Hi all,

Been reading this forum (Distribution forum) for a couple of weeks now and looking at various Linux webpages about the *best* distribution to use.

I've been using Fedora C3 for bout a year now on a dual boot system with the aim to completely seperate myself from XP and I've managed to get a good deal of the way there having become well integrated with the command line interface.

I'm pretty good with most basic command line commands, and have tweaked command files for wireless networking, and so forth. Saying that I still need plenty of help from documentation with installation and dependancies etc.

Now I find FC3 very annoying at the best of times and actually no faster than XP and I recently downloaded Freespire with the aim to giving it a go.

I was hoping Linux users out there is more experience than myself could point me to distributions more suited to the intermediate user as FC3 is obviously for those who want an easy set up with point and click to install.

Any advise is very welcome

Regards

I would recommend Ubuntu. A lot of people recommend this to newbies, but I think it's actually more of an intermediate distro. Sure, the actual everyday use is mostly point-and-click, but the installer is text-based, and most of the post-install configuring is editing config files and using the command-line. The Ubuntu Guide, which has been down the last couple of days but is usually up, is a big help in getting all the right commands.

Short of that... I don't know--Gentoo? Slackware?

My suggestion is Gentoo. I used to have Mandrake (from 7.2 back in 1999 i think up to 10.1) but last winter I decided that I want to try something else and installed gentoo.

Gentoo has excellent online documentation and is completely configurable. The install docs are good, but it is good to have some basic knowledge of working with linux before installing gentoo. As everything is compiled from source the install takes quite some time - especially on slower machines, but when the installation is done you have a nice working environment with only the services/programs that you have chosen. There are also binaries available if you don't have the time for compiling.

ArchLinux, Debian, or Slackware

The "which distro" question has been asked many times, and at the end of the day there really is no way for anyone else to evaluate which distro might match your particular needs and preferences. The only way to answer the question is to try out numerous distros on your own, the decide for yourself which one best fits your needs and preferences.

If you have not done so already you mightr want to check out LinuxISO and LQ ISO for more info. Good luck with it and happy hunting -- J.W.