Debian. There's nothing like apt. Blag would also be an alternative for me. I tried it, easy installation, quite fast on my rather outdated machine and I like the concept behind the distro. Still, I feel more comfortable with Debian, though I think that Blag has very much potential.

Gentoo all the way! ive installed gentoo over 5 times on the same pc in a row experimenting with all the different features and customization. the sad thing is that before gentoo, i used ubuntu :'( and i still do use ubuntu... but along with gentoo.

I love the ability to customize everything in gentoo. how i can just dive into the config files and come out with an entirely different distro. thats why gentoo works for me.

[edit] i didnt mean anything against ubuntu, its a fine distro just that it can be a B#$$%R to fix when something goes wrong. and that gentoo and ubuntu are at opposite ends of the linux scale... ubuntu being simple for the average user and gentoo ... being aimed more at the power user

Being a gentoo user myself, I was wondering how many votes Gentoo would get.....Reading through what people posted, us Gentoo users are a minority.

I think FC is goog!

I agree with those who have asked for the "another distribution" choice.
While being a Slacker all the way (quite a few of those here, I see?), I have recently been impressed with the Turkish Pardus distribution. I have put it on the system for the lady of the house.

People who vote for Fedora, can you explain what's so good about it? I used to use Fedora when I worked with Oracle database because it's associated with Red Hat and at least somewhat similar to RH Enterprise Linux. But frankly, other than the assoc with Red Hat, I really didn't find anything that it really excels in, compared to say Gentoo or Debian. Maybe I missed something.

I missed it too. I also missed how to get it to install a boot loader, how to boot without error consistently, how to run anything without at least one problem and how to install anything without a major song and dance routine.

I used Fedora Core once, it really wasn't that great. It installed Grub on the wrong drive, installed software I didn't want, and got erased the next day, in favor of SuSE, which, was pretty good at the time.

Fedora Core is not my favorite, but I do often test it. I find that it has some good features - easy to install, lots of packages, lots of new technology to try out. On the other hand, software updates are extremely slow compared to my Debian-based favorites, the code itself, though claimed to be recently optimized, also seems slower than what I am used to. Finally, Fedora Core, last I looked, lacked a good partition management tool integrated into the installer (or did I miss something - I have no problem with this because I have LOTS of prepared partitions on which I can install my many distros to test).

Not a bad distro, but the best? I would say it ranks somewhere between tenth and twentieth on my list, but not even close to number one.

Originally posted by docinthebox:
Seems many voters are first time Linux users who have only tried that one distro. This may be the case with a lot of FC and Ubuntu users.
Maybe there's a problem with polls like this i.e. does a user's opinion carry much conviction if they've only used the one distro they're voting for? How can they make such a judgement call in comparative ignorance?

Debian for the win, apt too

read my .sig

So, now we need to be distro reviewers before our votes can count? It doesn't matter that Ubuntu worked so well when I 'made the switch' that I felt no need or desire to try something else? I would certainly hope that's not the case! lol

On a more serious note, the 'Choice Awards' are mostly for fun. It's not a Presidential Election. Nothing is going to be taken away from anyone based on the outcome...

A good os is what servers the user the best. i won't use CentOS as a desktop OS but i would defiantly use it as a web server or a dns server for my network. If users have used Linux for the first time and found out that FC of UBUNTU are good desktop operating systems... so be it!!!
When it comes down to it, it's all Linux!

i totally agree with dragonslayer48dx

>> "Maybe there's a problem with polls like this i.e. does a user's opinion carry much conviction if they've only used the one distro they're voting for? How can they make such a judgement call in comparative ignorance?"

i always suspect that maybe that is one of the measurment for a successfull distro of a certain kind ... when people are providing user experience on the desktops , sometime they are actually doing something that they dont like to see on their own desktop ... expectations and the commitments , quite hard actually ... but it could have been easier in the first place ...


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