I think Ubuntu is a great package to get up and running. I installed it on various machines without any unfixable problems .Also Knoppix is an awesome tool for investigating and fixing PC's .
SuperOS - like Mint, it is a modded Ubuntu, very easy to use, recognises most common hardware/peripherals out of the box - wireless adapters, usb devices, printers, scanners etc., less good with softmodems and webcams. Dead easy update management and installation of apps and packages - shares Ubuntu Software repository and has its own too. Nice to use and does not have the usual Linux "feel" to it, if that makes any sense to anyone. Just about to try Mint, to see how it compares. Will let you know.
Mandriva PowerPack 2010 - love it! Also use Red Hat 5.4 (won't use 5.0 - 5.2 ever again)... have tried most of all the rest. Never really liked Ubuntu. Mint is indeed very good.
Do not know if this has been mentioned however I have been an avid PCLINUXOS usr for more than 5 years.Pclinuxos was originally based on mandrake before the move to mandriva.It is currently a kde 4.4 rpm distro that uses synaptic front end for apt-get. The founder Tex was one of the best 3rd party rpm packagers around in the old mandrake days ,then forked out on his own.It is also available in a few other desktop environments or in kde 4 case,software compilations.Comes with ati or nvidia installed. A minime version is available for the ones who would like to start with a scaled down version.
It seems like every release of Ubuntu is getting worse and worse in my opinion. GNOME is just too slow and Windows 7 is faster than Ubuntu on my PC. I love Xubuntu 10.04.
I use a highly bastardized fedora/LFS setup for the flexibility . I use the box as a NAT router over wireless for the Windows boxes in the house. This way everyone can get on the internet at the same time. Even play multi player games in different rooms. I never posted here because I had the perhaps mistaken idea that this was a doze only board. I have found most windows guys are usually Linux haters. Got into Linux/Unix/Solaris years ago. Also was sold by the fact that many high end IP routers run Linux. Been hooked every since . Also sometimes windows is as enjoyable as a root canal . Nice to have an alternative sometimes.
attitude and choice of software and and likes and dislikes (not hatred) ways we share the same ideas. just i have given up on native WIN install. man it rapes my resources. i am also into LFS, lfs -> blfs -> cblfs -> clfs -> now into hardened kernel's and beating my kernel juice up. smashing and smashing and removing all the dirty bugs from kernel, creating patches, trying to write drivers for kernel, selinux, grsec, selinux, apparmor, tomoyo and pam well with all security sometime i run into major issues. like system locks me down into the box thinking i am an intruder. sigh. paranoia is a mental disease. i guess. :-D yer right, this part, is the only interesting section in the entire forum, the newbie questions reminds me of how i used to ask the same questions in IRC in 1999-2000. then i picked up. and now i do all the work myself. foo fu foo fu patches and wewwwwwwwwwww. echo "main(){}" > dummy.c && gcc -v -g -Wall -ansi -pedantic -O6 -o dummy dummy.c && strip -s dummy && wipe -crfi dummy* ;-) + unsocial. :-D bye
I am using Ubuntu 10.4 and it is really great from the others. It has very wonderful features so you can work very well. There is no problem to use, installation and upgradation. It works very well. Its performance is really better than others.
Another one using ubuntu 10.04. what can i say once i install my drivers I am good to go. I use ubuntu because I know if I run into a problem I will most likely find a solution via google or ubuntu forums. I don't really want anything more complicated at this point in my life
For the last couple of years I've used Mint, it's pleasant to look at, and things work straight out of the box, I guess I'm getting lazy. If you want to look a bit more of a geek, try Gentoo, that'll make your brain ache.
LINUX!!!! Gawd I love it... Thi first one I managed to get into a PC was Suse 6.0 came on like, 5cd's... this was back when it was still tricky to use anything but an ISA bus modem... My favorite distro is kanotix. small but VERRRRY kewl Knoppix/Ubuntu derivative Right after that (and closely related) is Sidux, many of the saME developers working on it The feature most important with a *nix distro is THE SUPPORTING COMMUNITY -- with both of these distro, the IRC channel is always avail, NOT full of "bots" and though many of the devel's are german, there's always someone that speaks english... Good thread! Ln
Mandriva all the way, and yea, like the people that have posted above me, it's all about the person's preferences. Me, myself, I dislike where Canonicial is going with Ubuntu. I now run Mandriva 2010.1 GNOME full time and I don't have Windows installed anymore. Mandriva is fast, works out of the box, and has a great community.
I am a totally N0ob when it comes to Linux .... right now I am dual-booting Ubuntu Lucid and Windows 7 ... but planning to move to another linux distro once I get the hang of it.
For home use Ubunto ...same reason, I am lazy. For server centos, and at work limited to using debian.
I am definitely a distro-hopper. I currently have Fedora running on my server, Linux Mint 9 on both the laptop and desktop, and Easy Peasy on my netbook.