Hi,

Ok, I know the "which distro should is best to you" has been asked a good 3517 times here, but that's not exactly the question I want to ask.

I'm quite a new Linux user (I've used it for approx 1 month now). Although I'm not totally convinced by it (i find it slower than Windows, and much harder to understand), I'm so fed up with Microsoft's recent evolutions that I want to try and stick with Linux - as an "act of rebellion" and, er... just for the fun of it, too...

I've used a Mandrake 9.1 and mostly KDE as my desktop environment/window manager.

Now I'm quite fed up with having 5 programs on my system which do the same thing. I rather enjoy choosing one program to perform one task and keep that only program on my system so as not to have a 154646 options menu... For example I find it useless to have Xterm, Konsole, Gterm and three other console program on my system.

So what I would like to do now is make a new Linux installation. And I'm looking for a distro that could run faster than Mandrake. But I'm looking for :
-easy installation : I don't know how to compile a kernel and don't want to try out right now. I want the distro to automatically configure my hardware, too.
-recent KDE, IceWM, maybe gnome installation
-automatic installation of every useful development library so that I won't encounter any problem when I configure or install programs.

And that's all, for any other programs I want to choose them and install them by myself.

Do you have any suggestion of a distro I could try? Should I just stick with Mandrake and install only the packages I need ? (but I'm afraid it wouldn't run any faster!).

Thanks a lot!

Well, the problem with Mandrake, as you have obviously already realized,is that it is terribly slow at times. So is Red Hat (although they are probably the most tried and true distros, and the most stable). They are also quite a bit larger than other distros, as well, which is primarily which slows them down. From my experience, I've gone from RedHat to Slackware to now Gentoo. First of all, I like Slackware for it's more minimalistic approach, while it still provides an installer (more complex that mandrake or redhat, though), and I know that it has pretty recent versions of kde and gnome (not sure about IceWM, though). Also, it probably doesn't have the best of hardware configuration, but for most mainstream accessories, not too much configuration is required. Slackware is definitely faster than my RedHat distro was, and it very well may be faster than mandrake, too. My one problem with Slack, though, was that it was occasionally quite difficult to install programs, since all you can use is tarball installations, which you must compile and create Slack packages from (There are a few, but not many precompiled Slack packages). You have to fix dependencies on your own, too.

Gentoo, on the other hand, is quite different. It's very minimalistic (you choose all of your packages separately), and requires a lot of configuration, including compiling a kernel. However, it has a fairly simple installation mechanism, which is basically a completely automated tarball install system. The other good thing about gentoo is that is potentially one of the fastest distros, since you can have it compile the entire OS with your proc's optimizations.

The bottom line: If you don't want to have to figure out how to do some extra configuring, it would probably be best to just either reinstall mandrake or unisntall any unnecessary packages. If you don't mind doing a little configuring and research, and you need a little more speed, go with Slack, or something of that sort. If you're feeling ambitious, go for something like Gentoo. This isn't to say that any other distros are not good choices, but I'm kind of going off of mainly personal experience.

Well I read some stuff about gentoo, wandered on their web site too... But it seems too tough for me, I don't feel like installing everything by myself! I only feel really comfortable when my computer shows a GUI and when I can browse the net to find help. In front of a black screen and a command line waiting for my orders, I'm lost... And I don't have a printer, so learning all the Gentoo installation procedure seems a bit ambitious. What I would like is something quite simple, that would soon place me in front of a desktop environment, then I can install my programs and configure my desktop easily.


I think I'll give slackware a shot. But maybe I'm mistaken about Gentoo installation! Do you think it's possible to install it without any printed help? Are there help screens during the installation? I don't mind reading, actually, but I just want to be told what to do to make the stuff work!! :-))

Thanks for your answer.

To install Gentoo, you can boot with Knoppix and read the documentation online. It can not be that difficult if I was able to do it. But it takes days to finish.