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I have used Mandrake 9.1, 9.2, 10, 10.1, 2006. Then I decided to use something else, so I tried Fedora 5, Kubuntu 6.06, Suse 10.1 and Mandriva 2007 beta2. Fedora was a complete mess!! Very complex, hard to use, problems with partitions ntfs etc also it does not create seperate partitions for /home and / and also not localised installation for greek. Then I used Kubuntu, much much easier than Fedora, very frendly for newbies, a very good start! Also very automated with hardware, network, partitions etc, and very smart installation. But in installation you cannot change many things it is very fixated! As a conclusion very good impressions from Kubuntu, very bad from Fedora 5. Well then I tried Mandriva 2007 beta2, my well known Mandrake style with a lot of bugs like package manager broken, but more hightech lets say and better than the older versions everywhere. I left Suse 10.1 last because I had never seen a Suse system before. I was pleasently suprised to find out that it was far the best of all the others!! Complete localisation, excellent hardware detection even to a friend's HP pavillion 5500 were all the others had 'null' devices Suse found everything! Very friendly almost like Kubuntu, excellent installation system very detailed, very complete system (about 8Gb of software), separete partitions for / and /home, very good documentation, very welldesigned system tools Yast2 even a newbie can do very advanced stuff. A bit of heavy but very stable and as I said before it has nearly everything a commmon user needs. Problem with mp3 and dvd -> just download the full xine-engine(libxine) and all clear!! I haven't use Slackware yet but I am satisfied with my Suse 10.1 and I'm looking forward to 10.2 which is going to be even better it comes off officially these days!! For those who use Fedora I say try Suse or openSuse 10.2 better and you will find out what I mean!
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I've tried:
Caldera (Corel Linux, very old) Redhat Fedora Mandrake Slackware Vector And my choice, without a second thought, goes to slackware. I think it's the most stable, more configurable and does not have too much of an emphasis on being an "eye candy" like most other distros do. Most of the distro wants to starts up as a graphical UI, but when you first install Linux, it is given that there will always be a lot of tweaking to optimize your system, and it's easiest in the console environment rather than graphical environment. I guess it helps that I'm not too much into KDE or GNOME because they are too large. I run right now on fvwm/xfce, but I really like TWM. I can see, however, why people who just graduated from Windows wouldn't like Slackware, because there is a lot of typing rather than clicking/drag and drop. You also really have to know what you're doing, but you learn very quickly as you go, and there are TONS of resources on the internet (and of course here), so if you're having problems, it's very likely that someone else has already had the same problem. |
I have used Ubuntu.
-------------------------------------------------------- http://www.antarctica-rbak.nl/ubuntu/acer_aspire.php -------------------------------------------------------- |
I haven't use Slackware yet but I see that a lot of people recommend it. I have also noticed that everyone says 'a lot of typing, you learn as you go through, problems with solutions on the internet, search a lot'etc. I came to the conclusion from the previous posts that slackware is a pure linux distro, but my disagreement comes at this point!! We are talking about how to make our new friends comfortable with linux in the beginning and not throw them deep in the console from the very start!! I can understand that all you fellows just don't want a linux system to look like the awfull windows. OK!! But if I am not wrong the only operating system that is teached in schools, most of universities etc is Windows!! I am totally opposite with windows even from an ideological view but I think our new friends must start with something easy in a more graphical style and then to go on with a distro like slackware. OPEN SOFTWARE MUST BE THE FUTURE!!! Please don't advise hard distros just because it is more Linux than another one.
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Still, learning computers is just like doing math. If you dont take time to understand a problem and how to solve it and just get help from someone else, it's not going to lead you anywhere. You need to suffer and waste some time, then you get good at it. |
Maybe in other countries is a bit different but here in Greece the 90% of the PC users has no idea about Linux!!! Windows has conquered everything, all of our public PCs use Windows but before lets say 5 or 10 years ago nearly no one knew about Linux. The 10% is a good number concidering that nearly nobody here teach or provides Linux. We the Greek Linux users are trying to spread the word and we all want not to put the newbies into trouble because as I said before no one here takes the risk easily cause most have no idea!! That's why I say easy distros for start, because we must HIT Windows were it is better meaning FRIENDLINESS and automation. I am a Linux user 4 years now and all of my friends are using Windows. But I had 3-4 friends got into the Linux world. But it was me who did the hole work with setting up the systems trying to make them learn some things about console and believe me it was not easy!! Always problems with hardware etc. So when I found out that there was a so easy and complete distro like Suse 10.1 and 10.2 I told them straight away and they all now use Suse 10.1 and they are very glad that they switched from Mandriva to Suse. And believe me even with the easiest distro that is in my opinion Kubuntu 6.06 a completely newbie needs to spend a lot of time and suffer to be familiar with it.
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Please add Debian to the List.
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A complete newbie could be very happy with PCLinuxOS. It is light and fast, and it runs quite well on older hardware as well the newest stuff. Once you've got your feet under you, Suse is the Mercedes of Linux distros.
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You can find the latest software for SuSE at http://packman.links2linux.de/ |
about suse
i've only really used suse lately, so can't compare too much to others. but here's what i can offer. this is all based on 10.1 (the remastered re-release that's currently available, not the messed up first 10.1 release that apparently just didn't work well at all).
1) easyness. that's pretty hard to measure, because there's so many areas - easyness of desktop use, easyness of hardware plug n play, easyness of playing DVD's and MP3's, easyness of using the installer ... suse's good for most of those except encumbered media formats, more on that below. 2) NTFS : As far as i know any distro will only get you read-only access to NTFS, since microsoft guards the secrets of the ntfs file system jealousy it makes it tough to implement full support. (please tell me if i'm wrong on that i'll be really excited). i have a 2nd drive with windows - it's FAT32, but the principle is the same. Suse found it during the install and it just shows up in "My Computer". Albeit with the slightly cryptic name "/dev/hdb1". but that's not really worse than "E:" now is it :) you may also wonder about automounting portable drives; this works fine too. USB and FireWire drives, as well as a lot of MP3 players, digital cameras, other devices like that, just show up in "My Computer". to be precise that's in KDE. in Gnome they show up on the desktop, like on a Mac. 3) Softwares. someone mentioned packman above. Suse seems to take the approach of trying to package almost everything they can think of onto the DVD, which has its merits. for other things, packman (mentioned above) is a great resource. rpmfind and freshmeat too, of course. opensuse.org has instructions on setting up access to these archives through the YaST package manager, and it does score decent points for 'easyness'. 4) PHP+MySQL+Apache. yes. but i'd guess those are standard with almost every distro. 5) not resource hungry. not necessarily related to the distro, but first to the window manager you use and how much extra software you decide to install. KDE on Fedora will, i'd guess, use about the same amount of resources as KDE on Kubuntu. Which is to say, more than OpenBox, or IceWM, or ... 6) help material. some, wish there was more. for help i often find myself reading ubuntu forums ... 7) darkside media formats. novell seem to try & be really "clean" about these, so no MP3, DVD, most codecs, etc. out of the box. Suse does include RealPlayer, which plays some formats but not others, I don't really understand which. luckily there are packages available to enable codecs, mp3, dvds, and so on without too much headache. after that, Xine & its variants like Kaffeine play things nicely. the only annoyance is that you have to set the default app to something else besides RealPlayer, once you've made your other players functional... also: i might be out-of-date - it seems we still have to play this international game of Hide The DeCSS Package. last time i did this i just installed things from PackMan. |
WHERE IS DEBIAN??? I love that distro...
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From all used RH/CenOS/Fedora,TurboLinux 8.0,SuSE9.0,Slackware 10,and Mandriva2006, I think Mandriva2006 is the most friendly, and Slackware is the most stable. Nearly all my customers in China favor RedHat series.
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Mepis
I've tried a good number of distros; liked SUSE10, hated Unbunto; liked Knoppix, hated Gnetoo. However, I always return to my 'first love' Mepis. It just works for me. Easy to install, easy to run. Recognises all my hardware. I run an order version (3.4 or something like that!) - wasn't keen on Mepis 6.0
My advise would be try as many as you can and find one that works for you - everyone's needs are different. And yes, don't forget Windows. It might not be Open Source, it might be full of bugs but if it works for you.... Paul |
I've always used Debian. I guess I'm a dieing breed.
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