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rj686
February 21st, 2006, 12:25 AM
let me just say that i can't wait for the release of Dapper Drake (who the **** thought of that name? lol) :mrgreen: anyway.... i'm not running any linux distro atm because my brother will just say "Why cant we just use windows?" seeing as how we've never had a virus in this computer (and i dont any virus/spy/adaware protection) :). Im looking for a good laptop distro when i get my laptop for college. Enuf sidetracking....\\:D/ ....have any of you guys tried distros such as pclinux or vector linux maybe? I was just curious what some people think of other distros besides ubuntu.

O and MEPIS was what originally got me into linux :-D , and in my opinion RPM distros SUCK.....but thats just my opinion

Lord Illidan
February 21st, 2006, 12:36 AM
SUSE 10.0 and Damn Small Linux come to mind.

r4ik
February 21st, 2006, 12:44 AM
Others ?
I cant even control this one yet.

darkmaze
February 21st, 2006, 12:50 AM
fedora

majikstreet
February 21st, 2006, 01:31 AM
knoppix, slax, debian, slackware, any BSD - such as freebsd, DSL

check http://distrowatch.com/ for bazillions.

rj686
February 21st, 2006, 02:36 AM
i know about distrowatch i was just looking for opinions :), but thx

xequence
February 21st, 2006, 02:38 AM
I liked Fedora Core. It looked really awesome. Just yum was horrible.



any BSD - such as freebsd, DSL

o_O

rj686
February 21st, 2006, 02:40 AM
I liked Fedora Core. It looked really awesome. Just yum was horrible.




o_O

what doe o_O mean? lol, ive never tried a fedora core, heard bad things about em, im not a big fan of RPM distros....... i tried mandrake once and it couldnt even detect my mouse lol

xequence
February 21st, 2006, 02:42 AM
what doe o_O mean?

It looked like Majik said DSL was one of the bsds. But I know he didnt mean it o_O

rfruth
February 21st, 2006, 02:50 AM
debian of course ;)

majikstreet
February 21st, 2006, 10:19 PM
It looked like Majik said DSL was one of the bsds. But I know he didnt mean it o_O
thank god! I know DSL isn't a BSD... I'm not an idiot, you know! Lol.

Brynster
February 24th, 2006, 02:13 PM
I started on Linspire........



Stop giggling at the back.....


Do'h

Ok go on then giggle a little it is kinda funny.

Dragonbite
February 24th, 2006, 02:39 PM
I started with Red Hat 8

Then they announced they were going to end supporting it

So I updated to Red Hat 9

A month before they stopped supporting THAT too!

Then I installed Gentoo.

I found it's a great distro for giving you control over what gets loaded on and optimizing the system. The package manager (portage, is like apt-get) worked very well most of the time and I was able to troubleshoot when it didn't.

There's a learning curve because unlike most distros, you compile everything on your system via portage (# emerge program). The advantage of this is being able to use USE flags to help optimize the installation for your system (and keeping out what you have no intention of ever using).

This especially helps with older systems. Unfortunately it wasn't so good at detecting my hardware, a Sony Vaio desktop (at one point I had my winmodem working, my sound card working and my video working... just not all at the same time ;) . With Ubuntu it detected everything except the winmodem which is a non-issue (external USR to the rescue!)

The documentation is good and the forums for getting answers is probably one of the best (they've been around so a LOT of questions have been answered). I still use them even though I've moved to Ubuntu.

I moved to Ubuntu because while fooling around with the system was fun, it was also time consuming. Also I want to remove Windows entirely from the system and need a distro that is more easily managable.

My next step is to teach my daughter how to use it so she can show mommy when I'm at work \\:D/

pedrotuga
February 24th, 2006, 06:10 PM
Well... i tryed this one and it rocks if you want peak performance:
GENTOO!!!
Its incredible how your computer gets so much faster than u could imagin.
Like... i am using a amd athlon on a laptop and it its all the time turning the fan on due to overheat.... well using gentoo it keeps it loow.... coooll :) eheheh. this is just an example

disadvantage: for experts only :(

unfortunatly i am a beginner. So at the moment i am still using windows on my laptop. I run ubuntu on a server i have, and i am very satisfyed with it, really easy to learn... and this forum.... and the wiki :)

stanz
April 4th, 2006, 09:01 PM
My first intro: Deb's- Woody... thats when i knew~ i knew nothing!
Found Xandros soon after- by surfing...Then, Knoppix +4, with the dummies book-
Tho...none worked on that M$ box...
Googled- Charged- Replaced Hardware...& enjoyed living without windows & gates!
Tried Deb's - Sarge...now i know~ i know even less!
Got Xan on one box, Ubuntu/Kubuntu on this one...learn a'lil bit~every other day!

derrick1985
April 5th, 2006, 02:38 AM
PCLinuxOS

Al3xanR0
April 13th, 2006, 02:08 PM
I started using RHT 7.3 (this is long before yum, apt4rpm was still unstable and under heavy dev), which eventually lead me to Fedora. I tried Mandy but it just didn't satisfy me couldn't find anything wrong with it in particular (except it's ridiculous RPMDrake, I've got one word for Mandy --Centralize). While using Fedora I discovered Debian, in search of binaries that just were not available for FC. I did more than enough compiling while on RHT (either you compiled or succumbed to dep hell). Debian is solid, enough said. In search of a more user friendly version of Debian I started using Simply MEPIS, which imo is simply marvelous. I gave Ubuntu a try when I upgraded my FC2 box to FC4 and started getting seg faults every other time I installed an app via YUM. I like Ubuntu with the exception of two issues and apart from them I would give Ubuntu my vote for best desktop distro ever.

1. I hate sudo. It doesn't help it hinders.
2. incompatability with most Debian packages.

In short My favorites are in this order Simply MEPIs, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu

JAwuku
April 14th, 2006, 03:55 AM
FoxLinux Professional (http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=03344#0) is a nice-looking Fedora-based distro with a MacOSX style dock.

florizs
April 26th, 2006, 10:19 AM
what do you mean, other distro?
suse and debian came close but still Ubuntu is my perfect mix.

milehigh
May 17th, 2006, 11:22 PM
I've used PCLinuxOS on a laptop - very nice! If you have a widescreen, you can get 1280x800 by running XFdrake from the command line.

disturbed1
May 21st, 2006, 06:00 PM
Besides Ubuntu, I still have, and use daily Vector Linux 4.3 Rox filer kicks butt as a file manager teamed with IceWM. Solid, stable, fast, same install going strong for 3 years now.

After I bought Mandrake 7.2 a few years back, I was a distro adict. I've tried at least 90 of distrowatch's top 100. That was until my first beta install of Warty. Now I don't much care for other distros. Not much free time any more either.

Sure I still read the reviews of other distro's. And once in a while I'll even install one to a spare hard drive, but none ever last longer than a week. To be honest, most don't last longer than a day.

I recently ran the newest Fedora and CentOs, and have been looking to try Suse again, maybe next weekend.

shrimphead
May 25th, 2006, 10:42 PM
zenwalk 2.4

speed and rock solid stability of Slackware, except without the out of date packages :lol:

and it has netpkg, an addition to the slackware pkgtool set that allows you to install packages from an online repository.

And a small but very helpful community :)

qalimas
May 27th, 2006, 04:40 AM
My other favorite is Ubuntu, Arch takes number 1 for me, I try to love Ubuntu more... but once everyone started trying Arch and said how good it was, I jumped in, and don't regret it. I feel Ubuntu is more for people who want to use a system and don't mind not having it optimized. While I'm still no expert, I find Arch to be a nice mix of Gentoo and Slackware, and I love it. Arch has taught me a lot about Linux, I have known how to use and administer for a while, but Arch teaches everything, it makes you use the CLI, and you really get to know the internals... I love it :D

[/rant]

In short, Arch > Ubuntu

Ubuntu still rocks tho :D

gmcle454
June 3rd, 2006, 10:02 AM
Gentoo.

TrailerTrash
June 3rd, 2006, 04:57 PM
PCLinuxOS!

ComplexNumber
June 3rd, 2006, 05:37 PM
my favourite is fedora. unlike some others (eg suse etc), they know where they're heading. novell wants to get rid of KDE entirely, but they kmow that they can't p off the KDE folk too much, so they have to begrudgingly make concessions. i wish ubuntu would abandon kubuntu and the others so they can concentrate on their initial plan. lets face it, the only purpose of kubuntu and xubuntu and the others is just to bring the numbers up. kubuntu and the others will only ever be a half hearted efforts. canonical should get rid of the others, realise their direction, and focus exclusively on ubuntu. i really don't like it when a distro because too 'polluted' etc. the downside to fedora is that they're poluted slightly too (eg going with gcj isntead of sun java etc), but not in such a way as to affect it too negatively

Christmas
June 3rd, 2006, 06:05 PM
I used a little Fedora Core 4 before switching to Ubuntu. However Ubuntu made me delete my Windows partition and only use Linux. They say Damn Small Linux works very fast, the same with Slackware, but on the other hand Slackware is harder to configure. I didn't tried DSL and Slackware I had it for one hour, not because it was hard to configure, but it was the first time I saw KDE and I except the fact it was fast, I didn't like it. I also had Debian for a while, my impression about Debian was that it's not as stable as the others two, despite this "rock stable" story that is said about it. Only my impression, as a newbie.

I have a desktop PC, and Ubuntu seemed to me the only system that detected correctly and without file configuration all my hardware, I guess this should happen to laptops too. And this forums are great for Ubuntu, post your question and you will definetely get an answer, and there is very much activity here.

IYY
June 3rd, 2006, 06:07 PM
I like FreeBSD, but too much time needs to be spent compiling stuff.

Matrix101
June 3rd, 2006, 06:38 PM
Gentoo is my all time favorite, but as said before it requires too much time. My second choice is therefore Kanotix, which is basically Debian Sid with a custom kernel and some tweaks. It´s faster than all other debian forks i´ve seen before ,supports more hardware than all other distros and works very well with laptops from what i´ve heard.

Lunixfanboy
June 3rd, 2006, 07:04 PM
Debian, been so since the 2.0 days.

Reshin
June 3rd, 2006, 07:05 PM
Gentoo, king of linux! (If you have time...)

DoktorSeven
June 3rd, 2006, 09:28 PM
Slackware.

...what? Stop staring! :)

RAV TUX
June 3rd, 2006, 09:51 PM
1. Dreamlinux XFCE Studio Edition 1.0
http://www.dreamlinux.com.br/english/download.html

2. YOPER Linux 2.1.0-4
http://www.yoper.com/download.php








.

Kindred
June 3rd, 2006, 10:11 PM
Arch is my favourite distro, can't get much/any better than Arch.

eriqk
June 3rd, 2006, 10:55 PM
Gentoo, I suppose, if it weren't so time consuming.

Groet, Erik

asc
June 3rd, 2006, 11:01 PM
I was just curious what some people think of other distros besides ubuntu.
I'm fond of Debian on servers and OpenBSD for edge networking like firewall/routing/VPN. CentOS is pretty good if you have to use an "enterprise" distribution, whatever that means.

NJboi21
June 6th, 2006, 02:58 AM
Im a Suse user but also enjoy mingling with some Slackware linux, Ubuntu is my first Gnome Linux :)

xXx 0wn3d xXx
June 6th, 2006, 03:17 AM
Besides Ubuntu, Debian is my second favorite Linux distribution. I only used it for a short time (3 hours) but I gained a deeper understanding of how Ubuntu works and where it came from. I only had one problem with Debian. My network card was not detected. I could not set up my wireless without an ethernet connections and it would be a huge hassle to do so. When Debian Etch becomes stable (I could be looking at a long time) I will be first in line to try it.

RAV TUX
June 6th, 2006, 03:25 AM
http://img310.imageshack.us/img310/9663/yoper1ut.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Yoper is buy far the most intelligent and refined of all the linux distros, out of New Zealand, the cummunity is small and the forums feel like a welcoming small hometown.

also;

http://img128.imageshack.us/img128/1671/dreamlinux9qt.png (http://imageshack.us)

Dreamlinux XFCE Studio Edition is doing now what the big guys want to and will be doing 6 months to a year from now. If you want to see the future of Linux Distros today try Dreamlinux out now.

What Yoper and Dreamlinux share is that they are both small distros and they are not burdened by bloated politics and can enable and implement the latest and greatest today not 6 months from now.

these 2 combined with Ubuntu (my primary OS) make up what I consider the top 3 linux distros.