I know this has been asked before but... What Distros do you guys like and why? - Page 2

currently Slackware(mine) and Ubuntu(my kid's).

I second that (Arch). I've tried Arch and with some (still limited) knowledge, and with the help of the wiki, you are able to put everything together, only what you do want the way you want, so you end with a very fast and clean system (in no time)... OK, I can take everything sloooowly (gentoo), but not worth the time spent, for me. Need some time to get used to the (yet again, another) package system, pacman...

i like pacman. I think its better than most, i actually like it more than APT for stuff.

simple commands to know:

pacman -S = sync, installs a package
pacman -Ss = search, looks for keyword you enter
pacman -Syu = sync update upgrade , loads latest info from repos, installs latest packages

that is really about all you need to know.

Dum question but what do you guys think of Linux Mint????? - I'm normally a XP kinda guy have run Ubuntu both Festy and Gusty then ran SUSE10 for a while.

Currently downloading Mint after reading some excellent reviews on it - I get annoyed with Ubuntu for not supporting anything out of the box which is not "open source" I just want the darn thing to work without trying to figure out what commands to run in terminal. Or trouble shooting why my restricted driver won't turn on.

I know you guys are all terminal crack heads and know the code inside and out but spare a thought for the chap who just wants a distro to actually work and play a DVD without the hassle of getting the codec.

I actually preferred Festy over gusty which I thought was weird as I assumed Gusty would be better, but I had more hassles getting Gusty to work than I expected.

after using gutsy for awhile now, for some reason im noticing some bugs that were fixed in edgy and feisty but are now back in gutsy.... weird... but easily fixable

also, getting stuff to work in gutsy is easier. just go to add/remove, search "gstreamer" without quotes and check everything there, it should cover most of your needs

but yeah mint will do all that for you... its not that mint is ubuntu with codecs (actually it is), but its trying to be different by including different artwork and an array of different tools...


to actually answer your question, i like linux mint, its good for people new to linux.

Gutsy's been good to me, faster than XP with a lot more eye-candy, however there's a lot of power behind Puppy linux. I wanna try out simple pup, an XFCE variant of Puppy.

Lately, since getting D820, I have been lazy and used VMWare "virtual appliances" with VMWare Player running under XP. I've run VMWare versions of Red Hat 3 and Suse 10. My employer uses both distros for some of our digital film post production products. I also use Knoppix 5.0 fairly often. I will be setting up dual boot with Suse 10 in near future. I also like Ubuntu but have not played much with it.

It makes me shudder to think of how slow your I/O is likely going in that(And thus likely your workflow) if you are doing post in a VM. I am guessing your employer runs the work natively and you are just running them in VMs? Speaking of which, which tools are you using or did you all write your own? Curious parties want to know. Seablade

I only use VMWare when doing phone support from my laptop and when I want to look at our menus in our application without having to boot into Linux. Our actual applications are not normally used under VMWare. If I want speed, I use one of my other laptops that I already set up with Linux. All the SW are custom applications.

BTW - actual applications are run on HP wx9400 workstations attached to external cxfs, cvfs, or xfs drives. One customer is 300 TB+ on SAN in cvfs.

Yep, but even when dealing with Network drives, I/O on VMs is still extremely slow. But thanks for the answers, was a bit curious.

Seablade

pclinuxos 2008 gnome

Xubuntu

Elive works great for me.

Ubuntu because I have been using it off and on since 5.10. It does everything I need; I love it.

Linux Mint is pretty slick... especially for Ubuntu fans. It's an Ubuntu-based distro with Gnome or KDE pre-packaged. Although it seems geared towards noobs (like myself), it seems to be made for my laptop.

I've seen this thread floating around the top of this forum for awhile and decided it's time to chime in with my 2 cents.

I've been using various Linux distros for well over 10 years, and in that time I've tried at least 30 of them. My opinions are as follows:

Out of the RPM based distros [Redhat/ Suse/ Mandriva (Mandrake)/ etc...] I like PCLos best. PCLos 2007 is clean, light, easy to setup and configure has a nice balance of available software titles in it's repository. On the down side, it's slow release cycle due to it's tiny completely non-commercial volunteer based development process makes setting up an up to date system a bit more time consuming; in that many megs of files need to be updated upon installation, because the installation disc hasn't been updated in nearly 2 years. However, once up and running using Apt to get current is easy, just time consuming.

I'm a KDE fan so out of the DEB based distros I like Kubantu. It's Ubantu with KDE as the default windows manager and KDE based applications are standard.

However, I'm a geek, I love controlling and tweeking every aspect of my machine and nothing comes close to Gentoo in this regard. It's far and away my favorite distro. It's a complete and total pain in the ass to setup and configure, but once you've got it the way you like, it's amazing! You can compile everything on your machine just for your specific architecture and for the apps you plan on using. No bloat, and by setting compilation flags you can even further optimize your setup. I personally have setup 5 and 6 year old machines that run better than much newer ones because of the ability to get every once of performance out of the system. Gentoo's forums are active and helpful (as a matter of fact the Gentoo forums are quite helpful for finding answers with other distros as well).

I hope this helps,
Ciao

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.