added some extra internal software which allowed the use of Slackware Installation Packages (TGZ) and some other information that identified the system as Slackware.

Grand Master

CaKeY

Posted
Posted
The only thing with virtually any version of Mandrake is that the latest NVidia drivers will not work by using the normal procedures (install the drivers and then edit the XF86Config-4 file so nv now reads nvidia).

This is simply not true. Maybe YOU cant get your card to work, but most everyone else can.

  This is because Mandrake modifies the kernel to heck, and this is not good if you wish to upgrade the kernel later on.

Again. You can upgrade your kernel just like you can with any other distro. I'm running 2.6.4 right now.

Rising Star

shimon

Posted
Posted (edited)
Thank for the rename from "The Big Linux Poll" to "The Definitive 'WHICH LINUX DISTRO?' Thread"

and now to "What distro do you use?" and with glue and now with out and new thread made based on mine

Edited by shimon
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