Only and Only

Redhat

RHEL 4 specially

Fedora Core 4 is the best!

I used Red Hat from 7 on and FC 4 from half of november 05 until january 06, and I was satisfied because I still have all my files from the beginning. (I ditched Windows as you presume).

FC4 still had connecting problems with european DSL and especially configuring a normal 56 K modem connection. By default this becomes a Ethernet connection! Wireless was also an absolute problem.

Configuring FC4 is still not consistent.

With Suse no problem at all. All drivers are there regardless of commercial names, and the choices you have to make while configuring are well explained.

That's why it's number one for me.

Regards, Jan

My vote goes to Suse - it just works, no fuss. Despirately needed during the busy college terms.

Gentoo rules, but we have suse on more systems, so felt it was only fair to represent for them :S

The Ubuntu forum has over 70,000 members and counting, it's #1 on distrowatch and at shots.osdir.com.

I don't use Ubuntu so did'nt vote for it, but surely it will take alot to beat it.

I must vote for PCLinuxOS. I have tried:
Vector 5 (great distro, nothing wrong with it IMO),
Mepis 3.3 & 2004.6 (another good distro, just a bit bloated),
Mandriva (Why use Mandriva when Tex's PCLOS is avaliable?),
Kanotix (Great Live CD, fastest KDE I've ever seen),
Knoppix (ditto, but slowest KDE I've ever seen),
aLinux (tried 12.5 & 12.6, they both look great but can't get to install),
BeatriX (nice Gnome lightweight),
Puppy 1.0.7 (the fastest of the lightweights, IMO),
CentOS (nice distro, big download, very customizable in install)
and there are a few others I can't recall at the moment.

I have never met a distro I didn't like. I just like some better than others.

PCLinuxOS has the newbie-friendlyness of Ubuntu, the prettyness of Xandros, the hardware detection of Kanotix, and the ability to upgrade from the repositories whenever you like. You don't have to worry about breaking your system by upgrading.

PCLinuxOS. Texstar keeps things like Firefox updated, along with KDE. Multimedia works from the start and installing a video card took me a whole 5 minutes. Keep up the great work Texstar.


I used Kanotix for over a year but then my HD died. Was going to reinstall it but the last two versions didn't come with Synaptic.

My vote is for SuSE. While I haven't got round to using too many distros, it does "just work" most of the time. I'm still mainly using 9.1, because I couldn't get my winmodem working with the magazine cover-disk version of OpenSuSE 10 that I installed. I will be using it more now that I've gone broadband (which works fine), and it is noticeably quicker than 9.1.

I was also seriously impressed by the installation tool, which resized my 9.1 reiser fs partition with ease.

Rob

PCLinuxOS.

User Friendly. Live CD but made for installation. With compatible hardware can install complete system from live CD in 20 minutes. Own repositories, kept up to date, dependency problems inevitably solved quickly. Multimedia Internet Stuff integrated into Firefox as standard. Very good hardware detection.

Good online community: very "Newcomer" friendly, you won't see an RTFM type of response. Minimal slagging off of other distros compared to others.

Texstar THE rpm package builder. Ocilent great kernel developer, Ivan the scriptwriter. TheDarb the enforcer! Great artwork, Jose Rangels recently back on the scene. "Thac" contributing Music/Electronic etc RPMs and MythTV, plus alternate Xorg builds for awkward cards like Matrox, and alternate Multimedia Kernels. Own Control Centre built upon the 9.2 Mandrake one. Uses apt4rpm so that Synaptic can be used as front end for software package control.

Oh, and if you update your kernel when necessary via synaptic you never need to re-install. (Unless you're like me: If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!)

In my opinion, every other distro may be good in parts, but PCLinuxOS has it all!

First I tried Red Hat 9 (my FC3 disk got corrupted), and it was great, until I started having problems building newer programs because of the old packages. I then installed SuSE, which I hated (nothing against SuSE - it's great for the average user) because of the fixed installation, lack of build tools (releasing a distro without gcc should be a crime ;-) ), and annoyingly over-graphical GUI (not that GNOME is so great in that way either...).

Finally, I discovered Slackware, and I was in heaven. It's the perfect hacker's distro, just a bunch of packages and the basic framework (init scripts, etc.) with a bootable CD for installation. I'd like to try out Arch linux sometime and see how it compares, but I'm never replacing Slackware.

Mandriva for me.
I've heard Suse is similar, just no good for tinkering around with the config files, because the gui tools overwrite the changes.
I tried ubuntu, but I quickly missed the control centre, and I disliked the menu structure and the fact that I had to compile to get recent versions of rox and fluxbox.
I don't know what else there is that provides graphical config tools, but lets you change config files yourself at the same time.
While having a large, up to date app repository.

I voted for SuSE 10. Every thing just works. You have such peace of mind. Having said that, Slackware has been my fav linux distro. It just takes time to configure and set up things.

In this forum, I find it limiting to list one's fav distro. While I would love to use Slack at all times, I have to use RHEL/SuSE to run Oracle/Sybase DBs. (I know it is possible to make them run on other distros, but to simulate a production setup at work at home, you'd be better w/ RHEl/SuSE). Pat needs all the encouragement; he is just one man behind the scenes. But I would like slackware to become pentium (i585) optimised. No point in having i386 binaries. Even FreeBSD has done that.

Debian is a good distro too, but unfortunately lacks the comunity spirit of Slack. Hardly many Qs go unanswered on this forum.

It would be interesting to have a poll to find what people use their distros for: desktop, running LAMP, running DBs, development, multimedia development, home use etc. That would give a more balanced picture of how various distros stack with each other.

Voting for PClinuxOS as opposed to Debian/Slackware is absolutely unfair. these are used for desktop/server/web-hosting etc.

My 2 cents.....

For linux, my favorite distribution so far is Ubuntu for most of the reasons all its other fans like it. I do think Ubuntu installs rather a lot by default. The machine I actually use all the time to get work done is running FreeBSD 6.0 with the Ion2 window manager, OpenOffice.org 2.0.1, and the Opera browser. Most of my documents are produced with Latex. I tried FreeBSD out of curiosity. Once I got used to its way of doing things, I found it much simpler. I haven't gotten suspend/hibernate to work, but at 45 seconds to cold boot the machine to a gui, I can live without it. Linux on the same machine and comparable configuration took about 90 seconds to boot.

(K)Ubuntu for sure. Its a little slow, but I was able to get almost everything I wanted to to work. Of course there are exceptions, like that stupid nVidia driver that worked fine in the previous release. But other than that, its not so bad.