I dumped WinXP back in May. I installed Mandrake10 Official, and I haven't looked back. XP is alright for games, but I've found myself playing Chromium alot these days ;-) Not sure what commercial titles are out for Linux, but no big deal.

It seesm that I've more or less mastered Mandrake10, customized it nicely, and become qute comfortable with installing packages through the terminal. Still a bit confused about how to mount certain hardware in the terminal, but Mandrake recognizes most of what I throw at it (except certain USB devices.)

So, I'm willing to try another distro. Which should it be?

I'm looking for:

Ease of use (at least ease of installing packages) I need easy ways to meet dependencies.
Lots of customization possibilities (even more than Mandrake) icons have to be easy to install, for instance, and the taskbar and window decorations haev to be easy to change as well. I also need child panel support.
Heavy KDE focus (should support newest KDE version)
RPM install abilities (I still love RPMS.)
Strong hardware support
One that makes excellent use of lots of RAM, and an Athlon XP 3000+ processor.

I'm still a bit of a newb, but I've learned a great deal, so I'm open to suggestions. Gentoo? Slackware? Debian? SuSE? Xandros? Something else?

drop the nonsense about RPM's (have you actually experienced any other forms of controlled package management??) and gentoo would suit you well. But then all these threads will ever give is the posters favrouite distro, like i just did....

and everyone adores the Gentoo icons... lots of threads asking if they can have them on mdk / fedora...

Well, I like compiling from source, too. Probably the safest way.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by ltd602


So, I'm willing to try another distro. Which should it be?

I'm looking for:

Ease of use (at least ease of installing packages) I need easy ways to meet dependencies.
Lots of customization possibilities (even more than Mandrake) icons have to be easy to install, for instance, and the taskbar and window decorations haev to be easy to change as well. I also need child panel support.
Heavy KDE focus (should support newest KDE version)
RPM install abilities (I still love RPMS.)
Strong hardware support
One that makes excellent use of lots of RAM, and an Athlon XP 3000+ processor.


Here are the three distros I have experience with:

Mandrake (started with 7.0, now with 10.1 community). GOOD: meets ALL of your needs above, you just need to look fairly deep for some of the customization options you want. BAD: at least in my personal experience, I couldn't install the driver for my GeForce FX 5200 from the Nvidia website without my system going so unstable I couldn't run ANY desktop and had to do a full reinstall. (The bad is no biggie unless you're a gamer! )

Fedora Core 2. GOOD: items 1,4, and 5 above. BAD: only SOMEWHAT customizable from what I was able to find, plus I was NEVER able to get it to use the KDE desktop. Instead, it INSISTED on using its own cartoony desktop. More geared towards newbies, seems a little too protective for those of us willing to explore (at least from my experience).

Slackware 10.0. GOOD: Easy to install and customize, with your choice of Gnome and KDE desktops available. MUCH easier to install drivers from the console because it comes up in the console. BAD: no direct RPM support (although it has utilities to convert RPM's to .tgz packages that PKGTOOL can handle) Not for beginners, as some of the command-line configuration and customization options are not available in the desktops. But that also has the effect of teaching you more about Linux, so it's not all bad.

Of the three, lately I find myself running Slack the most, as I'm never quite satisfied with my configuration, and recovery from mistakes have been a LOT less painful than with Mandrake.

Hope this helps.

If you like Mandrake, why switch? Do you want to learn more about Linux?

Anyway, I use Gentoo and love it. I really doubt I'll ever switch distros again, and I've tried Mandrake, SuSE, Slackware, Debian, Arch, and Fedora.

Mandrake:
I liked it pretty well. Was a great way for me to get started with Linux. I mainly switched to SuSE because of all the problems 9.2 gave me, and I wanted to try something new.

SuSE:
It was decent. I found it a bit sluggish and buggy, but it wasn't too bad. I think why I switched to Slackware was I wanted to learn more about Linux, and I got annoyed with SuSE for tweaking stuff a lot and that sort of thing.

Slackware:
I used it for a long time. It was nice. Taught me a lot. It ran well, quite fast. I switched to Arch because Slackware didn't have too many packages, and because swaret hosed my glibc, and something else, twice in one week. (Really my fault... but I got quite frustrated) Oh, and because Chinese support wasn't working too great with it.

Debian:
I tried it for about a day. I couldn't really get it installed, not the GUI anyway. It was big and confusing. Even the main installer confused me, and I knew quite a bit about Linux at that point. I went back to Slackware and continued using Slack for a few months.

Arch:
It was really nice. Nice forums, nice website, nice amount of packages. It was hard to set up, took me awhile, now I could do it faster.. it taught me even more than Slackware. Pacman is a great package manager. It worked good apart from Chinese language support. Maybe I just was too dumb to get it working, I think I would be able to now... but not sure.

Fedora Core 2:
Clean, professional. Nice if you intend to use the default desktop (Gnome) with the default theme and icons (bluecurve) and never really change themes, or install much of anything, but that is only my opinion. Fedora's KDE is kind of buggy in my opinion, I couldn't get the menu editor to work, among other things. Gnome has some problems too. Chinese support was much improved but I had lot of problems with Chinese music files. And, everything is only i386 optimised.

Gentoo:
As far as I can see, I'm sticking with Gentoo. Chinese works the best of all distros. It's fast. It's stable. Portage is great. It is really non-bloated, it gives you only what you want, so you aren't going around with 5 web browsers, email clients, text editors, music players unless you want them. You can install exactly what you want, nothing more, nothing less. You can compile applications/kernel with the support for just what you need, not with stuff you don't need, or lacking what you do. It's up to date. Portage has almost everything.
Only downside, for me, is compile time.

It all depends on what you want.

If you haven't already, check DistroWatch to see pros and cons of the common distros.

Hope this helps.

Mary