favourite distros

[andrew.46]

I come from the other way: I now consider myself a Slacker but I have a big soft spot still for stock standard Ubuntu despite all of its considerable shortcomings...

[Peripheral Visionary]

@Kojak Peg: That's the beauty of LiveCDs and LiveDVDs! You can try them out before installing them! The only drawback is that performance from a LiveCD will be much slower than an installed experience.

[Kojak Peg]

Thanks guys

which is better live cd or virtual box

[Peripheral Visionary]

Virtual probably offers a better (meaning faster) experience.

[Kojak Peg]

Thanks

[iamkuriouspurpleoranj]

• Ubuntu because it looks great.
• Fedora because it's somewhat challenging and has a trouserless teddy-bear as its mascot. Best Gnome 3 distro but I tend to use MATE.
• CrunchBang because it looks great and has a fun-sized, friendly and capable community.
• CentOS (or Scientific Linux) because it's Red Hat, takes forever to load and has that strange out-of-date musty feeling that clothes in charity shops do. Thanks to extra repos like RPMforge and EPEL, it's possible to get extra packages that normal distributions have, although it isn't always possible to get them to work.
• Linux Mint MATE - because it's the best match for my PC (which is green) but I'd rather run Ubuntu with Unity.
• Xubuntu because it's the best *buntu match for my PC and it's inherently likeable perhaps because it promises little but delivers a lot.

That's it, really. openSUSE and Solus OS deserve an honorable mention. Manjaro 0.8.2 Xfce was good but I haven't liked any other release.

[pfeiffep]

For my HP Tower - Mint 14 Cinnamon

I really like the 'similarity' in looks to Win 7. Mint is very responsive, it seems to more easily customized than Ubuntu 13.04 with Unity (at least from my perspective). Install worked OOTB

For my OLD Dell Laptop - Ubuntu 13.04 Gnome Session Fall Back

Breathed new life into the 'Columbus Invented' laptop which was originally configured for Win XP which I've completely blown away. Install worked OOTB

I maintain Win 7 for Photoshop, iCloud, Roxio Creator. I'm planning on migrating Creator functionality to Audacity - still searching for realistic replacements for the other 2. Not willing to go through the extensive learning curve of Gimp, and certainly IMHO there's no truly functional iCloud replacement.

[malspa]

Right now, my favorite non-Ubuntu distros are probably Debian, openSUSE, and Sabayon.

which is better live cd or virtual box

Trying out distros by running live sessions from a flash drive is a nice way to go.

[Version Dependency]

Some of the older and more popular distros that you may want to familiarize yourself with are OpenSuse, Fedora, Debian, Slackware, Arch, and Gentoo. The installation process for Arch and (especially) Gentoo are not for the Linux novice though, so I'd recommend installing them in virtualbox a couple of times before installing them on a real machine, because you are going to need to refer to their wikis during installation. But both have deriviative distros that make them a bit more user-friendly. For an Arch-based distro, try Archbang. For a Gentoo-based distro, try Sabayon.

[deadflowr]

If it's a choice between a livedvd/cd/usb and virtualbox, I'd go with a virtualbox.
You can install it directly from the download folder, and no need to burn/copy/move onto a separate thingy.

If you have somewhat new hardware, then a virtualbox should run pretty smooth(most of the time)
And even if you don't, you can at least get a sample taste of the features a particular distro has to offer.
Plus you can see if the ISO image has problems, without having just burned 20 disks first.
Or having burned 20 disks for a distro you find sucks.