POLL: commercial or community

Mostly commercial distros like Suse, Mandriva, and Xandros tend to be easy to use, and for this are often shunned as "newbie distros". However, there are advantages to commercial based distros. They tend to be more feature complete out of the box, and also often come with tech support. And they still only cost about a third of windows.

Community distros tend to be more up to date, and have more rapid development. A lot of them also contain only OSS, which is nice for some people, and bad for others. A lot of the time you have to work harder setting up (and sometimes maintaining) your system.

Personally, I use Kubuntu 6.10 (community) because it is free, debian based, and uses kde.

It also "just works" when I need it to.

Depends on the application.. for a commercial business that needs support a commercial distro is the way to go.
For me I've been really happy with the community based distros such as Debian.

Too many wizards and simplifications reminds me too much of windows.. not that I like things to be difficult, but sometimes the wizards just get in the way of a quick configuration or making things the way YOU want them to be, instead of the limited options you usually get form a wizard driven system..

For instance A while back running Suse, I had an nvidia card. every time I wanted to make a minor adjustment I would run Yast which would throw away my X config and redetect everything from scratch, forcing me to reneter all the values, etc.. . all I wanted to do was change one minor setting, not do everything over from scratch.. what a pain. I'm sure they fixed that by now right .. ?

SuSE does not necessarily cost 1/3 of what Windows does; Buy one seat and install everywhere, or if too cheap to buy it download it or run the eval. It is less than 1/3 of the cost of Windows in that case, if you compare apples:apples.

Community, I run Ubuntu because it's one of the very few 1 CD distros left, it's very easy to use and introduce to people who are new to linux, and as earlier stated when I need to do something it "just works".

Nothing wrong with comercial distros. I used store bought versions of Red Hat for years until they abandoned the home users version. I switched to Fedora core instead and have been very happy with FC. I've purchased copies of Mandrake/Mandriva, SUSE, Corel and even Caldera 2.0 often just to support comercial Linux companies. Without these Linux development would be greatly slowed. Redhat alone provides a huge number of drivers and applications to the community. Buying a comercial version is basically supporting the future of Linux in many cases. So even if it just sits in a box at least the money goes to show Linux is a viable economic model and the future of computing.

I used commercial distros ie. Mandrake>Mandriva>Suse 'til I tested Ubuntu & realised that it already included nearly everything I needed on one CD. There isn't a great availability of recent distro's here, & broadband is just getting started & still fairly pricey, so a one CD installation suddenly made great sense. I was used to KDE so downloaded Kubuntu, downloaded a few needed apps & games -- gotta plug adept here -- makes updating fun -- & saved 4+cd's. I think the single live cd/installer will grow in popularity -- maybe SUSE will offer one.