Whats the worst distro you have used
 

Just wanted to see what ppl are using..and what isnt working...

Windows! ME was the worst distro, but in general they're all pretty bad. However R2 is supposed to be 'stable' and the ideas they've been talking about are quite shocking. it seems they've dropped the whole "Only use our stuff" mentallity and are working with a "We'll play nice with others if we have to" kind of philosophy now.

To be honest I can't see any sense in bashing distros. What you consider a "bad" distro depends so much on your personal taste and habits, that the info you request wouldn't tell me anything about how well it would suit MY needs.

Bad distro? Haven't seen one so far and I've tried maybe a dozen. Reading through posts here it seems hardware detection can be an issue. A distro that causes grief for one user may be just the ticket for another user with different hardware.

I would go on record to say that my favorite distro is SuSE (9.2 or later) or Ubuntu, and my least-favorite distro is any Fedora Core release (although I haven't tried FC5).

My $0.02

-Nick

I tottaly agree with nick. I have SuSE 10 with Ubuntu 5.10 and ive tried fedora 4 and 5.and both sucked ass..lol..mostly due to driver incompatabilities..and dont think i didnt try for hours upon hours upon days upon weeks

I doubt there is really a "bad" distro. For me, Ubuntu just wasn't good at all. For others, they love it. It's all subjective. For me Slack is tops.

My favorite is SuSe, and I've had nothing but good luck with Fedora (used 1 and 4). I don't really have any that I don't like, although I probably had the most issues with Mandrake 10, but the 10.1 Mandrake/Mandriva and later Mandriva releases seemed to take care of most of that.

I started with Mandrake but didn't like it at all. Moved to Mepis and loved it because it recognised my hardware really well - I still have soft spot for Mepis. It fell behind in developments, so I tried Suse and it was okay. I got given some FC4 disks and I stayed with it for quite a while - it was good. Upgraded to FC5 but had problems getting things working; I couldn't wait for someone to come up with the solutions. I needed to get the computer to work properly so I moved (last week) to Ubuntu (reluctantly - I don't need a distro to preach ideology at me). In between all of this I tried various Live CD distros, e.g. Knoppix, Kanotix and others I can't remember.

What have I learned?

Each distro has its idiosyncratic ways of working and it takes time to master these differences.

I noticed my sometimes negative reaction to a new distro is frustrated by the fact that it doesn't do things the same way as my previous distro. For example, I loved the ease at which I could use Firefox to install a FC4 rpm. Very simple and convenient. I could search for an RPM that I wanted and simply install it through Firefox.

Ubuntu is a different animal. Lots of command line stuff if the package you want is not in their pre-ordained list of what I need. But I'm getting used to its Ubuntu way of doing things and most of the packages/features I like are now on board.

So judgements about the worst distro are mostly subjective; feel and experience conditioned. I prefer for example neat and tidy distros. Knoppix was over the top for me; too much stuff; and I don't like the almost silly KDE practice of naming packages with an inital "k". But that is me and there are millions out there who would disagree.

So, the obvious answer to your question is that the worst distro is "in th eye of the beholder".

Regards
John

I really like Mandriva and it has been my on/off main distro for the last 7 years, but I think Mandrake 9.x release series was the worst ever for any distro I have used (and I have used many being the distro junkie that I am). I would have like to say Ubuntu because I really don't like it, but unfortunately it works fine on my systems. :)

Mandriva/Mandrake not bashing GNU or Linux but the distribution assembly which i dislike compared to Debian/Ubuntu,Gentoo or even Fedora.

All my really bad Linux Distro experiences were with much older verions and I would like to believe the issues I had with those distros have been fixed by now. but I'd have to agree it's very subjective to the users tastes.

I Prefer Debians way of doing things now.. very nice.

This topic is just a flame war waiting to happen :-(

Anyway: I have had very poor experiences with Fedora 4 and 5- as in, not even being able to boot from the install CD on relatively new (not even bleeding edge) systems with newer chipsets.

I've had the same situation with Debian but have had great success with Debian derivatives such as Ubuntu/kubuntu.

Yes, it depends on what everyone feels makes a distro "bad".
Just their personal tastes or something really flawed in that version of Linux.
I had Mandrake, Red Hat, and Slackware not work with my video card, all but Mandrake released after a version of Suse worked fine with it.
Had problems with my winmodem and onboard sound. Replaced them with something that worked and now I watch what components I buy.
Had a Mandrake 7.x install CD crap out and had to use one I got from a magazine to install it.
Had another version of Mandrake unable to use CDs and floppys until the automount was turned off.
Had Suse with the new 2.6 kernel have USB problems until the automatic mounting was disabled.
I grabbed a "free coupon" Linspire download and am not very impressed with "click 'n run".
Had trouble getting aLinux to run at all (really liked some of the old Peanut Linux versions).
And I find I do not have any distro to add to the "worst distro I have used" list.

I've always had problems with the so-called easy distros, Fedora RC2, won't pick up my nic(3com), haven't tried it since rc4. Mandrake always would want to partition my whole hard drive and not let me create a partition, that was using MDK 9, haven't tried it since.

Harder distros works great for me without issues. Just a matter of taste for what one person likes & dislikes.