234 replies to this topic

[Hagar]

I'm a long term slackware user, use it for servers. I'm getting into gentoo, which is nice once you get through the 18-hour birth pains  

For the desktop, my favourite Linux is a little known BSD variant called Darwin, it has this wicked windowmanager/GUI called Aqua

[MLS]

I really like Ubuntu, but I wish it were distributed with "batteries included" regarding multimedia. I know about the legal issues and how easy it is to get those to work, but is makes it a bit hard to advertise its "Just works" factor.

I also like Gentoo, which is nice to learn more about Linux. You do everything by hand, but you have the most powerful hand ever
It suffers a lot from its (well deserved) bad reputation, though.

About the Gnome/KDE differences :
- Gnome is easier (as in, less painful) for beginners.
- KDE is ultra-configurable. Fun, but it has a lot of drawbacks
- KDE software is very well integrated but often bloated. If for some reason you need to scare away forever somebody from Linux, make him try KBear
- Disregard the KDE screenshots that look like crap, it can be made to look somewhat appealing
- Using KDE software in Gnome can be a pain
- Using Gnome software in KDE can be a pain

[troll]Whichever you choose, 40% of the linux Users will tell you you made the right choice, 30% that you should choose the other big name desktop environment, 20% will say "Down with this bloated crap ! I use Fluxbox, and it is very snappy on my Pentium 133", and 10% that will say "Stop using this GUI junk ! True mens do everything from the CLI".
Among those 10%, 50% use vi, the other 50% use Emacs. [/troll]


Hagar >
True. I stopped caring for Linux on the desktop since I got my Mini  

[blahsucks]

Emacs = God.

That doesn't mean it's good. Seriously, is there anything emacs can't do? It's an HTML editor, a web browser, an AIM client (no, I'm not kidding), and five thousand other things. Not to mention the fact that a compiler and debugger run INSIDE emacs...

I always wondered who used XEmacs among the CLI addicts, though...

It can be extremely painful to get things working with Fedora that don't work out of the box. Gentoo is designed to be flexible, but it's more difficult to use. *Ubuntu... never used it, admittedly. I've heard good things, but I just installed Fedora a couple of weeks ago, so I'm not willing to go through the download. I'm planning on it sometime soon.

GNOME is basically targeted at the Mac. Out of the box, you'll find GNOME is not as close to Windows as KDE. You can reconfigure everything so both look identical, but you're not getting the same functionality.

KDE has Konqueror, which has a unique rendering engine and is more well integrated than GNOME's Galeon and Epiphany, which are good but dry on features.

Many, many Windows ports use GTK+, at least in my experience. Qt/KDE software is usually written from scratch, providing higher levels of integration. There are hacks to provide uniform theming between GNOME and KDE, but nothing comes out of the box unless you choose an identical theme between the two DEs.

Linux on the desktop is reeaaaly flexible, but even KDE is not going to be as uniform as Windows or MacOS when you start installing external software without package management.

[Swad]

I'm pretty excited about KDE 4.0 - I think it will probably bring KDE 1) lightyears ahead of Gnome and 2) closer in competition with Windows. Right now, Mac's Aqua is king.

[Technobob]

After trying many versions of Linux, I settled on Xandros until Mac x86 came along that is. I dumped it and just gave windows the boot on my laptop.

[zfire89]

My favorite linux is fedora core 4, next to it would be ubuntu

[wmarsh]

SUSE Linux by far. Fedora is too incomplete. Debian is usually obsolescent and a bear to install.

SUSE works perfectly out of the box. Currently using 9.3.

See opensuse.org to download CD and DVD images

[wmarsh]

wmarsh, on Oct 12 2005, 02:48 PM, said:

SUSE Linux by far. Fedora is too incomplete. Debian is usually obsolescent and a bear to install.

SUSE works perfectly out of the box. Currently using 9.3.

See opensuse.org to download CD and DVD images

Just upgraded to SUSE 10.
Surprised to find it supports hfsplus out of the box. So if you patch something and it won't boot, your Mactel can access your OS X file system and fix it from Linux. Just add the file system to fstab specifying hfsplus.

[DrJägermeister]

Suse 9.3 works fine for me & OSX86:
The bootloader Grub can boot OSX86, XP and Linux. Also it have access to the FAT32, ntfs and hsf+ partitions. Linux is the only OS witch support all file systems.

[Metrogirl]

My vote goes for Suse too.   I'm on 9.   Didn't know 10 was out so I'm going to have some fun this evening downloading it and no doubt fun tomorrow installing it.   Then I will be playing with an HFS+ partition for OSx86 - sounds perfect.

No real reason for my preference apart from its compatibility with all my hardware and the fact that I'm comfortable with it after a lot of hassle with other flavours of Linux.   I still have Fedora on a laptop which supports a specific app and I don't want to break it or reinstall so it will stay...

[Hagar]

I don't really understand Ubuntu's popularity.. I thought at first that it was due to the fact that it comes in ppc flavour & this comunity has a distinct mac-bias, but it's done great generally, as evidenced by its place in the dstrowatch rankings..

Anyhow, just to add to the list, my toolkit is never without knoppix, probably the best LiveCD Distro out there. I took the trouble to download the DVD so I use that, but I've yet to find any reason that it's better than the CD..

My wallet is incomplete without a Creditcard CD containing DSL, but in the ca. 50mb category I like Puppylinux, due to it's ability to write back to a CDRW. This allows you to customise the distro to a given machine, (useful to set up a boot cd for a machine whilst it waits for a new harddrive, for instance) and also to download & save files on the CD.

[beaviskob1]

This is my first post so here goes, Slack is sweet but takes some work. For my ease of use and compatiblity with my systems eMachines T3265 AthlonXP 3200 +  Nvidia 6800 gt and my Lappy eMachines M6811 Athlon 64 3200 + Mobile 9600, These two obscure ditros ROCK! PcLinuxOnline and Kanotix64.
If  you are looking for a KDE based distro I recomend trying these, they are both live-cd's that can be installed. PCLOS for 32 bit is mandriva based that TEXSTAR has done wonders with, ATI and Nvidia 3D versions and a modified synaptic for package management. Kanotix 64 is debian based so it works nicely also.

[zorxd]

if you want full control, install only packages that you want and learn Linux well : Debian
if you want something that looks like Debian but more easy : Ubuntu
if you want to compile all your apps from source : Gentoo

do not use something from a company (Fedora, Mandrake, etc)
If you want an OS controlled by a single company use Windows or OS X.

[quixos]

i've been "evaluating" linux distros since Yggdrasil Linux.

despite all the bells and whistles of other distros, Slackware is what i come back to again and again. it works out of the box, the documentation is great, the community is mature, and (yes, it stands out) polite.

one of the nice things about Slackware is that you pretty much have everything you need to build any application.

Slackware is known for being conservative on the kernel side.

However, in Slackware 10.2 ...

"For the first time, a 2.6 kernel with support for SCSI, RAID, and SATA is offered as a boot option in the installer (called "test26.s")." wow!

[furtivefelon]

i love freebsd.. btw, it's not a linux, freebsd is based on unix code..

mainly because of its unhypedness, and also i like to use an os that has proven stability in server environment, as i do alot of development for web, need to be familier with the os i'm using on my server

other than that, i see no reason not using ubuntu.. it's a quite good desktop os my vote still goes to freebsd, as it's what i'm using..

[cyrana]

I prefer Ubuntu personally, although I did use gentoo for quite a while.  Even though I started on Ygdrassil or whatever back in 1995, I don't have the patience for some things any more.

Edited by cyrana, 05 January 2006 - 02:36 AM.

[Revenant]

SuSE 10 rocks ..   because it has APT,RPM and YAST ( Best Control Center EveR)..

just try it and you will live what I am talking about !    

[DrJägermeister]

Revenant, on Jan 5 2006, 06:48 AM, said:

SuSE 10 rocks

I just upgrade from Suse 9.3 to Suse 10, here's a Screenshot (with lg3D):

Great Hardware support in Suse 10 (my WLAN was not working in 9.3).

[axept]

you should check this one:

http://www.zenwalk.org/

It's Slackware based . uses kernel 2.6.14.2 and most important the new reiser4fs that gives a tremendous speed to the system.
It has XFCE as gui instead of KDE/Gnome

http://www.xfce.org/...enshots&lang=en

After this, i confess that Mac OSX86 it´s not so desirable like it was 3 months ago.

[quixos]

i loved it when it was called MiniSlack. the whole ZenWalk thing stopped the growing buzz in it's tracks. nothing against the distro or people using it. but such a strange decision to exchange such a descriptive name for something so ornamental and indistinct, so ungoogleable if you know what i mean.

will have to try it out again. god i hate that name! /me flip flops.

Edited by quixos, 11 January 2006 - 09:12 PM.