Hello,

For a while now I am seriously thinking about starting my adventure into the Linux world, and finally I have some spare time to do it. The problem, of course is what Linux distribution to choose.
I'm very serious about learning and I can put as much time as needed to understand the in's and out's of linux. The problem is there are so many distributions out there and for someone like me, honestly they are all the same.
I don't want a windows replacement OS, so distro's like ubuntu or mint(or some other similar) are not really for me, I think.
Any tips and advices are welcomed, don't be shy to post them.
Oh BTW, thanks in advance for the help and understanding. I know you get this question a lot.

There are hundreds of threads here on LQ about which distro to choose. They always devolve into "I like this one" or "Use this one because I use it". Hit the search button and have fun. Or look on distrowatch and have fun. Or just download a couple of distros, install them one at a time and have fun. Or just download Debian, Centos, and Slackware, see which one appeals to you the most and have fun.

In the end, Linux is Linux, regardless of which distro you choose. IOW, anything the Slack or Centos guys can do, I can do on Debian. The difference between distros is almost like the difference between motor oils: some have pretty stickers, but they all oil your car. Brand affiliation makes people crazy.

Have fun.

Anything in the top 10 or so at distrowatch is fine.

If you like to be in control and don't mind typing a few commands, take a look at Arch.

Some distros that let you learn more than the user-friendly one's I would say are:

Slackware
Archlinux
Cruxlinux
A Debian minimum install
There is the source based distros, such as Sourcemage & Gentoo

There are plenty of others, but these should get you started.

Just so you know I'm not saying "Use my distro", I'll say that I agree with pixellany and FredGSanford. I think distros are different, myself. But I can see how they might seem the same if you haven't used many (or any) and they can basically be grouped into classes. Slack and Arch are very different and SuSE and Mandrake are very different, but most people would agree that the first two and last two are more like each other than either from the other two. (If that made any sense.) And you've already (correctly) isolated Ubuntu and Mint as yet another group, closer to SuSE and Mandrake, but not as close as they are to each other.

So, given what you say you want, I'd agree with something like Arch or Crux (or Slack! ). Just keep in mind that, while distros do differ, there's nothing to keep you from changing Ubuntu to boot to the command line and uninstall the package manager and build everything from source. It's just that that doesn't make much sense to do. But any distro will give you a shell and coreutils on the one hand and Gnome and/or KDE on the other. It's up to you to make the most of whatever you choose (Slack).

Best "Linux learning distro" is LFS, no matter how you look at it.

Not necessarily the best first distro, though - gotta have a host system first. (Yeah, I know there's LFS CDs and all now, but, seriously, I think it's better if you already know a few basic things before getting into LFS. And, even then, you can just copy and paste the LFS book into a terminal and not learn much of anything so, still, it's up to the user/builder to make the most of it.)

If you want the baptism by fire approach I'd say Slackware, it was what I wet my teeth on. You can't do a stage1 install of Gentoo easily these days so that took all the fun out of that (not that I don't still use it mind ). Of the big players, the RPM based distros are much alike and the DEB based distros are much alike, and with all myriads in between. And you have Arch Linux. And if you want Ubuntu without the Ubuntu, try #!CrunchBang.

Thanks a lot for your answers. It really helped me in my decision. So I finally nailed it down to either Slackware or Arch Linux. I'm still searching for what the difference between the two are though. I see that Arch linux is defined as a lightweight distro, but I don't really care about it since I wanna customize it anyway. Both seem to be two of the 'hardcore' distro's and definitely not for newbies. I already installed Slackware yesterday and I'm gonna install Arch in a few mins too. Also, I see that a lot of Slackware users switched to Arch Linux for a reason or another.

And I am sure that a lot of Arch users switched to Slackware......


There are two very big differences:

1. Arch is "rolling release" and by default gives you the latest of everything. Slack is more conservative and has a specific stable branch (like Debian an others)

2. Slack, by default, has no dependency checking as part of the official package management scheme. Arch has the pacman (CLI-only) package manager complete with dependency-checking.