Newcomers, has Ubuntu made you curious or content?

[plb]

Just wondering for all the newcomers to Linux, has Ubuntu made you curious and wanting to try out other distros or has it left you just content to stay with strictly Ubuntu?

[brossmac]

I actually tried quite a few distros before settling on ubuntu. While they each had their benefits and drawbacks, I felt ubuntu had the best balance of features.

Probably one of the biggest reasons I went with it is that it seems to be gaining in popularity. I'm definitely not a bandwagon hopper by any stretch of the imagination, but I felt that there would be more software and support with a distro that is becoming more widely adopted. As I get more proficient with Linux I may then switch to something else.

[Sunflower1970]

Yes (sort of) Ubuntu will be my main OS on my computers, at least for now. There might be a time in the future that I find something else better...but not any time soon at least. I have downloaded a bunch of live CD's of other distros to see what they're like (although I've not installed any of them, yet)

[earobinson]

you dont need to install live cd's you can just run them of the cd.

[plb]

Another good way for testing other distros is use a virtual machine such as vmware. vmplayer is free and in the repos. Additionally, you can easily find vmware images on the net to try out.

[Pobega]

Another good way for testing other distros is use a virtual machine such as vmware. vmplayer is free and in the repos. Additionally, you can easily find vmware images on the net to try out.

QEMU is a bit slower, but it's FOSS and DFSG-free (For you Debian users out there), and it's what I personally use. It's a bit slower than vmware but it gets the job done.

As for Ubuntu, it made me curious. It was the first distribution I tried, since I bought a System76 laptop for college and it came with it by default. After having to reinstall four or five times within the timespan of two months I gave up on it, and I began distro hopping.

I tried Gentoo (Off of the GNOME LiveCD, too lazy to do a three day install) and I liked it, but I couldn't get a lot of things working.

I never liked any of the RPM based distributions, and I was really too lazy to try any other Debian based distros; So I gave the real thing a shot. And I haven't look back since!

I run Debian testing on my college laptop, because I can't afford to have an operating system that doesn't work (i.e. If Sid ever was to break during a time where I need to review all of my notes or something, I'll be too busy trying to fix my laptop to actually study; I can't afford that!). On any of my home computers I run a mix of FreeBSD/Debian Sid. I'm thinking of dual booting FreeBSD on my laptop, but I can wait until it supports the Intel Pro Wireless 3945ABG card.

[plb]

FreeBSD is fanastic...I used it almost exclusively from 4.1 to 5.something.

[maniacmusician]

QEMU is a bit slower, but it's FOSS and DFSG-free (For you Debian users out there), and it's what I personally use. It's a bit slower than vmware but it gets the job done.


VirtualBox is also mostly free, and it's faster than VMWare. It shares some code with qemu, but has a lot of its own stuff as well. But I find it to be a lot better than most other clients.

[Hex_Mandos]

Curious. I wouldn't use anything but Ubuntu as my main OS (for now, at least) but I try out distros from time to time. Ubuntu is great, but isn't necessarily the best distro all the time.

[Swarms]

I have tried a couple of distros before Ubuntu, Red Hat, Mandrake and Debian, but with those I had to run windows along to still be able to do what I usually did. But somehow I always managed to screw up my bootloader and because I thought it was hard to learn Linux to know, I freshinstalled windows instead.

Now I decided with Fiesty to return and I learned more than I did the whole time with previous distros, its so easy! Now my 5.1 soundsystem work again, I thought i was going out buying a new card (just for a better driver support), but saved that, and learned how to run emulators for the games etc. I can't live without.

Maybe in the future I want to change, but aslong I don't feel limited like Windows made me feel I am happy!

[seshomaru samma]

Curious


I have since tried : puppy ,suse, fedora, knoppix ,dsl , debian and blag
They were all ok , but each one had something i didn't like about it

After I upgraded from sarge to etch , i decided that debian is what i want and stayed with debian

[Iceni]

Very curious. I'm currently trying gentoo on a laptop, and running a few in vmware. I see no reason to change my desktop, tho.