One of the pleasures of Linux is that you can try out different distributions to see which one works best for you. You like Ubuntu, but you want to fine tune the desktop engine? OK, try Kubuntu with its KDE desktop then. Some worthwhile distributions, however, don't get as much attention as they deserve. So, here's my list of five great distributions that you might want to try.

Before launching into my list, let me preface it by saying that this is a list of what I consider relatively easy to use desktop distributions. So, while Debian is a great distribution, I haven't included it because to get the most out of it you should be an experienced Linux user. I also haven't included special purpose distributions like my favorite system repair Linux, SystemRescueCD. It's a great system repair operating system. Even if you don't care for Linux and your job is bringing misbehaving PCs back into line you really should get a copy. It, however, isn't a good, general purpose desktop.





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I highly recommend gOS 3 to anyone interested in Linux. Although it is nOObed up, it is a very fun and interesting operating system to play with.

If cloud computing really takes hold like everyone thinks it will (I think it will not, but that is a different rant), this operating system - or kind of operating system - will be leading the way...

I disagree. Debian has made huge steps forward in terms of ease of use since Woody. I have known people who have started with Slackware or Gentoo as their first distro. By comparison Debian is easy.

SimplyMEPIS and PCLinuxOS are old now. SimplyMEPIS is based on Debian Stable. It is now 17th at DistroWatch.

And what about openSUSE? Doesn't it even deserve to be mentioned?

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is a guy with highly controversial opinions.

Yes Debian is a good distro, it was the only one that I install on an old gateway that found the ISA network card.

ubuntu screwed linux up

So when do we expect the baster child.

Many people believe that is why it was created in the first place.

You crack me up A17...

XD

Care to explain why? I am not up and up on the linux community.

If you want just one reason, here it is: everything needs to grow at its own pace. Every explosion of growth is bad, be it the human body or the economy or everything else.
Ubuntu has attracted all sort of "wrong" people because of its very aggressive advertising campaign. People who don't have a clue about computers want to try it now.
Once they try it and find out that it doesn't work for them, they don't want to hear about Linux for the rest of their life.
It is very much like the n00bs we attract here. Once things go wrong, they blame everybody and everything but themselves.

There are of course many other reasons, but that will do for now.

Fedora it a great distrobution which i feel is better then ubuntu Or SuSe

hmm... without intending to endorse any of the distros I can say the opposite about the ones that became popular - whether it be through marketing or true qualities alone, I can't really judge.

For me it was actually Mandriva and Ubuntu (especially the studio version) that got me into Linux and... stick to it for a good while now. Despite a few irritating issues to get it up and running for my purposes, that is. I also tried Suse a couple of times but got thrown off because of the little 'sympathy' for artistic users. A couple of years ago I checked out Dreamlinux which looked very nice but which I got hopelessly lost in. That may not be the case anymore in their recent releases. Then there are these so-called 'familiar-feeling' distros like Linspire (hello mothership widows...). From hearsay it seems it's easy to handle but I never got into it just because of the founder M.R. who I reckon is a hit-and-run conman - he sold out and ripped a lot of musicians off back in the mp3.com times.

Anyway. I would say I'm more of a 'power user', definitely not a noob but definitely not a geek. I'm absolutely horrified of the command line and encrypted looking text I can't decipher at first sight and I know as an undeniable fact that I'm not alone with that.

The real problem I see with any Linux distro is the scattered info and the instructions that are too little 'authoritarian' thus leaving too much space for interpretation and confusion to non-IT gurus. (Once again I didn't say noobs....)

There's shiploads of nice support out there which is basically...err... well-meant but often way too esoteric when sh*t really hits the fan. That's what puts non-command line people off, not the distros themselves. Average users want to click on stuff and hit buttons and be guided through menus. They don't want to type stuff that seems to pull them back to the 70s and reminded of the reasons why they never became IT gurus in a first place.

That reminds me of something... Wait a moment, isn't it called Microsoft Windows?

You literally just inferred that 90% of the world's computer users are well... dumb (for the lack of a better word).

Including me...


I feel that one button is way better than 2 clicks, 26 key strokes, and 3 seconds of waiting... But that is just me.
(i.e. Being able to listen to MP3 files out of the box on say Windows vs. Linux, or OS X vs. Linux)

Or OSX... except for one or two clicks and one confusing menu less.

What I'm talking about is something like this
http://littlergirl.googlepages.com/NvidiaD...owTo.html#toc13

The user who didn't study computer science (computers are made to support people aren't they? or is it the other way around?...) might try to work his way through this jungle once, perhaps twice after failing the first time. A few might actually succeed. However I bet you an amount of your choice that the vast majority will just turn around and boot up widows or, if they can afford it, get a Mac.
That's where any Linux distro gets its reputation from. Shame really...

edit: I'm actually just being devil's advocate here but I'm sure I do have a point although it's sometimes hard to digest for the super geeks. If the Linux world really want to talk about desktop there are basically just two alternatives. Either you stay in an elitist corner that the syntactically challenged is not quite able to wrap his head around - and you clearly state it, "this is not for you" - or you go the extra mile and make it accessible to potentially everybody with an average IQ. I still remember very vividly the times when computers where "command-based" only, reason why so few people got into it back then. If there really is a true incentive to offer something less intimidating it should be done all the way through...

No, not really, it was just the logical consequence of what solaar said



Actually on openSUSE you do it literally with one click...

And not just NVIDIA and ATI drivers.

Oh hell, they are all KDE or Gnome with a few different themes with the Linux kernel.
Nothing to fight about.

I started off with Slackware back in about 95/95 with Slackware 2.0. I have used SUSE for a lot of things and I recommend it for most serious businesses and large enterprises, I always liked PCLos for desktop use though. I have always continued to use Slackware on my daily production and development boxes. Gentoo is another favorite of mine as well, although I don't use it much. I want to use my box, not continually be compiling on it. The only other distro I use a lot is BackTrack 3 Beta 2. I have that installed on my Toshiba Laptop for wardriving. It is a serious pentesting distro based on Slack 10 so it is rock solid in my opinion.

I just bought my Macbook in March when I cooked my desktop and it was a complete intro to OSX and Mac's in general. I love it, it has the fun and development capabilities of a Linux box and is also an awesome machine for daily use in school and at home for normal uses. I will never go back and have been slowly migrating files from my Slack box to the Mac. I find myself using Linux less and less although I still think it is an amazing distro.

Welcome to the forums urlugal.

Well, the differences are 1)stabilty (= number of bugs), 2)ease of use and 3)extra features.
IMHO, openSUSE does pretty well in all 3, Mandriva in points 2 and 3 and Debian in point 1.
Another difference between distros is the number of available packages. My favourites do all pretty well.




I love OS X, of course, otherwise I wouldn't be here. However I find Linux more flexible.
Besides installing and configuring OS X plus adding all the extra apps (many need a serial or even activation) takes a few days, versus a few hours if I install, for instance, openSUSE with a DVD.

See there you go again.
packages all the Distos get the packages from the same pool. they may make their own packages manager etc but they all use the same packages.
Nothing new there. bugs are in the packages. so you can't say one distro has more then the other.
Now if you say BSD is better then Linux your saying some thing that has a difference.

To start with, let me say I am very demanding of my distros and I tend to be set in my ways. Maybe I am a little to picky and demanding but all this cute little happy, oh the user doesn't need to know that or they don't need that feature crap in a lot of these new distros is getting on my nerves. This isn't just Damn Small Linux (DSL),my current PIA, a lot of the smaller ones I have tried in the last few months fall into this category.

I have been using DSL on my 200mhz laptop, it runs fast as hell and works great for normal everyday things. It does what it says it does so I can't fault the developers at all. This morning though it is getting on my nerves in a bad way. My problem is that I am not willing to trade off what I need and want for this speed. I tried to use their myDSL binaries to load some games, ruby, and xscreensaver, that was ok after I fixed it so that I could install them locally. According to the instructions this should have been done for me, it must have forgot . Then I finally figured out that you need to be logged in as DSL in order to do this, would of been nice to tell me that in the instructions. I did that and still could not load anything from the gui, it spits out a bunch of hex crap and then says it cant remove /tmp/noload. Back to root to remove the file. I finally got ruby installed using the ruby.DSL package, from the command line, gave up on the gui. I tried to run some of my scripts, all well and good, then I tried to use an interactive shell.

Nope, ok I can see that. They are trying to trim things down, I understand you can't have everything. I downloaded the tarball and was going to install the full version of ruby. I say was. I went to configure the tarball and well, no gcc, no cc. I am still ok with this, sacrifices must be made. I went and took a look at the package list to see exactly what was installed and what I would have to install to get gcc up and running. No make, no gcc, no cc, a trimmed down version of the c libs. To make this a short little rant I need to install a whole lot of stuff just to install my tarballs.

I still like DSL and it is the fastest normal distro I have tried, Gentoo still has a long way to go before it can be called normal or simple. Nothing against it, I used to run it on my FX-60 box and loved it. Every aspiring geek and hacker should install Gentoo from scratch at least once just for the sake of learning all the things that go into an install behind the scenes.

I just dont think DSL is a good distro for someone that wants to do any hacking out of the box. I will continue to use it as a repair cd for all my systems and recommend it as such but I have a hard time recommending it to someone who wants a full production distro. For the average Joe it is great. Goto myDSL, find the program, and one click to install, hopefully. For someone who demands full control out of the box I still say Slackware or Gentoo. You can do it with DSL, just not out of the box, but the develops never promised that, so no fault to the distro at all.

It seems to me that in the last 3 or 4 years or so distros are starting to focus to much on the broad picture and wider market and leaving their core people wondering wtf.(Suse) Then you have the other extreme, RMS. As much as I don't agree with him on some things, I am more and more seeing his point of view. Most major Linux distros in my opinion are becoming too watered down and flashy. Not the kernel or Linux itself, just the distros. Linux used to lead the way in development of cool things on the gui frontier, now we follow. Windows used to copy X, now it seems to me on some level X is playing catchup to windows. I am not talking about games or 3d software either.

OpenSuse is way to bloated, but in my experience it is the best for enterprise level use, I used to run it on my old Toshiba laptop and loved it. Fedora and Red Hat are way to commercial. Any distro with its own certification program is stupid. Those certifications are a waste of time, they get you in the door but that is all. Umbutu, and all its variants are way to cute. I will concede that they may very well be the door to mass acceptance though, if that is really a good thing I can't say. Debian is very good and rock solid but last time I tried it(Woody) I had to do a lot of hunting down of codecs because they were worried about offending people. I know lawyers suck and lawsuits happen but come on. Also forget trying to use KDE on a GNOME centric distro, KDE on Debian is near pointless, the same goes for GNOME on OpenSuse. This is a whole other issue, I know. Slackware and Gentoo are really all that is left of the old guard of do it yourself. Gentoo is rather new but it has a very good outlook towards it's software, and I understand why GNOME isn't included with Slackware anymore, and agree with Patrick's choice. You can still download it and run it just fine though.

This is just a little mussing from me, no attack is meant on any distro they are still light years better than windows and each has a very good set of defined parameters in which it is capable of operating. Most distros, including the major ones, are turning into niche distros, they are good for a certain group, but annoying the hell out of everyone else. I just sense that some of the freedom and power that we preach to the general public is being slowly eroded away, in my humble opinion. We try to educate the people about freedom to choose but in some case they have no choice.

I strongly disagree. There are distros which offer few compiled packages. Even the much loved and respected Slackware falls in this category (about 800 packages, versus the 20,000 or so of Debian or SUSE)
If you want something which your distro doesn't provide as a binary, you must compile it, with no guarantee of success.



Strongly disagree, again. If that were true, all distros would have the same bugs. Only Slackware doesn't modify the packages from upstream.
OTOH take Debian, for instance: each package has its own mantainer.
Else how would you explain that Debian Unstable has tons of bugs, while Stable has very few?
Read here if you want to understand better what I mean:

http://blog.sillica.com/2008/06/11/debian-...ch-us-anything/



That is why I have always disliked DSL. In my opinion it is a toy OS, waste of time.
My computers are never older than 2 years anyway. If you want something fast, start with a basic Debian install and add what you need.




All you have to do in order to have codecs and other "forbidden" stuff in Debian is adding one or two lines to your sources.list. Then you'll find absolutely everything you might be looking for within apt or synaptic.
I also disagree that "KDE on Debian is near pointless". I have always used it. The only annoyance are the double menus (KDE + Debian). Else it is standard, untouched KDE.

These KDE vs gnome and distro threads always go on forever. But I like zypper which is kind of new to me that I use in opensuse 11. You have the option to use binaries, use yast, or the terminal apt style out of the box.

zypper refresh = aptget update
zypper update = apt-get upgrade
zypper in <package> = apt-get install <package>
etc.

Indeed, I always use zypper from konsole. Right now I can't because I am on dial-up.

And using windowsssssssssssssssssss.. yuck .. lol

What would you do if you were on dial-up with a softmodem?

Kill myself. no way could I do that again.
And they make drivers for software modem's now.

That is being considered

P.S: Of late I'd use any OS that gets the job done, no matter if the devil himself created it.

i wish there is a one or two linux distributions i think its better to focus in one direction than in multiple directions

anyway i don't think there are a major difference between famous distributions at the end they are all linux

and about ubuntu i think ubuntu gives a chance for linux to be popular and well known

however i wish i could try the following dist. 1- blacktrack 3 2- redhat 3-fedora

i'm opensuse and ubuntu user

I know what you are saying, and it SHOULD be true, ie, everything in the open source community should be created equal.
But it's not, and I have found it is far from what you said.

On my Powerbook, for example, I have tried the following distros:

• Ubuntu
• Kubuntu
• Debian
• OpenSuse
• Fedora

and they all behave completely differently!!
Ubuntu is easy to use, but slow and buggy. Kubuntu is less easy, slower and more buggy. Debian is very fast and stable, but near impossible to use. Opensuse has brilliant features, but is slow and buggy. Fedora is probably one of the best distros on the surface, but the PPC port is pathetically slow.

And this is why 'Linux' will never take over the world....
At least with Mac and Windows, (Mac moreso) you have one entitiy that performs in the same way with the same features on any computer because there is just one choice.

Why?

i use ubuntu but i completely agree with you on this one if you look at the adobe site theres plan on making photoshop for ubuntu soon when the market share hits 5%



focussing on multiple directions is the way of linux its free afterall well mostly



i agree with you ther the questions is why is it almost impossible to use im going to use debian as a server distro

oh god i said that dang it must be so hard seemings as i like the debian flavour choice ppl choice