Switching Distros

[carolinabranden]

I'm switching to another distro here soon. I was considering Arch Linux until I saw their download/update community can be unpredictable at times. Haven't decided which shell to use either. Windows has given me enough nonstop maintenance hardaches. After I've configured my environment everything should automatically update and external devices should be recognized plus connected. I like how simplified and user-friendly Mac OS is; however, I don't want a cosmetic look-a-like in Linux. lol

Linux Mint
Arch Linux
XFCE / LXDE

...are my choices thus far. "What tasks are you planning to do?" If I'm gaming, I prefer to use Windows 7 on my desktop (which has Linux too). The Lenovo X120e will be used for watching movies down to academic use. Which distro and shell do you think meets what I am looking for?

[Perfect Storm]

Moved to the Community Cafe, as it's not a support question(s).

[Johnsie]

I've heard good things about Fedora lately. There's also a website that allows you to easily create your own custom distro:

http://susestudio.com

For shell I love gnome. Lucikly there are plenty of other distros that have Gnome by default.

[TBABill]

What about Debian? Fast, efficient, doesn't break much (not at all for me on the stable Squeeze) and you can have your choice of distros....stable, testing and sid (and experimental if you are just so adventurous you actually want your machine to break frequently). And you can get whatever flavor you want...KDE, Gnome, Xfce, LXDE, etc. PLUS, fonts in Debian are now fixed and look great!

[cariboo]

Which distribution you use is a matter of personal choice, I'd suggest you try the disto's you are interested in, in vbox before making a decision.

[3Miro]

My personal choice:

1. Gentoo + XFCE
2. Arch + XFCE
3. Fedora + XFCE is also nice.

If not XFCE I would use Gnome (if I use Gnome it would be with Ubuntu before Fedora). I have used LXDE, but I find it a bit lacking and not stable enough yet.

I have no impression of Mint, however, Mint is based on Ubuntu, which is very Gnome-centric. This non Gnome DE sometimes have trouble.

[snowpine]

You can read a great description of the top 10 distros at:

http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

Personally I think it is hard to go wrong with any of these; it is purely a matter of personal taste and what tasks you need it for. Probably any distro is suitable for watching movies and academic use, however if you are nervous/inexperienced about installing multimedia codecs on your own, you might consider a distro like Mint that includes the codecs pre-bundled. Also if you are in school studying computers, you might consider an .rpm based distro like Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat, etc. as these distros are popular in the workplace.

[NightwishFan]

Can not go wrong with most of the major distros. As was said try a few out in vbox.

[Shining Arcanine]

I'm switching to another distro here soon. I was considering Arch Linux until I saw their download/update community can be unpredictable at times. Haven't decided which shell to use either. Windows has given me enough nonstop maintenance hardaches. After I've configured my environment everything should automatically update and external devices should be recognized plus connected. I like how simplified and user-friendly Mac OS is; however, I don't want a cosmetic look-a-like in Linux. lol

Linux Mint
Arch Linux
XFCE / LXDE

...are my choices thus far. "What tasks are you planning to do?" If I'm gaming, I prefer to use Windows 7 on my desktop (which has Linux too). The Lenovo X120e will be used for watching movies down to academic use. Which distro and shell do you think meets what I am looking for?

My personal choice is Gentoo Linux with the Bash Shell. I have tried the Z Shell in the past, but I felt it was too complicated for my purposes and that it was too easy to write scripts for it that were not portable.

[3Miro]

Can not go wrong with most of the major distros. As was said try a few out in vbox.

Keep in mind that due to limitations of Vbox you may not be able to get accurate impression of the distribution. For example, in my experience, Vbox and KDE don't like each other, so any KDE distro would suffer. Once you install KDE on your machine, you get a very different impression.

XFCE and LXDE should be fine though.