I have been wondering which *nix works best as a desktop system. I have this laptop on which I wish to install a *nix and was curious as to which is the best platform to make use of it like a desktop system. Furthermore, I would like to know what are the strengths over using one *nix over the other as a desktop.

-onelung

You're more likely to find what you're after if you ask which desktop Environment is the best. Generally speaking, most people would point you to KDE or Gnome, of which there have been rival wars over (feature wise) for a long time. People like one over the other for often very fickle reasons. These two are the most "popular" partly because they are what come as "default" on many distros so more people get to know them.
As well as these there are a multitude of others such from Fluxbox to Enlightenment, and ten again, do extra packages like 3D desktop also count? People who care enough to choose one of these over the others are often very set in their opinions. Their reasons range from one extreme (runs fast even on low spec) to another (packed with tonnes of effects / eye candy).

What kind of computer are you wanting a desktop for? What kind of user? do you like using terminal much or avoid it like the plague? Do you prefer speed over graphic extras? Are you after something with lits of pop up speech bubbles that is easy to understand or do you hate it how such features get in the way? Tell us these things and people can then give you better recommendations.

This is one of those subjective questions! Really depends on your notebook and what you want out of your operating system.

I wish to use my laptop at college. So for sure I will be making extensive use of wordprocessors and spreadsheets for typing research papers and putting together statistics. I also would like to watch an occassional movie every once in a while. My laptop has a dvd. I have no problem working in console I am familiar with it enough to work through it without a hitch but I think I should make use of a window manager of some sorts. I usually make use of windowmaker. I am not sure however as to say which *nix would have support for a Compaq presario 2100 for doing what I have explained above and producing the best response on such hardware.

Okay. Practically any distro will do. I would load Fluxbox window manager so you don't have unwanted memory hogs working in the background when you play those movies, and it's just my opinion that Fluxbox is better than BlackBox. Prefered Window Managers depend on taste although you can always install them afterwards if your distro doesn't have one you like. Check out http://distrowatch.com/ to compare raw distros against your tastes and the specs of your box.

When you say *nix do you include linux?. Most of the BSD unix variants started their growth as servers and would be my first choice for a server..

Laptops do not allow you the luxury of picking your hardware. and IMHO linux tends to support more devices If you want to use the builtin laptop modem only ltmodems are supported in BSD. Linux supports smartlink and conexant modems in addition to ltmodems.
Java and Flash plugins are doable in BSD but take a lot more time to install than in linux.

My fav-Slackware
as an alternate Mandrake

yes I said *nix. I am not limiting myself to any *nix variant although I use freebsd heavily. My hope is to get the best for the machine I am using so I can make the most use of it.

I'll post on this as I recently had to change some things I do to support a laptop that I missed the return window on...

The BSDs hold a special place in my toolkit that Linux can never approach. Unfortunately, I was forced to install Gentoo (The Linux that wants to be BSD but can't quite make it) on my laptop (x86_64 HP) due to all the BSDs having pretty serious problems with it from not supporting the PCMCIA slots (Net/Open) to powering off when attempting to boot (Free/DFly).

So, I guess I'll plug Linux for hardware compatibility as well, even when (in my case) it runs about 1/5th the speed it should (and yes, I have the stepping stuff all set up, it's just slower than it should be).

Have you looked at debian. I have limited unix skills but found the debian package to be pretty easy to install, patch and install distros...although I still prefer FreeBSD.

I have been told that Freebsd is the more user friendly of the bsd's. its what I use for about 85 to 90 percent of my day to day computing. (I use windows for games). I have used KDE, Fluxbox, Blackbox, Xfce, and Gnome for window managers and on a system with a lot of disk space and ram I use KDE, on older systems I use Fluxbox
http://www.freebsd.org/ FreBSD
http://freebsd.kde.org/ KDE on FreeBSD
http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/ Fluxbox

FreeBSD on Laptops
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...p/article.html
http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~dkulp/fbsd/laptop.html

If you want something automatic, go with Debian Sarge, or Mandrake. These install a nice desktop system. Mandrake installs Gnome, KDE and IceWM. Debian installs Gnome and KDE. KDE is visually quite appealing and more advanced looking than Windows. Gnome is a bit more simple, but easy to use and many say they like it because "it just works". Many apps can be used in both. I use kwrite in gnome, for example.

FreeBSD can work, but you will need to configure your desktop yourself. Apparently FreesBIE is worth checking out as a desktop.

BSD's not hard to get a desktop on ... I'm back up on FreeBSD on my laptop (Thank you *SO* much to Jung-uk Kim and all the folks on the freebsd-amd64 list) and all I did was this

That's not too rough is it?

On a side note -- xfce4 is a decent little desktop. I've only been using it for about 10 minutes now, but I like it so far, and it's considerably slimmer than some of the alternatives, though if you like KDE, there's always the instant-workstation package

Gentoo is the best operating system (period).