Fedora, every other distro I tried this year I wasn't very impressed with. Not to say they weren't good, they just hadn't changed very much. The Fedora 10 LiveCD ran faster from the CD than Windows Vista did from the hard drive, and supports every single device I have out of the box, including wireless, which is something that none of the other distros I tried this past year can say. I liked Fedora 10 so much, it has become my new permanent OS. I made the sacrifice and ditched Windows altogether after backing up my emails, and have now made the 100% conversion to Linux.

OpenSuse is way better than most distros. The only distro that comes close is Ubuntu

in my openion
Top -> Slackware it is always slacked

Possibly. I voted Slackware in this poll, because it works perfectly well for me as a desktop distribution. Anything else is irrelevant.

I really enjoy these discussions :)

The truth is that all of them are the top, as long as one of them suits your own needs. Come on, Linux is Linux!!! Let's be proud to belong to the Linux user community no matter what distro is the best or the worst, as log as we don't have to depend on MS... I guess that's the most important point.

Don't forget this is just a poll

Cheers

Luis

Hi, i use Zenwalk now for 4 years and i was testing and using a lot of others and no way... for mi Zenwalk is just the best: fast, professional, easy, stable and just all you need. 5.4 will be out soon.

Rar, we must fight amongst ourselves. Fedora all the way the rest of you all suck big hairy kiwis!(Actually I really like kiwis) Actually I agree 100%, it's good though that people can post "why" they think their distro is the best, it may open some peoples' eyes to other distributions who haven't quite settled on a single one yet.

Arch Not It
 

I read all the posts and there were a few that made me think that Arch might be something to try. I eventually got it installed using LVM. The docs were ok, I had some problems with getting Grub to work and went with Lilo instead. I then started reading the docs to get Xfce installed. After downloading the packages, I got an error when trying to install Xfce.

I needed something that "just worked" out of the box so that I can spend time on the stuff I get paid for. I really liked the minimalist approach and ideology behind their package manager and build system. But in the end, I don't have a lot of extra time to spend messing with the system.

I killed my Arch install and moved on to xubuntu 8.10. I had good results with 8.04 on a different laptop. Using the alternate install CD, I was up and running in no time with LVM, wireless, etc. I think I will try OpenSUSE the next time I have some time to try a new distribution, but for now, I am extremely happy with xubuntu.

Within the last 6 months, I have installed FC9, Gentoo, Debian, Kubuntu, and Mandriva on one machine or another.

I'll stick with Mandriva. Of the group I listed, it is the one that seems to just work while not working to stop me from doing what I want, not requiring hours to install and config, and not forcing me to debug for them or debug the installation to get it working.

If I had to use Linux, Slack would be where it was at for me. Else Debian a close second.

fwiw- as a *nix user since the early 80's, imho bringing Linux to the masses has not necessarily been a good thing, e.g. look at the HIG "our users are stupid" dumbing down virus that has saddled Gnome with about the worst window manager I've ever used....

How many technicians You 'imagine' maintaining this 2000 desktop fleet?

(Have You ever maintained over 30 PCs?)
:-)

And in which time cycle?

(I imagine as i write:
1. de-dusting 20 pc/day 3 times a year
2. Formatting a new HDD 10 times a day
3. crawling in yoga positions to check cables for 5% of the fleet every day
all done by the one 'red-hat-saved' wonderboy admin)

I would more likely make a single install for standard 6hours
and nc-ed it all over the place floor by floor, while flirting with "whatever comes our way", like any old fashioned Slacker
:-)
If they get bored, I would require a dedicated tech for every floor, so "we could answer in parallel"?

Duplicate post.

registered Linux user #412308

Linux Mint 5.0, I like the enhancements.

Puppy, keeps my legacy equipment running rather than collecting dust (Latitude i486 100 MHz, hey... it still works!)

registered Linux user #412308

My Choices...

Opensuse --- because it's NOT umboontu

Slackware -- because it's scares the bumbuntoo users

Mint -- because it's what boontumu should be

Mepis -- Same as above (plus laptops love it)

/butoombu rant off

What you say about Suse/Slackware/Mempis may be valid for power users and others but Ubuntu has an important place which is increasing, probably much to the embarrassment of Microsoft developers who see their new distro overshadowed by the sparkling Gnome and KDE desktops. Slackware scares me somewhat but then I never pretended to be a Linux devotee nor keyboard mechanic until I installed Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Now see what a tremendous job the boys and girls in the Linux family have done - mostly for free!