I'm trying to decide which Linux to put on my Mactel. I'm curious as to which Linux is the best and why. Vote for your favorite and please post why (If you voted "Other," post what it is!). Thanks for your help!

SLACK SLACK SLACK

Fedora! Fedora! Fedora!
To be honest, all Linux distros have advantages and disadvantages. The important is to run Linux
For further info, take a look at this site:
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

Gentoo works best because you compile it yourself. It is the most optimized for your computer, and it's very customizable. If you're not good with unix, though, it's not for you.

Fedora Core, because it has a very large and helpful group of users. There are several excellent user-to-user support sites to get quick help with problems, and for learning your way around, much like this site is a huge help in getting OSX on x86 working for all of us.

I use Arch Linux, it is blazingly fast and easy to use (if you have knowledge of Linux before)

Since your new to linux I would say the ezer to try and use would be ubuntu Because of apt-get and synaptic,alsp there forums and wiki are great.And Mandrive its user friendly and a lot of ppl coming over to linux start there.

Damn Small Linux (DSL) at 50mb distro size. Nice to install on a thumb drive and run your own APache\MySQL\PHP. So that leaves you with enough room for serving files. . The next one, eventhough it's "not supported" is RH9.

My vote goes to Gentoo.

By the way, why is FreeBSD on the list?

It should be *nix variants, actually.. But most modern Unices (BSD, Linux et al..) use X and its myriad window managers. I recommend getting a distro with either Portage or Apt-Get. They're great package management systems. Gentoo users in general seem to be a bit loyal to their distro, though.

You'll still get the same UI and commands, though; the main differences are in bundled apps and drivers, ease of installation, packaging, and support.

Oh bah. I was tired; I just got a list of the top Linux distributions and accidentally stuck that on the list because it was mentioned on the page.


Are you serious? There's no real difference in the GUI? So, basically, any distribution will be about the same?

Seems that Ubuntu is getting quite a number of votes but no one has commented on it. Personally, I've used Ubuntu since it's first release and I must say that it's a pretty snappy distro. The installer fits in a single CD, and they'll even ship it to you for free. The community support is highly active as well. Moreover, a new version is scheduled for release in October so it might be a good time to get it as well.

They all use the same GUI's, but some may ad/or logos and customize the menus. The two most common GUIs are KDE and Gnome. There are other elements that differentiate the distros such as installation, installing programs, ect..

I support Ubuntu and I hope the community gets bigger as time passess. I ahve been using 5.10 (Breezy Badger) Preview Release on virtual OS and I might say it is a nice release. Looking forward to the officalrelease. As much as I like Ubuntu, I would not use it on a production server .

Use any Linux that supports VMWare Workstation 5.0

Too bad VMWare doesn't run in Ubuntu, but Red Hat, SUSE, Fedora Core and Mandrake does.
I'm really impressed with the speed Windows XP runs in VMWare. It flies with only 192MB memory and completely usable on my P4 1.6Ghz. Sometimes I forget I'm inside Linux when the guest Windows XP is running full screen.

:-)

vmware does run in ubuntu,go to there forums and read up on it

In the specs, there's no mention of Ubuntu
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/intr....html#wp1000805

I'm gonna check the forums, they've probably recompiled the kernel with vmware-config.pl. Thanks for the tip!

Yea they dont support that distro.some ppl have had some problems getting vmware to run in ubuntu...but that goes for all linux distros.

I think I'm going to use Ubuntu for now. Thanks for all your help! However, now I need to know something else:

What is the difference between GNOME and KDE?

Thanks for helping! And feel free to keep voting!

Agreed.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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!

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..

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.

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 !

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).

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/index.php?page=screenshots&lang=en

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

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.

Saying a specific linux is the best hands-down would be kind of stupid now wouldn't it

It's like argueing over which sort of clothing you should wear which also is a heavily subjective debate. I think you should just nail down which kind of person you are and then most people would probably be able to name about 3 offerings that may sound like a sure fit

Personal favorites may be:
Slackware
(Definatly the hardest one to use, despite what people may say about Gentoo, this is definatly roll-your-own, but great fun too ) --Also this is a very BSD-like system as I understand it, I really enjoyed the simplicity of it.
Gentoo
(Different stages take different amounts of time, with Stage 1 installs being the "I have no life at all" warning. If you can stand a two days install though, it can end up being really fast and flexible, just don't use a slow CPU or harddrive)
Ubuntu
The worlds easiest way of installing, uninstalling and upgrading software (Debians APT) combined with the money of a nutty millionaire and the ease of use to make it user-friendly (My stepdad can use this and he's the kind of person who can't even open a new document once he's inside the word processor!)

I've used gentoo on all of my machines for a couple years now and it's the way to go for me, but when I have friends or family that are tired of having me try to fix or reinstall windows for them all the time and are willing to give linux a try, I usually set them up with ubuntu since it's a lot easier to set up for the most part and easier for them to understand how to maintain themselves once set up. It sucks that proprietary things like mp3, divx and dvds don't work out of the box until you run something like easy ubuntu or easy kubuntu or automatix, but if you can get those things working it's okay. I personally think gentoo is actually much easier to maintain as long as the person your installing for is proficient enough to be able to understand things like /etc/portage/package.mask and /etc/portage/package.keywords and revdep-rebuild and stuff when they run into a dependency problem with an emerge -uDva world or something.

I vote for ExTiX

I installed (live cd but whith hd installer on it) with the option to keep the Knoppix look that is on the live cd once, and another time I installed it with the debian style. I like both ways so much it is hard do decide which is the best. There was a third option can't remember what it was though.

It has several different destops you choose at login including x and whatever that newest one is I don't recall the name, the same one that is on elive, it's not completed though so you can customize it to your liking and forced to learn it to do that, it has the tutor. The one called rat doesn't work though you will freeze and have to reset.

I give it five stars and I have tried at least about 40 different distros.

SimplyMepis for me is by far the easiest and best distro ever, imho

Meh,

I prefer FreeBSD to Linux. Anyway, it shouldn't even be among the list of linux variants, as FreeBSD is actually UNIX. The nice thing about it is that it also has compatibility options for running things compiled for linux...

I think it is included because you FreeBSD people are like the blacksheep of the family, but we still consider you family.

well thanks for the friendliness, brother

gentoo all the way!
gentoo is not only compile from source, it's the most clean distro i've ever seen.
no dirty dependances, no apps installed randomly on the filesystem

and... you're not forced to compile the whole system you can use precompiled packages and have a fully funcional system in 30 minutes

after that you can compile binaries to fit your needs

and last but not the last... you can use the laaaaaaaaaatest version of your favourite software

with gentooo you can truly understand the core of linux!

I can't swear by Gentoo. I went through the whole damn process of compiling everything from scratch. Took me about 20 something hours. In the end the thing still took almost a minute to boot into pretty plain GDM/Gnome desktop. The apps do start up slightly faster but was the 0.2s that every app gains in speed worth the 20 hours install? I don't think so. It's not really a desktop distribution, more like a server distro. I did learn a few things about linux by going through the whole thing, but in the end it was frustrating spending 20 hours just to uninstall the damn thing because it wasn't as "l337" as people claim it is.

My favorite OS hands down is now SUSE. This is the closest thing to a desktop OS there is out there. Suse 10.0 looks amazing and supports alot of the things most Linux distro's fail to such as integrated WPA management with the wireless config. The package manager is not my favorite but it works.

Suse 10.1 is going to be amazing. I tried out beta3 and the whole look is so impressive even without 3d acceleration it was beatiful. Can't wait till they integrate compiz and xgl. Now the only thing left for desktop linux is multimedia support and of course the "killer apps" that will make you want to switch.

SARGE