I was wondering what was the prefered distros of thouse with more Linux skills than I. As I'm new to Linux and have only tried Mandriva 2006. So please tell us all what your favoriet Disrto is and why.

I love them all. Once you know Linux / Unix you can work with any distro.

The consensus is Ubuntu is great for beginners.

Other distros include CentOS, Fedora, SuSE, Mandriva, Xandros, Linspire, Debian, Knoppix, Gentoo, Slackware and many more.

Check out:

http://forumz.tomshardware.com/sof [...] 30699.html

and

http://distrowatch.com/

Good Luck :-D

I'm a relative noob (about a year) but I've been using SuSE since 9.1 Pro. I've upgraded with each offering (now 10.0) and I like it a lot. It's friendly enough to get up and running quickly and with it, you can be productive in no time. I prefer StarOffice to OpenOffice though the former must be purchased where the latter is free.

I have one box that I dual boot with XP when I wanna play games but rarely do I. I'm typing this one a Linux only box networked to the other via wireless router. I'm sharing files, a printer and secure all at the same time.

I've tried the old RedHat (prior to Fedora) and even Corel Linux many years ago. This one I like and it's good enough to virtually get me off Windows entirely!

SuSE is cool :-D

According to http://distrowatch.com/

These are the most popular distros:

Ubuntu
SUSE
Fedora
Mandriva
MEPIS


I do not believe this is a scientific poll.

No redhat ??? Man you missed one of the biggies. Linux_0 u r slipping.

BTW can Apples OS 10 be considered a nix distro since it is BSD ?

No redhat ??? Man you missed one of the biggies. Linux_0 u r slipping.

BTW can Apples OS 10 be considered a nix distro since it is BSD ?


Hehe :-D

Fedora is Redhat's community distribution and official Redhat products are now mostly for enterprise environments -- I also said "and many more". Anyway :-D

Apple OS X is Unix, modified but it's still Unix... I'm not sure if it's officially POSIX or conforms to the Unix specs but it is still Unix.

My guess is they are not bragging about it because Unix tends to scare people.

A little offtopic but recently I was looking at a machine with RedHat Enterprise ver 3 and guess what???? No MC. True it was setup by a friend who is a linux beginner at best but he said that he did a “standard install”. Man they are starting 2 look like a MS.

RedHat is concentrating on Biz customers and you can't blame them consumers are a pain to deal with.

Sorry don't mean to be harsh, but there is some truth in my statement.

Ease of use rules... even more so in the corporate environment. Businesses want productivity; if the employees are stuck figuring out how to use their computers... they won't be very productive. It's important to ensure your software is as easy to use as Windows (or more so) if you're going to convince business to hop on your bandwagon.

This is true and they have ease of use down.

Linux is so easy to use now a 3 year old can do it.

And I mean that literally.

I have 3 year olds using it :-D

They love those games :-D :-D

I love the games myself... the freeware stuff that you can get for Linux is tons more fun than Minesweeper and Solitaire.

I agree... it is very easy to use... but you've got your stubborn employees (or even employers) that get used to Windows and are very unwilling to use anything else... no matter how easy-to-use it may be. I suppose I can understand the mentality somewhat... especially if someone has been burned in the past trying something new.

I got tired of being burned with all of the security holes in Windows. It seems that I'd need to fdisk and reinstall everything every 6 months to a year and that's after spending too many dollars trying to plug all the holes with aftermarket utilities like Norton Antivirus, Internet Security and Black-Ice Defender.

Now, I just use SuSE Linux and Star Office. I've everything I need and most of what I want (XP still rules in the games department).

Of course there's a learning curve. There was a learning curve going from DOS to Win3.1, then to Win95, 98, FU (I mean ME), when I finally gave up and went to NT4.0, then 2K and finally XP. Too insecure. Forget it. I'll stick with SuSE.

The problem is M$ has everyone brainwashed and people are actually afraid of computers and are afraid to try something new.

They do not realize there is more than one way to do something.

I've been a computer person for over 20 years and I can't figure out where M$ stashes things sometimes.

I've used just about every single version of DOS, Winblowz [(C) 2006 Anoobis] and Unix and a few other OSes but to this day I have to fight with Winblowz [(C) 2006 Anoobis] just to get it to do simple things.

The only thing I use it for is playing some games that do not run on Linux yet and I can't even get it to do that without crashing, often several times a day

Granted the crashing can be attributed to M$, the game developers, the hardware/driver developers and possibly some user error but it is thoroughly annoying and a colossal waste of time.

Well said! Here here!

:-D

I hear ya both... but I'm still primarily a Windows user... Linux is just something I play with in my spare time. (Which I don't get a lot of these days). I have very few problems with Win XP, so that's probably why I've stuck with it for the most part.

Now, don't get me wrong, I do love Linux too... I don't know why I picked Fedora over any of the others... but now that I'm used to it, I really don't feel like trying another. Mostly it's due to time constraints... sometimes it takes me a while to get everything the way I want it; once I do, I don't want to try it all over again with another distro... lol.

The kewl thing about Unix, Linux and BSD is that once you understand the fundamentals it is actually very easy to go back and forth between different versions :-D

Sure you might have a few annoyances here and there but overall it is quite painless.

It is also quite easy to migrate software and settings once you know how :-D