Distros of interest and why.

[exploder]

What distros are of interest to you and why? Many of us enjoy trying and following different distros and I was just wondering why they might interest you. Please don't bash anyones choices or reasoning and try to explain what holds you interest.

Linux Mint Xfce Debian

This release has my interest because it is not Ubuntu based and I am interested in what the future might hold for it. With Gnome going to Gnome 3 and Ubuntu going with Unity I think this edition holds the key to preserving things we have all grown to love like the Mint menu. There has been mention of us providing our own package updates and the Mint menu being developed to work in Xfce like it does in Gnome, this would be exciting in my opinion. The current release updates from testing and tends to create some confusion. If we had a solid base, built our own updated applications and updated the base elements when necessary, I think the Xfce Debian based release could potentially become more popular than Ubuntu. If drivers were provided out of the box like Mandriva and PCLinuxOS, it would be extremely nice. I am very interested in how this edition evolves.

PCLinuxOS e17 gtk based editions

I am currently running the PCLinuxOS e17 gtk mini test 2 release on a machine and am very impressed with several things. This is the first e17 edition that has not given me any errors and I have been running it for a couple of weeks now. The nvidea drivers are installed out of the box, they work fine and plymouth works without me having to fix it all the time. I like how quick and responsive the system is and e17 has has the elegant look with the new artwork the PCLinuxOS Team have used in this build. Now, I do see some text with plymouth but it has always consistently worked for me and as I understand, if it does not work it will display text and that is perfectly expectable for me.

I like the "mylivecd" application that comes stock in all flavors of PCLinuxOS. There is never any excuse not to have my perfect working system backed up and I can install what I have on other machines. The rolling release aspect of PCLinuxOS is a major reason why I like this particular distro also, it's nice having up to date applications. Almost forgot to mention the kernel! I like the way Texstar builds kernels, I never see kernel errors and my hardware always works.

Now these are just a couple of projects I like and why I am enjoying following their development. What has your interest?

[viking777]

What has your interest?

Nothing.

LMDE (admittedly with a fluxbox desktop) has ruined my interest in all other distros I have come into contact with.

I am really angry at Clem for doing this to me

I used to get through half a dozen distros a week but now they all pale into insignificance compared to LMDE. The last distro I installed was suse 11.4, but I only did that to see if I could boot an ext4 distro from grub-legacy. As soon as I found out I could I deleted the partition it lived on.

Can I get LMDE aversion therapy somewhere so I can rekindle my interest in other distros??

[exploder]

viking777, I understand where you are coming from. You have got to be the king of setting up a light desktop environment and I always enjoy the screenshots you post.

[vrkalak]

My "distros of interest" . . .

+1 for LinuxMint-Xfce version. I look forward to being a part of this distro's growth.

Most everyone knows that I am an Xfce fanatic.

Crunchbang 'Statler' (Xfce)
Crunchbang has been around for a few years, based on Ubuntu and using the Openbox Window Manager.
Late last year, Crunchbang made the move from Ubuntu to being Debian-based. Crunchbang is now based on Debian Squeeze (stable)
While not leaving their Openbox roots; they have added the Xfce Desktop Environment.
Unlike Ubuntu, Crunchbang uses Xfce as a 'stand-alone' desktop, the way Xfce was meant to be.
True to form ... Crunchbang-Xfce is light on resources, minimal and super fast.

[exploder]

vrkalak, I like your reasoning on Crunchbang and you certainly have a great deal of talent with light desktop environments. I have admired many of the desktops you have posted and wished I had half your skill at making them look awesome! Nice post.

[linXea]

Slackware, my companion since 2002 and has yet to let me down. They keep it simple and vanilla, just the way I like it. It may not be best at anything but it's good at everything, whether you're running server, desktop or laptop. Once you learn slackware, you know linux.

Another distro I am very interested in is CRUX linux. Origin from Sweden, which caught my eye quite a few years back. It's hard, no doubt about that, but it's still very simple. Everything is manual and if you have the base knowledge to handle that you'll feel right at home. Just like BSD they've chosen to use ports-system which I really like. About 6 month ago they released their first x86_64 arch, before they were pure i686 optimized. CRUX linux is currently running on my media-box.

Frugalware started out as a fork of slackware. Its creator vmiklos, didn't fancy slackware's package-system and chose to head in the archlinux direction with pacman as package manager. However they may have started out as "based on slackware", now they are 100% independent. They focus on keeping it simple and they have a pretty large repository for their size. What I really like about this distro are the maintainers. They are pure golden if you ask me. Lovely bunch of people from all over the world. Being a smallish distro can benefit its users with immediate contact with the people in charge. Also, if you find a bug (very rare), notify a dev and it will be taken care of asap. This is what I currently use on my desktop. It's fairly simple but still not directed to absolute beginners. Intermediate users will feel just like home.

[exploder]

linXea, you have some very interesting choices. Slackware as I understand is very lean and fast. The Frugalware forum seemed to have a very friendly and helpful community the last time I visited there. Your choices demonstrate quite a bit of knowledge, I know you have to have a pretty good knowledge of dependencies but you would end up with a very clean, solid system.

[MALsPa]

Mepis:

I like a Debian Stable-based distro. Nice community. Easy to install. I like using it to boot all my other distros, and and the Mepis live CD comes in handy for lots of things. Kind of partial to Mepis since it was the first distro I installed myself.

SalineOS:

Got interested in it as an alternative to Mepis; I want to see how things go with it over the course of a few years. I like how the developer is very active at the forums.

Debian Stable:

Rock solid, dependable. I tried it at first because I thought it would be a challenge, but it wasn't difficult to install.

Ubuntu LTS:

I like the world-community concept. I think that going with the LTS versions allows me to avoid the problems some people seem to run into with the 6-month release cycles.

PCLinuxOS:

Dependable, gets me a little closer to "cutting edge," and it's a nice rolling release distro. Easy to install, works well out-of-the-box. I installed to see how long before it would break, actually, but it just keeps on working.

Fedora:

I've only used it for a few months. Just wanted to see what it was all about, and get to know the .rpm side of things a little better.

Scientific Linux:

Newest addition here. Looks like a distro that I can install and keep for a few years without much hassle. Also gives me more practice with yum. Seems to have a nice, civil community.

[linXea]

Thanks exploder. I think my choice of distros differ from most of the people here since I never got hooked on debian and its descendants. When I first started with linux you either went with Debian or Slackware, and I went with Slackware since I couldn't even get Debian installed back then. I think the simplicity of slackware drove me in the direction of even more manual distros later on.

[proxima_centauri]

For what it's worth, I've installed Linux Mint, Debian, Ubuntu and Arch Linux as primary operating systems (although tested countless others via VirtualBox).

I've used Arch Linux as my primary operating system for just under 2 years now. I certainly enjoyed the initial learning process. It was simple and modular enough to customize to the degree I felt comfortable, while having great documentation to configure and manage the system. I prefer the rolling release nature of Arch Linux and enjoy having access to the latest software. I've been lucky enough to have reliable stability in spite of the continual upgrades, and any obvious issues involving manual intervention are typically announced on the main page or being discussion on the forum. The availability of additional software via the Arch User Repository (AUR) is a treat, and I like not having to hunt down individual repositories for less known software. On a side note, the ability to enable the Arch Testing repository and install GNOME3 has renewed my interest - and I'm enjoying it thoroughly.

I enjoyed testing Ubuntu 11.04 and ran it for a couple of weeks in the beta stage. I was not plagued by any showstopper bugs (plymouth stopped working from time to time)i and had time to focus on using Unity. It was a fresh departure and break but ultimately not enough to keep me from Arch Linux.

[900i]

Crunchbang-Openbox, cause it's so damn fast.

[exploder]

So far it seems many of are are interested in light, fast systems.

[Habitual]

OpenSUSE 11.4 with Gnome.
I've only booted LM10 twice since I installed it, the day it came out.

It's a Porsche engine in a Volkswagen body.

and it has cured my interest in visiting DistroWatch.com on a daily basis.

[lmintnewb]

LMDE (admittedly with a fluxbox desktop) has ruined my interest in all other distros I have come into contact with.

Sounds about right to me ... The magic Mint developers +debian +fluxbox ? SWEET. Though holding off a bit until I get a lil more familiar with linux, linux mint etc.

[zerozero]

- LMDE is a passion being vanilla or pointing to sid (and sid is much more interesting and exciting)

- chakra: their kde integration, gtk-free idea and bleeding-edge system are very appealing to me; they have a half-rolling model (core system is updated when considered stable and apps as soon as possible); may sound a bit tricky but works very well;

- fedora15 (shell): i thought it was just a test-drive to see what that GnomeShell was all about, but the beast caught me and i'm really enjoying the ride

- waiting for mageia: can "she" replace mandriva?

[nunol]

So far it seems many of are are interested in light, fast systems.

Most of the time I install linux on someone else computer is to replace Win98/2000/XP on very old hardware. Usually 256MB or less so I need several light weight distros (not rolling) to fit everyone needs and with the exception of Puppy all the best ones are Debian based.

So I really am interested in Debian, Puppy and some other Debian based distros: Crunchbang, Antix, Lubuntu, Mint Fluxbox, Mint LXDE, Mint XFCE, Bodhi, etc. Not everything is old PC's so Mint 10 and Mint 9 LTS are also very important as they are my main OS.

I also need some tools distro like clonezilla, Parted Magic, etc. Usually I use this: http://ultilex.linux-bg.org/

I also like Arch for it's fresh packages and Fedora to practice my RPM's and see the new developments but the most important are Mint and Debian.

[Robin]

I wish I had a few spare desktop 'puters to distro-hop on! I'd be brash and brazen, boldly pushing the bleeding edge. But I'm down to one 'puter, a laptop, absolutely mission-critical. As long as that remains the case, I'm into the most stable, most reliable lightweight distros. I love Crunchbang (Debian Stable Xfce) with its cool tweaks by the awesome Corenominal. But hard to set up initially (for me anyway).

I'm an Xfce fan, and just to make a complete departure from Debian and Debian-based distro I tried Salix, but my hardware balks at it. Still I really like what I'm hearing about Salix and want to try it again on a new 'puter someday. I'd like to try out AntiX too, because the Mepis community is so awesome and helpful (and they like kids!), and it's Debian Testing (Rolling!).

For now I have to stick with Xubuntu LTS versions (and Mint 9 Xfce) because the new Debian version was also fussy with my hardware.

-R

[colyn]

I've been playing around the last couple of days with PCLinuxOS E17. It is very fast on my test machine and seems to be stable. I may install it on one of my laptops.

My main users are Mint 10 KDE and Gnome as well as openSuse KDE.

Since I am not too fond of Unity I'll wait for Mint 11 with Gnome..

[kvv]

1. Currently, Linux Mint LTS on work machine, latest on laptop for obvious reasons. Both GNOME.

2. Crunchbang with Debian Sid or Stable: A must try only because of the really sweet default openbox configuration. Easily one of the best setups I have seen for a work environment. And of course, it's very light.

3. Scientific Linux: Highly underrated IMO. If I am not wrong, it's centOS plus easy access to all the goodies + the cool-factor associated with using a distro developed by CERN . The only reason I am not using this in my lab is because I am not familiar with rpm. :/

[grey1960envoy]

I don't have a favourite distro but I do run #! openbox on one comp,Ubuntu Satanic on another,along with a Hackintosh, in other words ANYTHING goes in this home EXCEPT windoze although that may change with the addition of an antiquated laptop that is somewhere lurking in my garage. I just love to distro hop ,My wife is happy running Mint 9. The freedom is what keeps me interested in computers.