What is so awesome about your distro!
 

I think one of the greatest things about Linux is all the different flavors to choose from. Its almost as if you can tell what kind of person someone is by what distro they are using. :p So, tell us what distro is your cup of tea, and what exactly makes it perfect for you. Maybe even what you think they could do better. I guess Ill be the first...

Personally, Ive been a fan of SuSE every since I found out about it (around the 7.0 time). I had found out about Linux, and being the total dork that I am, I had to check it out and see if Microsoft had anything to worry about. I gave RedHat a try and that didn't really do t for me. I just thought it was too hard to configure. So a friend of mine was like "Hey, newb! Get yourself some Mandrake! Its what all the baby linuxers get their feet wet with!" So I did. I kinda thought the same thing. Lots and lots of commands I needed to learn in order to keep my monitor from exploding.

Alas, I had just about given up. And while I was reformatting my HD to Fat32, low and behold my cousin calls and says "Stop right there! My penguin senses told me you were reformatting your HD to a Windows format! Don't give in to the dark side young learner! I shall give you the key!" And so he flew... I mean drove over with 7 nifty little CDs that had "SuSE 7.0" written on them. He showed me the greatest little tools Ive ever seen (YaST2 and SaX2). "Why... with these tools... I CAN TAKE OVER THE WORLD!" and I did... well, actually I just got my box up and running and X configured correctly so that it looked quite nice... but I mean... it kinda felt like taking over the world.

So thats why SuSE is my distro of choice. I like the configuration tools better than any Ive seen on the other distros. Of course the one thing I still hate about SuSE to this day is that they don't make ISOs available for the public. Oh well. We cant all be perfect. :p

sorry about that. I kinda relized that after I posted it too.

I think the mandrake control center is awesome, very easy. It is easier to just go into there and adjust your screen resolution that to go and modify you XF86Config file.

URPMI baby...URPMI :D

Otherwise, its linux that's awesome...a distro is just another facet :D

Slackware users are better lovers!

Ive heard good things about both Slackware and Gentoo. I really wanna give them a try, but I dont really have the space. :(

Well Bitta, if Slackware users are better lovers, then that must make us Arch/Gentoo/Debian users sex gods. I've gotta say, when I installed SuSE 8.1 I wasn't at all impressed (maybe just a bad run). It was rather buggy on my machine. For the longest time I was a diehard Mandrake fan, but then I realized that it was just so bulky and had so many things I didn't need. So moved onto Slack (8.1). I used that for about 3 months, like it, then I updated to 9 and HATED it. After that I reverted back to Mandrake and had my own thing going on with that for another month till I found Arch Linux. Honestly I've never been more comfortable distro than Arch. I love the command line and using nano to edit all my files because it allows me to know EXACTLY whats going on with my configuration files. Those config tools are handy when you're a n00b but they are a nostalgic memory for us MS haters lol. I'd prefer to manually edit all my configuration files than to bother with control centers. I'd also like to add that the excellent part of Arch is it has a binary package system similar to apt-get (Debian) which allows me to pick and choose what I want to install, and the good thing is that the apps are kept much more up to date than the apt-get packages. I really love my distro for the hands on I get from it and wouldn't trade it for anything. Another plus for Arch is the fact that most users that switch from any other distro to Arch have a faster computer, Arch seems to run MUCH faster than other distro's, even gentoo. Though mind you Arch is only for i686 processors. If you're looking for something that won't take hours to install and has excellent power, then use Arch, cuz Arch users are sex gods :).

me, im a redhat user, not to say the other distros are inferior in any way, because the are not. after all they are linux, but i just prefer redhat as sort of a 'middle of the road' distribution in terms of skill level, not to hard, and not to o easy either :)

You know what's even easier? ctrl-alt-( + or - ) to adjust your resolution.. ;)

I love RedHat, why? Well, RH is not barebone while not being full of bloat.
Also, configuring manually is much more easily in RH, cuz the configuration files are smaller(less comments), and better organised than in other distros(Compare Mandrake's (saw only ver. 8.1) XF86Config with RH's).

Only thing I dislike is that with RH 8 you cannot choose 'real' filesystems for your partititions, only ext2 and ext3, which suck compared to XFS.

Slackware man, slackware all the way.

been doin the user friendly distro thing (mandrake/redhat/suse) for about a year now, i decided that i actually wanted to learn linux, so last week i installed slack.

Slackware is beauty in simplicity, you dont need big bubbly graphical installers and GUI only config tools. c'mon guys, what are we, windows users? Slackware doesnt hold your hand, but it doesnt shove you out into the dark either. It has a great collection of utilities, the packages on it are want in a base system (they assume you are able to install your own software *shock*) and the amount of support and documentation is enough to walk you through how to do things properly.

Debian does it for me, apt is excellent!

Debian man here, apt-get baby,

P.S

apt-get moo

:D

Slack9!!! Woo hoo!!!! :D

really can't be arsed with an evangeical rant but....

Gentoo's Portage is SO SO SO SO good. superbly great package management without being unsulting.

this contrasts with the way redha's package stuff goes... they use RPMS for ease and all that, but (last time i used it) comes with no useful rpm tools, like mandrakes urpm system, which is a vast improvement. redhat keeps it simple.. but still leaves you a mountain of deps that you quite probably wouldn't even have if you installed from source...! bit of a paradox really... go Portage!

Well I've been using RH 7.2 and up, RH 9 rocks with a little help from a Debian port called apt-get with synaptic, Synaptic is the top Software Management tool around, I use it for all my software management so easy and user friendly looking after all installation and removal, plus when you have to just get right down and compile a program that doesn't have an RPM binary for it use Check-install.

To me with a Synaptic and check-install helping RH it becomes the top ditribution for me.

that's an additional tool though... not part of the distro, surely something like that should be being used as standard, not somethign that is being continually recommended here when people get stuck with dependencies

I really like SuSE 8.2.

I have a love-hate relationship with YaST. It really has improved alot with this version as far as package management is concerned. It always was the best for setting up my hardware of the 3 distros I tried. It does do a little too much for you, will overwrite any hand edited config files if your not careful, and has a snotty attitude - like the big warning at the beginning of XF86Config: "DO NOT EDiT THIS FILE" (I think they say please too). Just watch me.

But thats configuring stuff. I used to be annoyed by the lack of SuSE rpms and how slow the were to provide official updates to old software versions, but I've found several sources for hand rolled SuSE rpms that have fixed most problems I've had. I solved my ugly galeon problem. The new gimp is a huge visual improvement.

SuSE is also a crisp performer in the same way slack was. RedHat seemed sluggish to me but this is all subjective.

When I used SuSE 8.0 I was disappointed because alot of the packages that SuSE included were buggy or older versions than what i had from RH 7.3. But I kept going back to SuSE because there was just something I like about the feel of the distro. i was really hoping that 8.2 was going to be the disto i've been looking for and so far I'm happy.

I can't really tell anybody why I like SuSE. I just do. What I think it boils down to is that when you start with linux, you need to keep trying distros until you find the one that fits into the nooks and crannies of your grey matter. They are the same, and yet they are different.

Man, what a pointless post :D

Yes it would be nice if RH would just include apt and synaptic with the distro it is a lot better than their own installer.

everything with slack is great