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Have you tried any new linux distros lately?

freebird73717 posted 2008 Aug 26 16:48

Me personally I haven't. I'm still happily using Ubuntu 7.10. What new distros have you tried lately. Tell us your expierences. What did you like and what did you not like? For those who have not tried linux at all take a look at THIS PAGE at pcworld. It is an interesting article covering two of the more user friendly distros out there - Ubuntu and Fedora.

FulciLives posted 2008 Aug 26 17:16

I'm surprised they mentioned Fedora. Although I liked Fedora 8 I have heard that Fedora 9 is buggy as all hell although I haven't tried it myself. The reports made me stay far far away! I am still using Linux Mint 4.0 I haven't upgraded to Linux Mint 5.0 because I'm too lazy and lack HDD space to back-up my stuff and start with a fresh install. Anyways Linux Mint 4.0 works for me. I really need to get me more HDD space. As for Linux distros I've barely looked at but would like to spend some time with ... Zenwalk and I haven't had a chance to try openSUSE 11.0 although I really liked 10.3 when in KDE mode. Ironically I hated the Gnome implimentation of openSUSE 10.3 yet I prefer Gnome over KDE in general. I like the idea behind Zenwalk and the fact that it comes with multi-media codecs pre-installed etc. - John "FulciLives" Coleman

jman98 posted 2008 Aug 26 18:15

Well, since you asked... Uubuntu: Likes: Package manager. For the most part stuff "just works" in it. Support for a wide variety of devices is excellent and we got a sound card to easily work under Ubuntu when it just didn't work at all under Red Hat. Dislikes: The whole "the user is an idiot" mentality behind Ubuntu is so incredibly frustrating to power Unix admin types. Having to sudo to do anything "scary" like install software is complete b.s. for power users.

freebird73717 posted 2008 Aug 26 19:26

Yes what makes Ubuntu good for the beginner in linux can be a source of frustration for the nix power users. But for newer nix users it's probably a good "feature". Would be nice if you could turn that off though. FulciLives : I really need to get me more HDD space. Don't we all? :D I can really identify. I have already bought a raid controller card so that I can add more hard drives. Now I just need to save the money and buy the drives.

disturbed1 posted 2008 Aug 27 01:34

Got away from Ubuntu earlier this year. Played with Arch for a while. It's nice, but not my style. Installed Slackware just prior to 12.1 coming out, and have had it on all of my PCs since then. Slackware fits my computing needs perfectly. Spending most of my time in either Fluxbox or Xfce. I love Gnome, but it wasn't hard to make Xfce look and act just like Gnome. Actually it's better, faster.....maybe it's just Slackware :) I did play around with openSuse 11 in a virtual machine. I agree that the default Gnome setup isn't that great. But I do like openSuse overall. It has some rough edges, but those can be worked out by the user. I wish they would point out more of the unique features this distro offers. Yast is nice for those that don't/can't do LVM setup and maintenance from the command line, you can generate an iso of your installation to run live, in an xen setup, or to clone to other PCs. And there's more. Besides that, Novell and openSuse are one of the biggest contributors to open source, both money and code. Once you get past the installation, which I personally don't like, the system itself seemed extremely stable. Perfect for a work machine. I can see why SLED is doing so well in market share. My girlfriend was running Vista for a while, then she went back to XP for about 4 months with Slackware, Ubuntu, and openSuse in VirtualBox. Just the other day she wiped her system and did a fresh Slackware install, on her own :P. I did have to help out in the end, but she made it further with the Slackware install then she did with both Vista and XP.

DereX888 posted 2008 Aug 27 01:42

I used to try every new one as soon as I got hold of it, but for long I settled with slackware and rarely I try some new distros. Last "new" one I tried was latest Ubuntu when I was installing it on my friend's laptop for the second time (after she "managed" to destroy partitions when she tried to add XP, ummm... what can I say). I can't wait though for the first Asus (or Acer?) machine to come with already "built-in" linux in the ROM. I just love this idea, I think a lot of good for *nix in general will come out from this. disturbed1 : My girlfriend was running Vista for a while, then she went back to XP for about 4 months with Slackware, Ubuntu, and openSuse in VirtualBox. Just the other day she wiped her system and did a fresh Slackware install, on her own :P. I did have to help out in the end, but she made it further with the Slackware install then she did with both Vista and XP. Marry her! :D (but in case you don't plan so, gimme her info ;) )

mats.hogberg posted 2008 Aug 27 04:28

Running Xubuntu 8.04 with LXDE desktop on my eee right now. Where XFCE takes 10-12 seconds from logon to usable desktop, LXDE takes 2! Memory footprint is about half of XFCE. And XFCE is considered a light desktop! /Mats

ronnylov posted 2008 Sep 02 08:34

I am using Linux Mint 5 Elyssa on my desktop PC and it is pretty and it works but there are some annoying bugs like in the "start menu" (actually Elyssa menu) sometimes does not disappear until I click on the desktop. So to shut off the PC I must click shut off in the elyssa mnu, then click desktop and another menu shows up where I can choose shut down. Other than that I like it. I have installed ubuntu-server on my home server and here it is CLI only and it makes me learn the linux commands faster than hte shiny desktop systems. I have made quite an advanced disk setup with RAID1, RAID5 arrays using mdadm and on top of that I am using LVM. It's only a simple samba fileserver right now but I will add other things also... I have done some distro testing with virtualbox on my desktop and I tried to install Arch linux but it was too advanced for me so I failed. Then I tried kubuntu and it feels quite good but somehow I prefer gnome over kde. Anyway VirtualBox is great for testing different distros just for fun.

Nitemare posted 2008 Sep 13 05:40

I just upgraded to Mint 5 (finally). I had some initial trouble with getting Envy to work as well as it did in Mint4 but I've got that ironed out now. I upgraded because something had happened to my Mint 4. I couldn't get system updates or packages any more because my root password was suddenly invalid? Probably somehting stupid I did (I have to stop working when I'm too tired) but it might have been something else. I haven't tested too hard... I only updated yesterday. I'm not having any menu issues though... only getting Mint to accept that my monitor will, in fact, run higher than 800x600 resolution. There's a new "screen resolution" tool... it sucks. The old x server tool is still there but they seem to be hiding it in favor of the new, less effective and non-intuitive POS. At 640x480 I could only see half of the tool and trying to click on anything would result in the GUI jumping to the half I couldn't see instead of selecting it. Using the keyboard, I could select what I wanted, but the monitor settings couldn't be changed and my resolution options were 640x480 or 320x240 ... with envy installed!!! After unvoking the old x-server tool from the command line, I got it squared away and now it's running fine... but I nearly re-installed Mint 4 instead

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