Distros of interest and why.

[kenetics]

My current favorites are...
Desktop:
Mint 10 for my everyday work, banking, etc. It just does everything so well.
Xubuntu for learning Xfce as an alternative to the upcoming Gnome3 & Unity battles. (Will try Mint Xfce when the dust settles.)

Netbook:
Puppeee 1.0 for my Eeepc 900. It's made specifically for the Eeepc and contains a whole lot in a such a little package.

Ken

[exploder]

kenetics, I have to agree with your thinking on Gnome.

[exploder]

Well, I can add Kubuntu 11.04 to my list. Much to my surprise it worked fine with very minimal fixing on my part. I really expected to see some of the things I found wrong with Ubuntu 11.04 but startupmanager fixed plymouth right up and I hid a duplicate entry in Dolphin. I have had Kubuntu running all day with no problems and what the heck, it even looks pretty nice. I never would have believed it.

[thouartsimple]

I am quite interested in Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu... but not Ubuntu too much. Unity looks nice but it's just not for me. I'd like to learn KDE, XFCE, and LXDE, so that's why the interest. I go like gnome and I am most familiar with it, but I prefer some sort of variety.

[exploder]

thouartsimple, now I admire the thought behind your interests. Learning various environments is always good and it keeps you sharp. I have been looking at e17 the same way. I spent most of a day setting up WindowMaker because I saw a picture of it and thought it would be challenging and it was, lots of googling for answers too. I hope you enjoy learning the various environments as much as I do.

[spider2097]

Aside from Mint Julia on my netbook, my other "main use" distro is Crunchbang Statler (Openbox) on an old laptop - it's a fairly low-spec machine that doesn't seem to play well with more resource heavy distros.

It was fun for a while trying out various distros (it's been a while since I did quite so much distro-hopping )

One that looked promising for a while (until I eventually gave up trying to get the wireless card working under it) was SliTaz 3.0. From the little play I was able to have with it, it seems quite well featured considering the ISO is only 30Mb. I almost felt wasteful burning it to CD

Another I came across that has piqued my interest is a Fedora-based distro named Fusion Linux. The main point of interest for me came due to the fact it uses the Mint Menu and seems to aim to be for Fedora what Mint is to Ubuntu. This is one I'm looking forward to playing with a little more.

I always have a soft spot for Knoppix I use that fairly often, mainly to check & perform maintenance on HDDs, however it's become a really nice fully featured Live OS. The only issue I have with it is the fact it's designed to be a Live distro & not installed to HD.

Speaking of Live DVDs I keep to hand, Isadora (Linux Mint 9 LTS) is right next to Knoppix in my carrycase. I'm kinda lazy, so keeping it close at hand for creating bootable USBs has become a no-brainer for me. One day, I may actually get round to getting familiar with Unetbootin, but until that day comes I guess Isadora will remain one of my favourite ladies

[Telecaster72]

I've got my eyes on Pardus, i installed it and ran it for a while and it is really really nice, and i never cared much for KDE before that, but now i have seen that it is possible to make a good KDE implementation, Its very polished and feels....expensive...It has a very nice Lancelot menu available that reminds me of Mint-menu. Unfortunately their repos are small, at least when you're like me coming from ubuntu/debian-land.

Another one is Chakra Linux, based on Arch, i have been playing around with it in VB a little and it runs light for being a KDE distribution, nice but very alpha, i will follow this one with great interest to see how it develops.

PCLinuxOS is another treat, especially their control center which is miles ahead of the regular gnome control center (Clem can find some great inspiration here), not as polished as Pardus or Mint though, the branding still has some way to go with different logos and fonts throughout the distro.

Zenwalk is another old friend i used for a while a couple of years ago, fast and reliable. Bad package manager, very counter intuitive but that aside very nice.

Crunchbang of course, i'm just waiting for someone to give me their old laptop, saying it is old, slow and useless

But this computer will run LMDE until it dies i think, i was looking for a rolling release distro to "settle down with" , i thought of PCLinuxOS for a long time but then i heard about LMDE and Debian will be around for a while, with PCLinuxOS it is all up to Texstar, if he gets fed up with doing the GREAT work he is doing it's over.

[willie42]

I like Crunchbang. Fedora is most likely my next choice.

[exploder]

I have been very interested in the PCLinuxOS mini editions lately. I was at the point of loading Windows 7 on one of my machines just to have something that would stay running because the nvidea drivers keep breaking on me in just about every new Linux distribution. PCLinuxOS has never failed me as far as graphics drivers are concerned. I loaded the KDE mini in Virtualbox, updated it and slowly added all of the applications and codecs I wanted. I used the "mylivecd" application to build the iso and tested out my shiny new system from the Live CD. Everything worked great so I went ahead and installed PCLinuxOS to my hard drive.

I had never realized the value of mini editions until I gave it a shot. My system is made up of exactly the applications I use everyday and my system is always current as far as application updates are concerned. I like the speed PCLinuxOS has and the task scripts provided in Synaptic made quick work of installing quite a few things. It's nice to know that installing an update is not going to trash my system and thanks to the "mylivecd" tool I always have a good backup and I can even give friends and family the same experience.

Something else I really liked was the selection of kernels PCLinuxOS offers. The bfs kernels seem to give a nice performance boost. If you are ever interested in rolling your own system, I highly recommend giving the PCLinuxOS mini editions a try, it's pretty easy and you will enjoy your finished product.

[ThistleWeb]

I've switched to Crunchbang Startler on the netbook with Openbox. I've had a few issues trying to turn it into a rolling "testing" install, so I'm back to the regular squeeze repos. My plan was that I'd always have a constant install but in all likelihood I'll get bored of it in a few months and switch anyway so rolling may be a waste of a good idea I've found the netbook can run Gnome etc just fine, but Openbox is lighter and snappier.

TinyCore is awesome in that it's a distro you could send as an email attachment, I think their current iso is like 13mb. It's a fully functional GUI environment too, mini-X (I think) instead of the regular X. I've played about with it as a live USB install a few times. Slitaz for the same reasons, it's a 29mb Openbox environment running entirely in 89mb RAM. As an emergency portable USB Linux that could find itself running on a whole range of hardware old and new, the smaller the RAM the better.

I've also been playing with BackTrack a few times as a live USB install, but haven't put the time or energy into learning the basics yet. BackTrack is a security distro for penetration testing, forensics etc. I'd love to be more knowledgeable about what my own network is exposing without me being aware of it, so that I can adjust my behavior accordingly. I'm thinking it'd be a handy show-off tool to help sell people on Linux too, by showing them how insecure their Windows networks are, with their consent obviously.

I love the idea of Arch, when I get the resources to be able to do VMs it's one I'll be exploring in detail. The idea of a rolling up-to-date lightweight XFCE 4.8 install is very appealing. I have tried Arch a few times and failed the install part each time, so I don't trust my abilities to dual boot it successfully until I've explored it properly in VMs.

[flygon250]

I have been very interested in the PCLinuxOS mini editions lately. I was at the point of loading Windows 7 on one of my machines just to have something that would stay running because the nvidea drivers keep breaking on me in just about every new Linux distribution. PCLinuxOS has never failed me as far as graphics drivers are concerned. I loaded the KDE mini in Virtualbox, updated it and slowly added all of the applications and codecs I wanted. I used the "mylivecd" application to build the iso and tested out my shiny new system from the Live CD. Everything worked great so I went ahead and installed PCLinuxOS to my hard drive.

I had never realized the value of mini editions until I gave it a shot. My system is made up of exactly the applications I use everyday and my system is always current as far as application updates are concerned. I like the speed PCLinuxOS has and the task scripts provided in Synaptic made quick work of installing quite a few things. It's nice to know that installing an update is not going to trash my system and thanks to the "mylivecd" tool I always have a good backup and I can even give friends and family the same experience.

Something else I really liked was the selection of kernels PCLinuxOS offers. The bfs kernels seem to give a nice performance boost. If you are ever interested in rolling your own system, I highly recommend giving the PCLinuxOS mini editions a try, it's pretty easy and you will enjoy your finished product.

Yeah. PCLinuxOS is a very nice little distro (I'm have the Xfce mini edition on my desktop.). Just bear in mind that it is a rolling-release distro, so if the graphics problems are coming from upstream, then they may filter down to PCLOS at some point, although I don't think that Texstar would abandon the basic nv driver (which should work with anything NVidia, albeit without 3D effects) until nouveau is stable enough for daily usage on most machines.

Along a similar line to the mini editions of PCLinuxOS, AntiX is also a very good minimal, rolling-release distro. It's essentially the ultra-light edition of MEPIS, except that it uses Debian's testing repos instead of the Stable ones that MEPiS uses. comes in three flavors, standard/full (for those who are planning to use the system as it is, which is IceWM/Fluxbox with ROX and a few applications which make a pretty much fully-featured desktop, with the option to add more from Debian if needed), base (a bare minimal fluxbox desktop which allows you to install additional applications of your choice from Debian's massive repositories on top of it.) and core (like Arch Linux, except that it's actually Debian Stable with a MEPIS kernel.). The only problem is there is no 64-bit edition as it is made with older hardware in mind. There again, there doesn't appear to be a 64-bit edition of PCLinuxOS either, so they are on level pegging in that respect.

Other distros of interest include Aptosid (my current distro. Uses Debian sid repos and is very good if you don't just mindlessly upgrade everything without checking dependencies first.), Arch Linux (or it would be if they used package signing, but that's not going to happen any time soon), CrunchBang (I have heard a lot of good things about it.) Gentoo (Never tried it, but I'm interested in portage, flags and the whole compile-from-source business) and maybe OpenSUSE with the Tumbleweed repository enabled (as an alliterative to PCLinuxOS.)

As you can see, there is a leaning towards rolling-release and Debian-based distributions. It's my personal preference. What I would really like to see as a distro similar to Arch, with its back-to-basics approach and sensible (IE: not including software that is pre-beta despite being declared stable and ensuring that all software supports all other software without dependency conflicts at all times) rolling-release cycle, but with the package signing that Arch lacks.

[linXea]

As you can see, there is a leaning towards rolling-release and Debian-based distributions. It's my personal preference. What I would really like to see as a distro similar to Arch, with its back-to-basics approach and sensible (IE: not including software that is pre-beta despite being declared stable and ensuring that all software supports all other software without dependency conflicts at all times) rolling-release cycle, but with the package signing that Arch lacks.

I think that distro already exist. What you described there basically is Frugalware. Not based on debian though, it's independent of any other distro.

[thouartsimple]

My desktop has been set up for distrohopping, so I am downloading PCLinuxOS Enlightenment =D I am doing the full edition though, not the mini... I think it looks pretty interesting! Right now I have Katya, Julia KDE, and Ubuntu 11.04 on there, but I plan on adding Xubuntu 11.04, Julia LXDE, maybe Mint XFCE (latest), and PCLinuxOS Enlightenment. PCLinuxOS will be my first non-Ubuntu/Debian distro... woohoo! This is great =D

Thanks enforcer for the PCLinuxOS recommendation! I'll let y'all know what I think.

[Aging Technogeek]

One distro that I have not seen among the many lightweight distros mentioned here is Madbox. I found this recently and have been playing with it a little in Virtual Box.

http://madbox.tuxfamily.org/

The developers are Belgian based and the site is in French, but I found enough sense in the Google translation to get it downloaded and installed.

It is a minimal offshoot of Ubuntu (currently 10.10 Lucid Lynx) with Openbox desktop and a very light app load. The .iso is only 489 MB and the desktop idles at about 90 MB of ram usage.

It is incredibly fast even in Virtual Box. I am considering putting it on my netbook in place of Crunchbang Statler.

[MALsPa]

Not along the lines of some of the light-weight distros that have been mentioned here, but I installed Mepis 11 the other day, and it's looking really good so far. Something for folks who are interested in a Debian Stable-based KDE distro.

[Arenalgarden]

I'm kind of hard headed. I always disliked SUSE and Red Hat from day one so I avoid anything that tastes like that.
I like Debian based distros and a few Slackware based ones like Vector and Salix.
If you get good enough to custom setup a Debian or Slack system, from a base install, you can handle anything any other distro can throw at you.
The nice thing is knowing 17 plus years and those guys are still humming right along Many Many Many others are dumpster diving.
Thanks to guys like Shuttleboy, Clem, Nordquist ( SalineOS), Pinguy and many many others "Debian" is now a breeze...... and half the people running it don't realize under the mask it's basically just Debian in drag.

" You ever run Debian ? No. Never heard of it. My kid put You Boontyoutoo on my machine. It's great ! What was that other one Deeboone ?"

[colyn]

My desktop has been set up for distrohopping, so I am downloading PCLinuxOS Enlightenment =D I am doing the full edition though, not the mini... I think it looks pretty interesting! Right now I have Katya, Julia KDE, and Ubuntu 11.04 on there, but I plan on adding Xubuntu 11.04, Julia LXDE, maybe Mint XFCE (latest), and PCLinuxOS Enlightenment. PCLinuxOS will be my first non-Ubuntu/Debian distro... woohoo! This is great =D

Thanks enforcer for the PCLinuxOS recommendation! I'll let y'all know what I think.

I'm running Enlightenment and can say it is rock solid stable. I put it on my test machine last week and then installed it on my new laptop yesterday.

If you have any issues with it the help on the PCLinuxOS forum will help get you up and running in short order

[thouartsimple]

EDIT: Well, I installed PCLinuxOS and it completely corrupted my partition table! I used a GRUB2 cd which allowed me to boot to Katya and KDE, but I lost Ubuntu, Xubuntu, and PCLinuxOS. So... I might not go with PCLinuxOS because I am paranoid that will happen again. It wiped my entire extended partition and made it so GPARTED couldn't recognize anything! Ugh. Oh well, that's why my desktop is for testing

[thouartsimple]

In the interest of trying out pretty much all flavors of Mint and Ubuntu, I have decided to go with this type of partition scheme for my distros of interest.

Katya, LM XFCE, Julia KDE, Xubuntu 11.04, Ubuntu 11.04, Julia LXDE, Lubuntu, gNatty (Ubuntu 11.04 with Gnome-shell, interesting at least).

[grey1960envoy]

My wife says if I don't quit distro hopping she's going to leave ..... I'm gonna miss her