I know this has been asked before but... What Distros do you guys like and why?

well ubuntu plays nice with laptops. for laptop user ubuntu seems to be the best bet, hardware usually works. gusty just came out today if you wanna check that out.

otherwise, i really like elive, enlightenment is such a beatiful manager. unforutnately it doesnt play nice with my laptop, even tho its debian based so i use it on desktop.

um distrowatch shows some popular ones. mint is one of my favs for ubuntu. gusty version of mint should be out soon.

i stay away from opensuse....

oo and im throwing arch in here b/c i know abf has been using it recently

+1 for Gentoo

none, I like Solaris better.

Gentoo and eLive primarily.

Gentoo for myself, very customizeable, and by far my favorite package manager.

eLive for others(And myself). Works pretty well, very lightweight, and looks good.

Ubuntu is another I recommend, just not a personal favorite. Works VERY well from the get go usually, but tends to be a bit on the slow side.

Seablade

gentoo here

Here are my top picks:

Arch
------
Pros:
--Really Freaken Fast
--Pacman is a great package manager, repos are fast and full of everything
--Start w/ base config and build on it for your own needs, very flexible
--Fast and friendly forums
Cons:
-- Wiki is not of gentoo standards (lots of old and wrong pages, lots still missing)
-- Limited package base because Arch and Frugalware are only distro to use .pkg

Elive:
Pros:
-- debian base
-- APT package management, fast, lots of stuff to choose from
-- E17 looks flippin' sweet
-- reasonably fast for not being a speed-optimized distro
Cons:
-- slow repos
-- have to pay to d/l most releases
-- slow release cycle (b/c of small dev team)

PCLinuxOS 2007
Pros:
-- really fast, probably fastest KDE desktop i've ever
-- Draxtools for easy configuration of most things
-- plays very nice with most hardware, even laptops
-- decent repos (both in # of packages and d/l speed)
-- uses APT for RPM as package manager.... better than mandrake's URPMI
Cons:
-- slow release cycles b/c of small dev team
-- slow-ish forum and lack of quality wiki


i tried Suse 10.3 yesterday and I didn't like anything about it. Slow boot time. Better performance than previous versions once booted, but no match for PCLOS or Arch. Their Gnome is actually NOT more of a "True gnome" compared to Ubuntu.... its actually even more modded for Suse. Package manager is crap. Yast is crap.

Abf, you don't have to pay for eLive, though they would obviously prefer if you did. Paying does get you a faster download for official releases though

what do you think about the new Mandriva Linux 2008 powerpack ???

The only version I tried and got to work was SuSE 9.1 Personal x86. At first I thought that NOTHING other than windows 95 and 98 would run on the REALLY old HP Pavilion 8240 that I gave to my sister. SuSE showed me otherwise. The only thing I have against it is it won't come off easily when you want to finally hand down the system to someone. But it was great considering it had no problem running off a 500Mhz Pentium Processor. I also loved the ease of install and choice of GUI. I chose KDE over Gnome and had a blast.

suse was completely poor on my hardware until about the dawn of 10.1. 9.1 through 10.0 the sound was really badly broken... for a generic intel sound card (snd_intel8x0) that is indeed really bad. At least the 9.x series had acceptable boot time. 10.0 and 10.1 where especially horrible. 10.3 seems to be better about boot....but like i said i always consider suse as probably the worst one among the "everything but the kitchen sink rpm-based distro" family... aka Fedora, Mandriva, and Suse.

well are there any distros set aside for laptops??? ive tried debian, ubuntu, and backtrack and nothing would work. i could only get mandriva to work. but even then it was a bit iffy and was nothing like the other distros. any suggestions for a best bet?

see if your laptop is listed on www.tuxmobil.com

that will tell you what's worked for others with the same notebook

Longest thread title evar.

Denian etch.

I i have to say that debian is probably my favourite when it comes to linux. looks good, works well. To be honest i am a little biased as some of my friends are developers, so i tend to get pushed towards debian.

However, for a bare bones install i would have to go for gentoo. it is brilliant when running a basic install with really good tools and easy expand options to give you exactly what you need.

barebones config vs usable out of the box config are really different things. And with that the need for the distro of choice changes.

For config from scratch, the best options are Gentoo, Arch and Debian. And even between them there is a difference in needs/goals. Gentoo takes forever to install but gives you every package you could ever think of in the repos, as well as gives you complete control of where to go. Arch lacks some package selection in the repos but installs much faster, arguably much simpler to set up, still gives you plenty of control, and comes out to be very fast when you are done. Debian again gives you many packages to choose from, little more complicated to configure than arch though, but gives you support for like 10 different architectures vs Arch's only 2 supported architectures.

I run Ubuntu Gutsy on my XPS M170.
I run Debian 4.0 on my Qube 2.
I run Debian-minimal on my Linkstation HDG.
I run 220V on my toaster.

I started out with Red Hat, moved over to SUSE, and now I've been using Ubuntu for over a year now and moving to their new upgrade.

Debian has never let me down....

DSL (DamnSmallLinux) is great for older laptops...

Recently tried Kubuntu and found it's pretty good, very easy to get going...

Put AmigoLinux once on my ol' Libretto 110CT as you could install it from Windoze.....