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[c1utch]

So, i've aquired another 160gb HDD and thought I'd try linux again

I'm leeching Mandrake 10.1 right now, but i may go with 3 partitions of:
Fedora 3
Suse 9.2
and the Mandrake

just to see which I prefer, however, has anyone here had any experience, or reccomend anything to use or not to use?

thanks

[torg]

at my company we always had problems with mandrake distributions. they just seem to do something wrong. you loose your settings, or cant compile anything because the enviroment variables magically vanished and so on...
at home i 've been using suse (currently 9.1) since version 6.2. never had any serious problems with it. especially installation always was pretty smooth. additionally you get rpms of nearly all software you might want to install. and if not, compiling usually is no problem, as suse sticks to the posix recommendations concerning directory structure relatively strictly.
i can't comment on fedora, though...

so my choice would be suse

[Jenno]

IMHO Mandrake trys too hard to appeal to the lowest common denominator. eg. the "omg!! teh windows is the same thing as my computer" crowd.

I'd recommend Ubuntu, or if you're a little more curious/adventurous try Gentoo or Slackware.

I personally dual boot Win XP/Ubuntu on my desktop (XP for games.... ubuntu for everything else) and run slackware on my server.

EDIT:  Also, I hear good things about Suse, but I've never tried it.

[painQuin]

mandrake also appeals to the lazy bum who still wants his computer to be able to do useful things, like run without crashing (a complex task for windows, it seems)

the installer is usually smooth, and if you know what you're doing it's pretty easy to leave out the stuff that's in for transition folk

I personally have never had any real trouble with it, and I am indeed a lazy bum

[lb969]

I'll stick to Debian thanks....

Much nicer than the others... has an apt-get that automatically installs apps for you.

[torg]

Linux lacks one unified installer for all distributions. that's its biggest flaw...

[est]

you think that that's it's biggest flaw?  hehe.  how about lack of driver support, lack of game developer's support, and lack of a unified underlying directory/file structure?

i swear to god, i install debian, mandrake/redhat & gentoo and they're all different.  got me looking all over the goddamn place for things that should be kept standard.  debian even changed things to something different again between woody & sarge.

it's fucking annoying, because i want to use linux.  it's just that it isn't up to my standards as yet :/

[synecdoche]

I am hardly any kind of Linux "guru" but I'll echo the recommendation for SuSE.  I think it is a lovely distro.

[torg]

you think that that's it's biggest flaw?  hehe.  how about lack of driver support, lack of game developer's support, and lack of a unified underlying directory/file structure?

driver support is not so bad,  lots of folks are working on it. game developers support is not so bad, too, think of SDL and all that stuff. most developers complain about the lack of support, but actually evrything is there. the publisher just dont want games for linux, because linux still has a too small market share to be profitable. on the otherhan some games are also ported to linux, just have a look at doom3 or neverwinter nights.
and there is no lack of a unified underlying directory/file structure. there are recommendations in the POSIX standard, but some distros ignore them. on the other hand, look at any windows machine. half of the software and data are spread all over the hd, ignoring any directory structure. some softwares dont even run, if you dont put them in c:\thesoftwaresname\ ...  there's no real difference to any linuxdistro in that.
an a unified installer could help fixing the strange directory-philosphy on linux....

[painQuin]

I'll probably get flamed and burned for this, but RPMs and gzipped tarballs are pretty close to standard
I have to say, tar -xvzf; make; make install; can often take less time than some windows installers, and urpmi <appname> is pretty darned speedy if you have a good resource (say, the cs department of your university)
RPMs work on redhat and mandrake, and tarballs work just about everywhere - and I prefer rpms because of dependancy checking, urpmi can be told to grab all the dependancies for what you want to install
it's a lot easier than trying to track down required stuff for windows

[torg]

have you ever built an rpm? that's a pain in the ass... some things just dont work with em. additionally you choose thedirectories you install your stuff in yourself. you also might create completely new directories on root level and what not. it just provides a wrapper for your install scripts and tared and gzipped  files.
that's not what i meant with 'unified installer'... i meant a tool, that not only installs all the stuff, but also manages it, similar to suses yast (or the now defunct red-carpet from ximian) and it must work for all distributions.

[fin]

suse has gotta be the best distro ive tried, although ive never delved much into "proper" distros like debian or slackware.

i'm using mandrake 10 the now, i stopped using suse a while back(7.x i think) cause mdk cd's are cheap to get hold of. it's(mdk) ok and pretty damn easy to use and install (i've not been messing about with the computer so much lately so my skills have dwindled) but it feels a bit more raggy than suse, if i was gonna spend money i'd buy suse probally.

[Deacon]

Asking whether Double DIN-sized units support CD changers is like asking whether size 9 shoes are blue. The two concepts have nothing to do with each other, and the answer will differ depending on the particular size 9 shoe. One is a size while the other is a feature.

[Morgul]

Ah, teh L1NuX. Yes, I have to admit, I am a linux geek. Hardcore linux hacker. And what distro do I use? Gentoo. Plain and simple, it's the best thing for ppl who want specific things. It's the most stable distro, period. the portage tools are amamzing, and installing things is easiy (alibet, it takes a while to compile them from source...) and I could go on and on.

Now, this being said, I have a G/F who really shoul have been born in the middle ages. She despises tech, and she would love it if we all rode horses, and lived in small villages. (She's cooky, but I love her.) She also admits that she needs a computer, and she learned early on to hate windows. (Spyware == teh sUxz0rZ!!!!11one) So, I put gentoo on there.

I must admit, having her run gentoo seemed retarded on my part, since she knows > 0 about computers... but she picked it up rather fast. It's REALLY scary doing an install for the first time... and I've never even dared to do a stage 1 install (I'm too damned lazy, and impatient). However, I would really recomend it to anyone who wants to either learn a lot, or 'play'. It's not something I'd say you must be l33t to use, but it is challanging.

Oh, and just so that I don't feel like I was ranting about my fav. distro; SuSE is a nice one that I've used for a few years. It's good, it's GUI, and it's hardware support is awesome. Mandrake is ok, but they don't do enough bug testing I think. Mandrake always feels... fragile to me. Hard to explain. It's easy to break. Fedora Core seems pretty good.. I've fallen out of the 'in crowd' though, so I don't know about the latest version.

Recomendations:

1) Gentoo
2) Suse
3) Fedora
4) anything running a 2.6 kernel

Then again you could run:
Linux, running PearPC, emulating MacOSX, runing wine, emulating VMWARE, running windows98SE, running PearPC, running VMWARE, running Mandrake. (And yes, you CAN do it. No, I don't recommend it.)

[Go4t]

another recommendation for Gentoo
i've tryed lots of different distros and im by far the happiest with gentoo
other than gentoo (since it can be a bitch to get working right) i would suggest debian

[nihilist]

Gentoo == teh ownage distro.

Caveat:  Gentoo means that you'd better be willing to get your hands dirty.  And wait.  Cuz compiling stuff ain't always fast, especially if you emerge KDE or Gnome.  (emerge = Gentoo package management)

For a less hardcore user, I'd suggest one of the Debian-based distros, something like Ubuntu.  Perhaps Debian itself, though I've been less than impressed with the X11 support that it offers.

[ElRodente]

i just got a dvd with suse 9.2 and ubuntu 4 on
worth it? or am i too lazy








why am i asking you that?

[Samari]

For a first time playing with stuff I'd probably recomend Fedora.  I've always had pretty good luck with Red Hat stuff, it's not the tightest distro around but it's pretty user friendly.  once you get yum set up properly keeping things up to date and installing is pretty easy.  

gentoo is good if performance is a concern but the install instructions are beastly.  i have it dual booted with XP on my laptop and it behaves quite nicely once you get everything emerged

debian and I have not, nor probably ever will get along.  it took me about 6 kernel builds before i finally got X to work the last time i tried.  if I were setting up a server that needed to be reliable and put in production I'd probably pick debian, but not for a desktop

mandrake never really impressed me that much.

that's my $.02

[emopants]

I know you said "Linux", but I'm gonna go ahead and recommend FreeBSD (or OpenBSD).

I'm an OpenBSD dork.  One of my favorite parts, is that It Just Works(tm).  Sound is working, X works, apm works, etc.  All out of the box.  No need to recompile or configure anything.  If you want to, go ahead, we'll let you shoot yourself in the foot.  But you don't have to.

[nihilist]

BSDs are precompiled binaries that go for the lowest common (hardware) denominator.  If you like that, go for it, but me, I'm all about squeezing some performance out of my machines.

[emopants]

BSDs are precompiled binaries that go for the lowest common (hardware) denominator.  If you like that, go for it, but me, I'm all about squeezing some performance out of my machines.

No, they focus on stability.  All of those wacky speed tweaks can (and often do) cause breakage.

Yes, Linux may be faster at some things, but (e.g.) FreeBSD is a faster router.  It depends on what you do.

And more often than not, your computer is waiting on you to do something.  On anything faster than 1GHz, its faster than me, so I only bother upgrading my compile box.

[Kalyke]

I would also recommend suse, for a mostly non linux user I found it most comfortable because it reminded me of windows, more than redhat or fedora core.  You can all feel sorry for me because I have a midterm in my Linux class tomorrow, or not, I feel sorry for myself enough.  Anyways Suse is also nice because since its from Germany it doesn't have to apply to the copyright laws in the US, just something my teacher mentioned.

[emopants]

Anyways Suse is also nice because since its from Germany it doesn't have to apply to the copyright laws in the US, just something my teacher mentioned.

On that note, OpenBSD is from Canada, and is striving to make everything licensed under the BSD license, so all can use it for any reason.

[torg]

....its from Germany it doesn't have to apply to the copyright laws in the US....

well, we have copyright laws, too *g*
can you give examples for things that suse doesnt have to apply too?

[Jenno]

Suse is also nice because since its from Germany it doesn't have to apply to the copyright laws in the US, just something my teacher mentioned.

Suse is run by Novell, isn't Novell an American company? :S

[Kalyke]

Truthfully, I'm not sure what laws would be differant or any other specifics, I just know what my teacher mentioned. that since it wasn't from the  US it didn't have to apply to US copyright laws, it makes sense that it would have to apply to German copyright laws but they are different.

[torg]

Suse is also nice because since its from Germany it doesn't have to apply to the copyright laws in the US, just something my teacher mentioned.

Suse is run by Novell, isn't Novell an American company? :S

Yep, Novell bought it in 2003. But SuSE as a (daughter) company is still located in Germany.

[nihilist]

I'm not quite sure what copyright laws and a Linux distribution have to do with each other.  Crypto laws, that'd make a bit more sense.  There'd be no problem including strong encryption, because it wouldn't be based out of the US.

Which is part of the reason why OpenBSD is Canadian.  

And don't get me wrong, I love OpenBSD, just that for a desktop box, I'd go with Linux over a BSD.  Especially if I ever planned on playing a game.  

Samari:  the Gentoo install instructions are pretty straight forward.  First time I installed, it came out fine.  And it was nice of them to include alternatives, so that you have choices as you do the install.

[torg]

Crypto laws .... There'd be no problem including strong encryption, because it wouldn't be based out of the US...

yep, that makes more sense.

[nihilist]

yep, that makes more sense.

Why, it's almost like I know what I'm talking about!

[torg]

yes... one could think that *g*

[Samari]

Samari:  the Gentoo install instructions are pretty straight forward.  First time I installed, it came out fine.  And it was nice of them to include alternatives, so that you have choices as you do the install.

I agree, but to someone who isn't completely comfortable with the way things work in linux there are numerous ways to botch things up in the process.  I only had to try it once to get it to work, although i had a few issues here and there.  Then again I'm pretty familiar with Linux so when stuff went wrong I knew what I was looking for; a complete newb would probably give up in the face of some of the problems I had.

[nihilist]

... a complete newb would probably give up in the face of some of the problems I had.

No doubt.  But then again, Gentoo is still working on making itself more user-friendly.  Currently, it's for more of a moderate-to-experienced Linux user.

[festerius]

On my personal computer... I will admit that I use WinXP... But on my servers I use Gentoo.  

All other flavors of Linux taste bad.

[Schmung]

I keep meaning to use Linux, but everytime I loom into it afresh the same problem crops up. Linux only does a quarter of the things I use Windows for, if that. So why bother with the hassle of rebooting every half hour, it's simply not worth it. Now, windows is basically a bit crap, but untill all my games, development tools etc move over to Linux and untill it becomes less cryptic then I'm simply not going to bother. I want to use Linux, I really do, but at present it's just not an option.