This category could be divided into "Best Distro for Modern Hardware" and "Best Distro for Older Hardware".

In the Modern Hardware category, I vote for Mepis. Hands down. I've tried every major distro at least once over the past 5 years and I've finally settled on Mepis.

In the Older Hardware catagory, it's Archlinux. Got it running on my old Toshiba Satellite laptop with 32 meg. ram. Not fancy or fast, but very functional and well thought out.

This article says it all -

http://www.plugintolinux.ca/simplymepis_review.html

Ten Reasons for Trying SimplyMepis has turned into Ten Reasons for Staying with SimplyMepis. And Debian has to get my second vote (if I had one), because Mepis is built on it. By the way I also run Mandrake, Suse, and Fedora. And I've recently eliminated from my drives Slackware and Ubuntu. Mepis is simply the best.

Buster Ellis

I have to give my vote to

Fedora Core,

it amazed me.

I went from Mandrake to RH to Slack to Knoppix to Arch, and I keep on returning to Arch. It just works. There aren't any GUI tools, but the simple /etc files beat the the simplicity of Slackware by a lot. Oh, and it's by far the fastest I've tried LFS or Gentoo....but belum....for you all you Indonesian speakers out there. Are there any? hehe

suse...

I am using slackware and I am quite happy about it.

Slackware's installer is perfect for my PC. It's quite friendly for people who have to change/tweak the configurations. linuxpackages offer common packages so most of the time I don't have to compile. The packages dependence is usually easy to solve. Compile/makepkg is usually smooth, too. Slackware is very comfortable for me.

I used too many hours to hack/tweak many things but I still can't make it simple enough for friends. It's stable but not perfect. There are still some i18n issues that I can't solve. Slackware 10 has more fonts/i18n problems than old versions.

So, I won't vote this year. (I have no time to try others distros. Mepis, ubuntu, fedora are progressing and I know nothing about them. It wouldn't fair without comparison)

I'll vote for Fedora Core because its stable and much faster than previous versions

Fedora - because I'm a lazy bastard and just want
tons of good software right from the get go.

None of this "workstation install", "server install"
or whatnot. Nope. I want everything they packed
into those 3 CDs! I want the asian character support that
I'll never use, and more servers, clients, and programming
languages/environments than I'd be able to learn in a lifetime.

Honestly, between all command line and X programs,
it's like getting a new toy evey day. I still haven't come
close to trying everything I got.

Are there other distros that give you a huge mountain
of software like that from the initial install? I'd consider
giving any a try that meet this criteria.

I'm kind of tempted by the ease of package management
I hear about in debian (that'll probably the next distro I try), but
for the time being, rpm-ing and compiling have worked for me on the
rare occasion that what I wanted wasn't already there.

Quoted for truth.

been using redhat/fedora since version 7, was never quite impressed with it.
switched to mepis, loved it.

LONG LIVE MEPIS!

Mepis is my vote.

Have tried many distros and there are a lot of good ones out there. But I have to say I like Mepis the best.......For now.

mepis gets my vote

after a lot of distros this is the 1

Well, I haven't used them all yet, and I've torn my hair out in frustration with the 4 I have used.

I voted Gentoo.

quote MikeZila:
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quote:Originally posted by scuzzman
Slacker till I die

Quoted for truth.
-----

Quoted for fact.

egag

I used to use Mandrake and really loved it, didn't like the changes to support structure ( I go way back -- version 6).

I wanted something that everyone seems to make sure their product works with and the Redhat name always comes up (just read this thread). This points to something standardized and consistent or at least something people compare what they ae doing with.

So I jumped right in the middle of where everyone is looking: Fedora Core 3 on my personal systems and Redhat Enterprise 3 on my webservers..