Linux Mint 9
Back in 1994 I started using Slackware. Remember how you had to configure x, your graphics adapter and your monitor to get a gui? HA, those were the times..
Now when I am installing Linux for someone, it is always Mint 9. Long term support and everything that they will need is already there. Put in a movie, open hulu, got to love it.

lrfocke

Odd indeed. Every time I've taken Ubuntu for a test drive I never not experienced bugs within first few days of use, if not hours. And the few times I kept it around long enough to update (lower tech user machines) I had problems and that was the end of Ubuntu until more recently when I took 10.04 for a test and, once again, ran into glitches withing first few hours.

Odd indeed that people have such divergent experiences. Thank the gods we have choices.

More recently I have been testing Salix, thanks to these polls cluing me in, and becoming increasingly favorably impressed. Slackware w/o the masochism.

Sadly enough, I have experienced more bugs in Mandriva than any other distro :/

Attackpup V-1,comes with Wine,VirtualBox,IpTraf,gslapt to install packages from Slack,you can get a couple of pets(addons for puppy)deb2pet.pet & rpm2pet.pet that will convert and install deb and rpm packages,shareinternet(Puppy as a router).Small to download 325mb(on dial-up,so size does matter) recognised modems on 3 computers,full or frugal install or install to usb and take it anywhere.PuppyRocks!!!

Ubuntu and Fedora are the buggiest distro's I've encountered, even the Ubuntu LTS releases. Six months to create a polished OS and kill all the bugs? No, just no.

openSUSE's nine-month cycle was a little better, but I'm not using it anymore since they decided to hop in bed with Microsoft.

Debian stable + backports is perfect IMO.

Slackware is the best!!!

I've always gone with Ubuntu because it has the best online support base, but I got sick of them constantly changing the look and feel. Tried Debian, and loved it. Once you've used Ubuntu, Debian is easy to learn, and much cleaner.

Here's an interesting take on distro popularity
http://www.zimbio.com/Linux/articles...cording+Google

The fast-forward version is that the author looked to see how many pages Google found mentioning each distro. The top ten were Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuse, Debian, KNOPPIX, Mandriva, Gentoo, PCLinuxOS, Slackware, MEPIS.

Of course, it's probably impossible to measure distro popularity. At this site, Slackware is over-represented and Suse under-represented. Distro Watch merely reports enquiries, many of which may end with "Well, I certainly don't want that one!" The page-counting approach conflates frequent usage (Ubuntu) and frequent cries for help (I'm not going there ...)

I think the best way to rate popularity is to count the number of people who are actually using it, but obviously that is impossible. It may be possible to do a survey of how many machines have each OS installed, or simply ask a sample of linux users which distro they use the most, which is what this forum is basically doing, but the sample size is probably not big enough to get a truly accurate result. Also, some forums may be more frequented by different types of users.

The one thing I noticed about most distro lists, they all include the same 5 distros ranked at the top of any list.

Slackware
Redhat/Fedora
Debian
SuSe/openSuse
Mandrake/Mandriva

They just won't go away and alot of newer distros are based on one of them, including Ubuntu!

@ fred
Well putted.

Well stated, indeed. Must find a better distro. Ubuntu has always worked well with my hardware, but when I bought a new PC and tried 10.04, some of the software available in their repos just doesn't work-- e.g., either closes unexpectedly or freezes and requires Ctrl/Alt/Backspace to close. Installed 8.04, which was my last upgrade on my older pc, and it works perfectly fine, but I will want or need to upgrade someday...

I decided to give Ubuntu a try last week but it crashed a few hours later on a system update and upon reset either froze at the login screen (could not switch to tty or ssh/ping box) or if I booted into recovery mode I received a kernel panic.