I am fairly new to linux and I have explored atlease 7 distros and I have gotton all of them to install and They all have there perks but Mainly i can not decide on one. This is what i want in linux. Easy package handeling, nice and stable graphical enviroment, easy to do server administration, ease with drivers especially video (love to get the Cedega version I bought to work right on my ATI card if not Nvidia here I come). Once I decide on a distro I will attack this problem. I've narrowed it down to four mainly. Slackware, Debian, Fedora Core 3, and we all can't forget Gentoo. Mainly, i'm looking for the ultimate Windows replacement. Suggestions on which one would be best at all these? (And please don't tell me to use all text or forget x when i'm running servers I don't care if it chokes performance a bit I'm just familiarizing myself with linux and also i've tried webmin and I like it but i don't want to do my administration from it I'd rather use something built into the operating system) Thanks for reading this very long post. I have Fedora now but package handeling and stability isn't the best. The war in my mind has been on and off for 2 years and i'd just love to settle down with one and forget windows for good.

I envy you. I havn't gotten any distros to work.

Because it seems like you want to be secure, stable and to have alot of control over you r system i would probably choose gentoo. Gentoo is a distro that is more customizable and gives you more control then the other three. Not that Debian, Slackware and Fedora Core 3 are no good because all distros have their own good and bad aspects no one distro solves every problem. However in this situation i would have to go with Gentoo.

Unfortunately, there's no perfect distribution, and there will never be. Slackware does not have a great package manager, Debian and it's apt get works great at first, until it funks your system really bad at the point you can't install or remove anything, Fedora is buggy and unstable(keep Redhat's tradition at best, with exception of Redhat 7.3 which was pretty good), Gentoo is time consuming with portage.... well, you've get the idea.

If you are into gaming, it does not matter much the graphics card you own. Although Nvidia offers neat drivers for Linux, the availability of games is still limited for Linux. Sure, we get a few new native games as Doom 3, but it's not much more then that. Cedega is great, but it's still full of problems, for obvious reasons.

Well, to sum up: If you are after a distribution which has everything, you won't find. Pick up one that you like and add the packages yourself to make life easier for you.

If you are a real gamer, dual boot. There's nothing you can do against that yet. I don't think it's worthy the investment of a new Nvidia graphics card if you have a perfectly good ATI, because later on, you will see that games in Linux were not quite what you hoped for...

Since you know what you want to do with you machine, install one distro with the minimum required and add the packages yourself. All Linux distributions are the same, and yet different, meaning it really won't matter much the distribution you use, but the packages you install. Pick a distribution randomly, pick it by the color or the fanciest homepage... just consider package management, the rest is just the next step to get it working.

I chose no Linux at the end (but am a Slackware and SuSE lover) but FreeBSD because of it's license, community, philosophies and package management. The rest is up to me making it work.

Good luck!

if you feel up to the challange and feel like adding only the packages you want and want your server to be really stable you could try LFS but it would probably be a lot of work.

There is no right or wrong answer to which distro you should use - it's a matter of personal choice. The only thing to do is continue to play with the distros that seem to fit your needs and preferences the best, then determine the winner on your own, at your own pace. Good luck with it -- J.W.

These are the kinds of responces I wanted to hear. I think I'll just knock fedora and slackware out of the picture for now. I'll dual boot Debian and Gentoo together and put them to the test. My main goal is to say bye to windows forever. I also knew no linux is perfect just the one that was closer :-)

I'm a noob too and I really like Fedora. The default package management isn't too good at all, but you can install apt and synaptic for it, and then you're steaming! Can't remember the URL for APT for Fedora, but do a quick Google search and its pretty easy to find. That's how I got it originally.

Thanks Guys for all your input. I just couldn't decide so I built 2 servers one with debian sarge and one with fedora 3 and run them both for a while doing the tasks that they are known to be good at and hopefully as they advance I'll decide on just one.

I have tried all of the ones you talk a bout and a few more I find myself coming back to Slackware. Just my two cents. Peace

A stable good with drivers and extremely easy package handling i would definatly go with suse

SUSE cost $800 a year ofcoarse it should be stable for that kind of $$$. But I had the trial of that edition and all it did was give me hell and it didn't work very well or at all with my microsoft enviroment. And I think I'll take a better look at slackware. Thanks, back to a 3 fight.

If your looking for a good Linux server and you like Fedora Core 3 you should try CentOS http://www.centos.org/

This distro strives to be a free clone of the RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux). It is just as stable, and it's completely free.

If you're a bit of a gamer, IMHO you'd be best off leaving a couple of partitions for XP and game data.

Game publishers, unfortunately, don't see any $$ in Linux yet. BTW, you'll have more luck running OpenGL games under Cedega than DirectX (think Call Of Duty!)

Treat the windows install as a Wintendo - mine is totally unpatched, not networked and never does anything other than run games. Does the job I want it to.

I'll Check it out thx.