most popular distro on NBF - Page 2

SUSE 10.1 x64 rocks

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Well that confirms that I was using linux before Gentoo existed

Seablade

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.

I actually use CENTOS 4.3 DVD , see http://www.centos.org . It's based on Redhat , 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 will give me the most trouble, but I'm ready for that.