Hello Guys,

I use Red Hat right from their 6.0 distribution. I liked RedHat for it's ease of use, while not very simple, it was quite logical to use. You can quickly become a proficient user without knowing a lot of technical things, and I did manage to gain a bit technical knowledge.

However, with Red Hat stopping their distro, and combining with Fedora, really shocked me. At first I was happy, but when I saw the Fedora Core 1, my happiness vanished and a feeling of dread covered me. That distro truly sucks.

Now, I am left in the lurch not knowing what to do. I don't want to go in for distros that cost money like gentoo, etc., and I also am afraid to go into the murky waters of debian or slack. I am thinking of installing windows again in my system to dual boot, so that atleast I can have a familiar system(I dumped win2k in '02).

Are there any distro's with the flexibility and ease of use of Red Hat without the candy floss of distro's like xandros? And it must certainly be freely downloadable!

Any comments are welcome!

Thought of trying Mandrake 9.2?

Since when did Gentoo cost money?

Ok, I thought that Gentoo costs money, but still I think that it does not measure up to RedHat. And, since Mandrake is bankrupt, I don't want to try it and then end up just like now, with nowhere to go!

Hi UltimaGuy,
I am only new to linux but have tried alot of distro just to get a taste for all. It still amaze's me people think slackware or debian are hard distro's. Not anything against RedHat or Fedora but in my opinion if your upset that RedHat has ended and there arent any distro's you think you can start to use its just sad (and I dont mean that in a bad way) . Check out distrowatch and if you see any you like ask around these forums for any user opinions and experiences with the distro ('s) that catch your eye. There are plenty to choose from and have some fun trying them out.

Gentoo and Arch Linux are free to download and fully configurable and, IMHO, give you more flexibility to setup your system the way you want without bloat. Both have different package systems than what you are accustomed to so it might take a little reading to get up to par but once you get the hang of it, it really opens things up for you. There is plenty of free support at their respective sites along with this site where you don't have to be left in the dark as to why something doesn't work. I have quite a few distros booting now and spend most my time in Gentoo and Arch just because of ease of use and problem free environments. You can basically have as much eye-candy as you see fit or none at all and they will still more than get the job done.

Once support for a sync-able Pocket PC interface is introduced along with the software to program my MX-700 Home Theatre remote then I will say good-riddens to Windows without blinking.

rberry88

" Are there any distro's with the flexibility and ease of use of Red Hat without the candy floss of distro's like xandros? And it must certainly be freely downloadable!"

I'd consider trying the free downloads of MEPIS Linux or Libranet GNU/Linux Classic.

Mandrake is not bankrupt. It is an excellent distro.

Mepis is a great distro, and Knoppix is excellent when installed on your hdd.

SuSE ftp install?

SuSE

When did Mandrake go bankrupt?

btw what do you don't like about Fedora. I haven't used it. But I've seen it. It looks nothing bad to me...

January 13, 2003 MandrakeSoft filed for a "declaration de cessation des paiements" (similar to the U.S. Chapter 11-Reorganization). Since that time their financial situation has greatly improved. They should be around for a good long while.

can anybody tell me which distro is best for music development? i need the lowest soundcard latency etc. is any distro specialized on this?

Hey don't knock bankrupcy, look what it does for the airlines, Chrysler, etc. Besides, once it's up and running, so what? (not that I want them dead or anything!) How many people still run redhat? If it works, it works.

I am thinking of moving to mepis linux, but from what I read, I think it is cutting edge, and probably will not be very stable. Do you think that I can install mepis and work on it without breaking my system. And, I generally use my system for the following :

* Programming in C++ and Java

* Playing around with kernel compilations

* Browsing the net

* Using Open Office.

And a lot of other things that I do occasionally like using GIMP. But I regularly download and compile new programs and utilities from source. So, this must not break my system.

I know that this is silly for me to ask, as I have more than 2 years experience in Red Hat, but the problem is that I have never even considered other linux distros, except playing with FreeBSD, which I did not use for day to day tasks.

Comments please...

Mandrake do a multimedia kernel for low latency with sound cards etc.