Hi guys,

Just wondering if anyone would care to nominate a disastrous distro from past or present that was simply AWFUL and what exactly was so bad about it?

The list of bad choices is always longer than for the good ones......

I did not "bond" with:
Linspire, Freespire, etc.
Mandriva
Anything made by RedHat
Elive
Gentoo
Slackware
and others that I cannot recall...

In which case(s) was I the problem? You tell me.........

I can name more than 10. Most as equally disastrous in different ways. Asking for one worst distro is just as pointless as asking for one best distro. It completely depends on the user, the admin and the purpose.

2 members found this post helpful.

LOL! "Did not bond with" - how typically tactful of you, Pixellany. :-)

Yes, definitely. At least as far as Slackware's concerned.

Caldera

Kind of a really hard question to ask of the average user; those distros that <person> doesn't "bond" with, are not going to be given a fair chance by <person> before being replaced with something more appealing, so <person> cannot really give a qualified explanation about what was so horrid about those distros.
An exception would be if maybe <person> is forced to use <distro> at work, and thereby getting a long opportunity to learn the distro and grow to hate it more and more with each passing day-- then <person> would be qualified to say what's so horrid about it.

I bonded with Slackware, but not with any others in the same way. Of the others, I didn't really give them enough of a chance to be able to say what was "so bad"-- they just didn't appeal to me, but they probably are the favorite of some other people.

I bonded with Slackware like superglue, Debian stuck temporarily but kept dropping off, and the others I've tried must have been non-stick: Teflon distros.

1 members found this post helpful.

This is potentially a much more interesting question than "what is the best distro." There are really only two I can think of (three, if you consider Ubuntu and Kubuntu separate) that I honestly disliked. (All others simply didn't meet my need well enough, or I couldn't understand them well enough.)

• Xandros: Buggy; applications crashed frequently, and the video often had lines running through it. This was 5-6 years ago, though.
  
• Ubuntu/Kubuntu (which is just Ubuntu with KDE): I don't like Ubuntu much, because it tries too hard to be a newbie distro, and disregards the user's Linux competence, if any. It didn't help that Kubuntu's installer overwrote my GRUB without asking to.

By the way, I can't help but notice the title of this thread, and mock it. "Worst...Distro...Ever. Now back to my comic book store."

Windows 98. It crashed completely on my "Built for Win98" Gateway. After reinstalling, I realized nothing worked because Win98 didn't have any drivers for my machine. I then had to go to Gateway.com on my Daughters Dell, find and download the drivers, burn them to CD, then painstakingly manually update the drivers for all the "Unknown Hardware", one by one, rebooting Windows after each.

Oh, did you mean Linux distros?

I did have an older version of Knoppix once that refused to acknowledge my ethernet, even though it had been detected and configured.

Cheers

Um, I hope your have your asbestos suit ready ...

Anyway, I'll try not to flame too much, but my nomination is Linspire, definitely the worst possible distro, and it was my first. Nothing worked properly, I went the the tech support forums to get help on at least getting internet working, and they couldn't fix it either. I then switched fo Fedora and everything worked fine.

Might I ask why slackware is on that list ? I can understand why RedHat might be on there, I'm not too fond of it either, especially with their recent releases. I would also question why Gentoo is on that list, but I suppose it can be difficult at times if you don't RTFM of course, same as Slackware. Did you RTFM ?

can a linux distro really fail unless it doesn't run on 50% of the hardware out there? or has a broken tool chain? The worst linux distro would then have to be somthing developed by a group of people (or person) that had no clue what they were doing but tried to do it all.

Same here. My brain runs Slack. The others make me go mental.

Funny thread.

So many did not even boot up on my relatively bland hardware. These I cannot even remember.

I think the worst one in recent memory was LinuxConsole.

Goblin, Dream, and Myah do not turn me on although I do appreciate the effort.

I'm really p*ssed off with the new buntus and grub2. These are unusable in my multiboot scenerios.

Of the new crop of releases Mandriva is doing the best for me. Works well on several machines. Video and wireless support is excellent. Mandriva is able to handle multiple wireless devices where others fail. I am not crazy over package management and finding software is always bit of a hassle.

*buntu. Because it feels so dumbed-down. They even decided to not install GIMP recently!

EDIT: Also thought I would mention KDE4 here because it is so BLOATED, buggy, glitchy, full of unnecessary stuff, and hard to use since they came up with this "plasma" thing (It's not that I have something against KDE, I really liked KDE 3.5, actually)! I mean why on earth would you want to rotate your widgets? And Qt3 looked and felt better than Qt4.