most popular distro on NBF

[abf]

I just was wondering whats the most popular distro here on NBF. I am gonna go ahead and predict its going to be a close one between Gentoo and Ubuntu, with Ubuntu perhaps having a slight edge. I am making it so that you can submit a vote for more than just one distro because I know people like Big Trouble has Ubuntu and Gentoo running, and I myself have Ubuntu and Arch, and so on.

Here are the choices and my explanation on the groupings:

1 - Ubuntu / Kubuntu / Xubuntu / Edubuntu / Nubuntu --- the "-untu" family, speaks for itself I think.....debian clones (but not "strictly debian") with different desktops or in the case of edubuntu and nubuntu for a specific task.

2 - Debian and spinnoffs. Lets me honest here, ubuntu is not "staright up debian". In this category ("DEBIAN") I shall include Kannotix....and the like.

3 - Gentoo. Pure and simple, no other distros paired for this category.

4 - SourceMage / Lunar / LFS / ROCK -- the "other" source distros

5 - RedHat/Fedora and spinnoffs (including Fox and the like)...your down and dirty RPM--based distros that are not Mandriva.

6 - Mandriva and spinnoffs (including PCLinuxOS). pretty much if it uses draxx tools it goes here.

7 - A retail n00b distro like Linspire or SuSe or Xandros that suck and should be killed off the face of Distrowatch.

8 - Slackware and spinnoffs including Zenwalk, Vector, etc...

9 - I dont use linux (but do use BSD or Solaris, etc...)

10 - I am a slave to Microsoft / Apple


EDIT:
ran out of room for "Arch/Frugalware" so I figure its best to put it under the "slackware" category since pacman is just an improved .tar.gz package manager and it ahs a similar simple layout that happens to require a lot of text file edits....


EDIT 2:
Also don't forget to post what you're using. I use Ubuntu Dapper Drake x86_64 on my laptop and Arch Gimmick 0.72 i686 on my desktop. But you know me, i go through distros like its going out of style.....although i am pretty comfortably set on ubuntu and have no reason to change any time soon.

[Chaka Kahn]

Ubuntu 6.06 32bit. it's all i need.

[seablade]

Hey Question for you ABF..

You want planned installs as well? For instance there is a machine that I am looking at purchasing for Myth that I think I will be putting Ubuntu Server on, but as of right now I dont use Ubuntu though I do reccomend it for most pople...

Seablade

[abf]

i was hoping to keep this poll "real-time" as in what do you actually HAVE going.

[spincricket]

I currently use suse, and linspire.... EEK, that would be sacriledge susesux@suse:~$ cat suse
#: suse sux
#: suse sux
#: suse sux
#: suse sux



I use Ubuntu Dapper 32 bit and Arch Linux. But, its obvious that the "buntus" are gonna win.

[RedDragon4Ever]

Hey!... I'm offended by what you said about the noob distros. I happen to like Suse 10.0...even if it is for noobs like me. But for clarification and sake of discussion and learning...what makes Ubuntu so great?

[seablade]

THe fact it isnt Suse?

Heh ok no Ubuntu for most of us, works great, is great on hardware detection, and doesnt come with a ton of bloat that the likes of Suse etc do. I have much better luck with Ubuntu than with Suse, and it is closer at least to a nice balance between noob friendly and linux centric for lack of a better way to describe it.

Seablade

[spincricket]

Nothing against nOOb distros per se, or nOObs. but I just cant take suse, the installation of suse, how bloated it is, yuck.

Ubuntu is semi noob oriented yet powerful enough for your intermediate/power user. The support and the whole chalupa around ubuntu is unmatched, unless you deal with gentoo, which is not noob friendly at all. That's what makes it so good.

PclOS is sort of a noob distro too, but its way better than suse.

So you see its not noob distros im against, i myself wouldnt be able to build an LFS, im just against horrible ass crack suse.

[seablade]

By the way while not a slave to them, I do own and love a powerbook with the Mac OS X on it for my day to day life, my audio machine is straight Gentoo though, and as I mentioned I will be setting up an Ubuntu Server box for Myth backend, with a different box for the front end I havent decided on yet, Might be another Mac OS box, or might be a Linux box...

Seablade

[seablade]

Nothing against nOOb distros per se, or nOObs. but I just cant take suse, the installation of suse, how bloated it is, yuck.

Ubuntu is semi noob oriented yet powerful enough for your intermediate/power user. The support and the whole chalupa around ubuntu is unmatched, unless you deal with gentoo, which is not noob friendly at all. That's what makes it so good.


Heh I suppose SpinCricket said what I was trying to in an easier to understand way.

Seablade

[abf]

i threw Suse in the same box as xandros and linspire because they are commercial (yeah i know suse oss is free, and that madriva is also commercial but is in a separate category) noob-centric (yast is ment to cover having to edit at least 20 config files i can think of)...but its 1) bloated and 2)doesn't work for sh!t on 2 sets of hardware that i tried it on (this applies to Linspire and Xandros as well...the not working on 2 sets of hardware part). I honestly hate Suse even more than Fedora, and Fedora was pretty bad on my account.

I have nothing against noobs, we all were noobs once... i would just never recommend suse to anybody, ever. PCLOS is my opinion, next to Ubuntu is the best way to go for noobs.

[ExplodingLemur]

I've been using Debian Stable on a few servers and desktops. Backporting source packages from Unstable is pretty easy, so I'm never behind with the packages that matter most to me. Tried the Ubuntu live CD on my desktop and found it fairly lacking (took about 15 minutes to mount my Windows NTFS partition such that I could open it from the file browser in X) and when I installed it on my old Dell laptop the installer removed PCMCIA services, disabling my PCMCIA network card. I'll give it another try on my new Asus laptop, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

[Colin Dean]

Ubuntu Dapper on notebook and Internet-facing server, Kubuntu Dapper on Folding box, Trustix Secure Linux on backup server.

[jnev_89]

ubuntu dapper as my main os on both my laptop and desktop, though I am currently playing with gentoo and arch on my desktop.

[xrchris]

Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 dual booted with Win XP.

[drlouis]

Slackware 10.2

[Jason Kitchens]

Ok, lets see.
1. Unbuntu dapper on: dell c640 P4 2.0ghz dual booting with xp pro.
2. " " " " on: systemax g732 p4 3.0ghz d/b with xp home.
3. Xubuntu dapper on: ancient K6-2 desktop started with ubuntu but the performance boot of running xfce made it worth changing.
4: Arch, or at least trying arch on: emachines m6810 amd64. This is my newest install and also newest machine. I've gotten the base install in, but havent had much of a chance to plug in the cat5 cable from downstairs to install the rest.

[RedDragon4Ever]

I guess I will be formatting my suse partition and making it ubuntu just to see the difference. If this many ppl hate suse, then I must be on the right band wagon :bow: thanx for the advice.

[theoak]

Suse 9.3 on my emachines m6805 because of all the distros I have installed, it is the ONLY distro that supports all of my hardware. I have also installed on this laptop:

Kanotix 2005-4 64 bit, and 32 bit, Fedora Core 5, 64 bit, Kubuntu 5.10 32 bit, Ubuntu 5.10 64 bit, (which barfed worse than any other distro on my hardware) Suse 10.0 32 bit, Suse 10.1 64 bit, Mandriva One (free with a magazine), Linspire 5.0, DSL (can't remember which version, but it was within 3 months). I even tried 64 bit Windows XP, and both 32 bit and 64 bit Windows Vista beta 2.

I am not saying that Suse is best, but I have to go with what works on my hardware. Even the newer versions of Suse don't work as well on my laptop as the 9.3 version.

Now if you want to talk desktop, I've installed Redhat since 4.2, Mandrake since 7.1, Slackware, (can't remember how far back) Turbo Linux, Free BSD, BeOS, (and what was that Debian distro that you could play Tetris while it installed?). Anyway, the one I liked best on the desktop WAS Mandrake 10.1. It installed in 20 minutes flat and every device was supported out of the box. That included an ATI TV Wonder card, 5 in 1 memory card reader, firewire, a Sony camcorder, printers, scanners, dvd burners, video card, USB thumb drives, webcam, my Zaurus 5500, and an Aiptek digital camera.

My only problem with the updated Mandrake versions (Mandriva) is they fired their founder Gael Duval!!

Anyway those are my thoughts on what worked with my hardware.

EDIT: I did have to install Qtopia Desktop rpm to get the Zaurus to work, so it was not really "out of the box".

[mohapi]

Xubuntu Dapper/Edgy and Arch with an xfce-svn build. One for reliability, one for speed. :)

[squonk]

SUSE 10.1 x64 rocks

[Mind]

I voted gentoo but I use vlos. I have installed gentoo but I prefer the ease of screwing up my system and reinstalling it in a matter of a coupe of hours than a few hours.

[abf]

I voted gentoo but I use vlos. I have installed gentoo but I prefer the ease of screwing up my system and reinstalling it in a matter of a coupe of hours than a few hours.

i dig that. used to run vlos a while back. great distro if you thnk about it. my other recommendation to you is give RR4Linux a spin if you have a chance sometime.

[drizek]

Kubuntu on my I9300
Kubuntu with enlightenment 17 CVS on my thinkpad 240. <-this thing kicks ass. It runs azureus, opera, xmms(and amarok, but the ubuntu xinelib is messed up so it wont let me play FLAC files.) and openoffice. I also play wesnoth, sudoku, frozen bubble and mahojongg on it. I never expected it to work so well when I got it, considering hte specs(in sig). I think i owe most of it to enlightenment though, with nothing running hte entire system is only using up about 40mb of ram.

[Ernest_P_Worrel]

Me likey Zenwalk, PC-BSD good too >.>

[cjcox]

SUSE... which isn't for noobs.. doesn't suck ... people who THINK they are experts and make idiotic polls have trouble with it sometimes....

[seablade]

SUSE... which isn't for noobs.. doesn't suck ... people who THINK they are experts and make idiotic polls have trouble with it sometimes....

Bitter are we?

Seablade

[abf]

Worrel -- i do agree on PC-BSD being good, the downside is that it is BSD and ATi doesnt make BSD drivers, so I can't use it w/o giving up 3D. Zenwalk isn't bad, but Arch + XFCE-SVN FTW!

SUSE... which isn't for noobs.. doesn't suck .
LNQTW! (linux n00b quote of the week)

[cjcox]

LNQTW! (linux n00b quote of the week)

Totally ignorant post of the week. You have NO idea.

[abf]

Totally ignorant post of the week. You have NO idea.


i invite you to prove me wrong. i've been trying suse since 9.1 on 2 sets of hardware which are totally different and in either case it fails...horribly, every time, not to mention dog slow (especially 10.0 + gnome)

[seablade]

CJCox you might be surprised how many of us have all tried Suse at one point or another and decided it wasnt the best choice out there. I used to reccomend it as a noob distro as it used to be one of the better hardware detection on install distros, and that really doesnt say much, or rather it says how far Linux has come recently. Even then though I was the first to admit it was slow and installed everything but the kitchen sink(And in some cases, that to).

I find Ubuntu to be much better, not only in hardware detection in general, also choosing what they install, while not as noob friendly of a control center, it still is somewhat friendly, and is not broken by doing things it doesnt expect(At least hasnt been yet that I have found) unlike Suse. It also does a better job of introducing linux at a fair pace and teaching what it is capable of as a result of its not quite as noob friendly control center that eventually you deal with the commandline.

Suse tries to be a windows clone in many respects. It tries to do many things just like windows does. Ubuntu tries to make the linux way of doing things more accessible to windows users, but doesnt hide the linux way of doing things.

Suse might also show its strengths in an enterprise desktop despending on how well coordinated they have tied their control systems in with the enterprise offerings, I am not sure as I havent used it in this situation. The ability to remote administer is possible in any linux box via ssh, it is then the administrators job to know how to do so, unfortunatly doing so via straight SSH on a Suse box tends to results in options that Yast doesnt understand, and thus my opinion breaks it. Happend a lot for me when I used it. Disadvantage of graphical control centers that arent as flexible as the text based config file they try to hide.

So again if Suse has tied in their control center for remote administration, on identical completely supported desktops in an enterprise environment, it may show its strengths to those admins that prefer the graphical. But that is about the only place I could see it doing so.

Seablade

[abf]

thats a good point to bring up that changing things on your own (not yast) things tend to break, for example after suse poorly (i mean HORRIBLE isn't the word) detected my sound, not even detect my wifi, wrong resolution, etc, etc... by the time i corrected most of those things by command line (except sound, i tried everything including a total kernel recompile) things got really nasty.

i am not singling suse out, fedora in the same respect has a similar flaw, but the more memorable case I have is with Mandriva. My wireless is Atheros and well, mandriva considers madwifi to be a "members only" option, so i said what the hell and installed it from svn.... it worked, as long as i stayed out of the control center's "networking" settings.....it recognized i was using madwifi, but since the actual package wasn't installed it gave me crap about it and wouldn't let me install the actual package w/o a membership...blah blah blah.

[cjcox]

Sorry you had a bad experience with SUSE. Since there are thousands with successful implementations, you have to admit that your experience is not typical. Still no reason to start a poll about "most popular distro" and leave out the most popular ones. Whatever...

My reason for choosing SUSE, is that unlike most of the others (Red Hat primarily... back then there wasn't a "gentoo"), is that the SUSE engineers were Unix folks with experience... experience that was sadly lacking at Red Hat. Of course in those days, you had to still build many things from scratch, which probably appeals to you. Which is fine. I'd probably go with LFS if you really want to learn it all from the ground up though. Just my opinion.

I personally appreciate how YaST has evolved. It means less work for me. When I have to setup everything manually, it takes much, much longer. Sure, there are still some areas where it's better to not let YaST do its thing, but you can easily make the determinations when you see what it is trying to do, some things are just obvious, and you'll know that there's no good way of "wizarding" a particular option or scenario. In other places, SUSE actually does a pretty good job with their YaST. It doesn't give me any problems, but I do know what it can and can't do well (again, mostly common sense).

For a long time Linus favored SUSE (I guess he was a noob a couple of years ago), he switched to FC5.. I believe that's what you'll find him running today, but it's more of a matter of what best supported the hardware he was working on.

I think rather than trying to pass judgement on particular distros, the poll ought to be opened up to allow those "noobie" only distros as well as your own personal favorites. It's more open minded.

[abf]

i do include the most popular options on my poll. keep in mind i am limited to 10 answers, originally i had suse as its own answer, but i had to combine something to make room....

what do you mean when "there wassnt a gentoo" gentoo was around FOREVER! so has slackware.

[seablade]

CJCox please go back and reread my post.

Yes I use the term noob a lot, but also read the reasoning why I DID reccomend Suse once upon a time, and why I no longer do. Primarily there is a different distro that does the job much better.

Yes there are thousands of users on Suse, then again there are thousands of users that dont understand that you dont nesscarily need a boxed distro to have a good distro, and many more thousands that use other distros. That has little to do with wether or not a distro is a good choice. I would also wager a guess there are thousands of users the agree with my opinion on Suse as well, as not only here but on an Audio forum I post it tends to be a general thought process as well that Suse is to bloated these days to be very useful or truly representative of what linux can do to the newcomer.

Its nice that there are/were linux engineers working on it. There are on many other projects as well. I make no assumptions about what does or does not have kernel devs working on it to be honest, I would venture a guess that the majority of kernel devs these days are on a corporate payroll to do that anyways, wether that corporation be Novell, Red Hat, IBM etc. Does that naturally make those projects better? No not really. Can it reflect on some of the experience going into it, yep. But then again there are no kernel devs that some of those kernel devs listen to when they present a problem that work on other projects because they are that good, they just choose not to work on the kernel for whatever reason.

Linux Torvalds, while I respect him greatly, also favors KDE. Personally I dont, neither do many people here all for their own reasons. A LOT of things in Linux come down to personal preference. That is what is so great about linux. Something works better for one person does NOT work better for most. In fact I would be willing to bet the majority of say audio professionals or hobbyists on linux dont run KDE as it tends to slow things down, depends on arts to much, etc. when there are better out there etc. But does that mean it doesnt work better than the alternatives for Linus? Nope.

Suse, Mandrake, And Fedora to its own extent tend to be nood distros because that is what the newcomers to linux know. They know what gets the most publicity, what gets offered by vendors or sold off the shelf. Does it say anything about them by itself other than newcomers tend to start there and then move on if they move on... Probably not. My thoughts on Suse come from more than that in my experience, I have also had similar experiences with RedHat(Before it was Fedora) and Mandrake, so it is not alone.

Then again those that never move on from those distros, may not realise what they are missing. If they are happy and content more power to them. If not they will hate linux and consider those distros to be representative of something that they really arent, which is how most of linux itself operates.

But I will not say Suse is the best choice for noobs these days anyways, or even for those that are not. That is why I reccomend Ubuntu, as it tends to be the best distro for most desktop purposes for those that want something easier to use than Gentoo or just want a general purpose distro. I believe i have already posted what I find to be Linux's true strength, and it isnt the desktop, it is how flexible it is and the fact it can be customized to anything, desktop, embedded etc. If I havent posted it here I can I suppose, though it will take a bit of typing to explain it throughly. Funnily enough I didnt have this view several years ago, before I tried things like Gentoo or LFS(Yes I even did that fun once or twice), before I started looking at projects like Myth, or Familiar, and realising the potential of linux if it was truly brought out and customized. Now I have to agree that it is strongest when customized for a purpose, something Suse and the others cant do easily. I consider this a weak point for them, even for Ubuntu, though Ubuntu and Fedora arent as bad as Suse or Mandrake in this regards IMO, they are still weaker than other distros for this purpose.

And by the way, the poll was for the most popular distro on NoteBookForums not in general, as this is not the best venue for determining that...

I think if you look at it, Suse is FAR from the most popular on NBF, while it is more popular than others, and could have been switched around, ABF didnt know that when he made the poll, thus he went with what he guessed.

Seablade

[seablade]

By the way ABF, Gentoo has most certainly not been around forever;)

But then again Mandriva was called Mandrake, and I believe Caldera before that if I remember right, and the list goes on.

RedHat and Suse havent been around forever either.

Please note a trend... Linux changes. That is why it is so powerful. We refer to linux AS linux, not Linux 98 or XP etc. Kernel Versions are as close as we get to that, and even those change.

Seablade

[abf]

By the way ABF, Gentoo has most certainly not been around forever;)

RedHat and Suse havent been around forever either.
We refer to linux AS linux, not Linux 98 or XP etc.

Seablade

there is a russian distro called LinuxXP :huh:

also gentoo 1.0 was out in 2002....4 years is a LONG TIME in linux terms,slackware since 1994

[seablade]

Well that confirms that I was using linux before Gentoo existed;)

Seablade

[aaronjb]

also gentoo 1.0 was out in 2002....4 years is a LONG TIME in linux terms,slackware since 1994

Four year is a long time in IT terms - but it's a short time in terms of the length of time that Linux has been around (as you say, slack came out in '94).

FWIW I started with Slackware in '96 - serious learning curve there especially as I always had esoteric hardware :) But I loved it..

Moved to RedHat, then Mandrake, then decided I hated all the pointy-clicky configuration systems as they just got in the way more often than not (as folks have pointed out - you can confuse them by configuring things yourself)..

Stayed away from Linux for a couple of years then found Gentoo - which is now my distro of choice generally speaking, though I've also used Slackware on some severely resources-limited boxes.



Heck - I even installed Gentoo on my box at work.. ssh, don't tell IT ;) Although I must admit I'm back in XP now - rubbish broadcom (tg3) drivers don't work very well with the integrated NICs in these boxes, and basically stop processing TCP streams if the data rate goes over about >50KB/s. Pah.

[faheyd]

I actually use CENTOS 4.3 DVD :cool2: , see http://www.centos.org . It's based on Redhat :cursing: , but I like it still. Installs very easily and the YUM package thing is great for getting stuff you need. I've used alot of different distros, Slackware from the .9 days, RH, Mandrake, etc, but CENTOS has got me hooked. I'll be loading it up tomorrow on my E1705, and I presume that the wireless :alienhead will give me the most trouble, but I'm ready for that.

[abf]

i tried cent....was hardly impressed, just another RHEL quote. I swore off RH distros forever, anything that uses Yum pretty much. Yum is a really slow and inefficient package manager, even urpmi is reasonably faster, not to mention APT and Pacman which are th3 s3x. Portage is whole another cup of tea.

Some other package managers that didn't impress me: Connary, Sourcerer, slack-get