What distro to try?

[Zwopper]

Belenix! - Great fun!

[67GTA]

Other than Mint, I can only recommend Mandriva/PCLOS. Opensuse is nice, but still has a lot of dependency problems with their repos. If you use the pacman repo to get restricted stuff, your install will soon start falling apart because the main and pacman repos have different versions of everything. If they would fix this, it would be number two next to Mint.

[eeezzzeee]

Two that I have recently experimented with on an OLD laptop have been Vector and Tinyme(pclinuxos based). Both worked really well on my old laptop. I currently have tinyme running on it right now. It is a cool little distro, way light on resources, but still has synaptic to get any packages you want later. Has the pclinuxos config tools for wireless which got my dlink 650+ working with a little effort using native drivers, and as I am still pretty noobish with linux it was a learning experience.

But like another user said, if you want to try a distro without burning your precious cd's try a bunch of them out in virtual box first. Thats what I have been doing, I currently have 5 distros in my virtual box, but they all live in my mint world

[MagnusB]

I can't see why people prefer PCLOS over Mandriva, the only major difference is Synaptic/APT over urpmi, but I have more positive experience with Mandriva than I have with PCLOS, and in fact all the drak tools are from Mandriva (among other the network tools are drak , Xdrak etc).

[67GTA]

I can't see why people prefer PCLOS over Mandriva, the only major difference is Synaptic/APT over urpmi, but I have more positive experience with Mandriva than I have with PCLOS, and in fact all the drak tools are from Mandriva (among other the network tools are drak , Xdrak etc).

I always preferred Mandriva. I always feel obligated to suggest PCLOS along side Mandriva for some reason. I think people want to like PCLOS because of the multimedia/restricted stuff is included by default. I personally could never keep PCLOS running on any of my machines. Mandriva (mandrake) was my first I want to try the newest Mandriva, but haven't gotten around to downloading it.

[MagnusB]

I run the newest version on powerpack on both my laptop and my desktop, runs like a dream Still, have to burn out the beta ISO of Mint as well, just have been damn busy and tired lately

[67GTA]

MagnusB, after thinking about your last post some more, I've decided to stop promoting PCLOS. Mandriva is just simply better. I always looked at it from the perspective of Ubuntu/Mint : Mandriva/PCLOS, but that really isn't the case. Mint makes Ubuntu better, and we are no longer copying Ubuntu's base. Mint has actually started moving away from Ubuntu, unlike PCLOS.

[MagnusB]

Hehe, always happy to help Still, there are some differences, though, PCLOS is a rolling release, Mandriva is not, so PCLOS tends to be a bit more unstable. And I have no idea why they use Synaptic in KDE, they should really move on to Adept. And the GNOME version of PCLOS has been even more unstable (for me) than the KDE version.
Overall, I find the reason for using PCLOS are the Drak tools, and I find them more stable in Mandriva, so for me, the choice is obvious...

[GoustiFruit]

The big plus for PCLinuxOS is the "rolling distro" part: it's really nice to be able to update a fully working and customized desktop to the most recent version. Instead of having to reinstall everything.
So all the distros you need to try are:
- Mint (obviously)
- Mandriva
- PCLinuxOS

[Andy Mack]

I've been trying loads of distro's recently, the top 5 as it were as well as a ton of other found through distrowatch.
Truth is Mint really is the only one that does everything I want and does it well.

One for the future for me is Debian Lenny when it final. I have a copy of Lenny Testing from april and it ran really nice. Trouble is wireless was an absolute pig to get going and even then it cut out on me every few seconds. Being a relative newbie I gave up trying to install nvidia driver so wiped the whole thing. I really like the way debian does things compared to ubuntu/mint but overall Mint wins it. I didn't like the debian forum either, new people asking a question hoping for a straightforward answer usually got one that gave a headache, some people there are all for freedom of choice but others look down on those who choose ubuntu/mint as if they are lepers, (bit harsh i know).

For a little distro puppy is just amazing it really is.

[Zwopper]

Like so many others I've had LOADS of fun playing around with Slitaz
- Now there's a slim distro for you - ISO size 25MB - and that includes firefox - go figure?! .
- Still fun stuff like composite window drawing and stuff like that works out of the box!

[xvedejas]

Well, I went out and got some CD's and have so far tried;

Debian
Arch
Sabayon
Crunchbang


The first two I couldn't get to work with my wireless cards, Sabayon is alright but I can't figure out how to install anything, and Crunchbang is really nice

[xvedejas]

Crunchbang? The distro names are getting sillier day by day.

It's named so because it's the work of one man and potentially unstable; it could make your computer go "Crunch.. BANG!".

[linuxviolin]

Frugalware
Parsix
Mandriva Linux One 2008 Spring XFCE
GoblinX
Draco
............................................................

P.S= Crunchbang is Ubuntu with Openbox. You have also Ubuntulite... (again Ubuntu + Openbox- LXDE)

[yamawho]

I'm running VirtualBox in Mint Darnya KCE. Based on this thread, I decided to try some of the distros discussed, including Mandriva One 2008 Spring.

This distro has official support for my EeePC.

I have it installed on a 16GB sdhc card and it runs great

[rivenought]

I finally found the time to download and install Mandriva One Spring GNOME. I have previously only used the KDE version of Mandriva, so I really wanted to give the GNOME version a thorough test drive. Mandriva's newest 2008.1 offering is certainly a distro to drive around the block a few times. You have to see this to believe it.

Of course, Linux Mint is still my premier distro of choice and is the only distro to grace my main machine's hard drive. However, just for the sake of research and experimentation, I would definitely suggest Mandriva for someone who wants to try something a tad bit different.

An observation I have made is that Linux Mint holds its own and even surpasses the quality of these legacy and elder distros. Look back at the progress and adoption of Linux Mint and you will see how far it has come in so very short of a time. One cannot thank and congratulate Clem and his coding cohorts for a most excellent job well done.

[MagnusB]

An observation I have made is that Linux Mint holds its own and even surpasses the quality of these legacy and elder distros.

In my opinion Mint still requires a bit more polish. If we compare it with Mandriva:
Live session:
Mandriva KEEPS changes you made during a live session on the install. So if you set up a network connection, for example installed a Windows driver with ndiswrapper, configured to connect to a AP with a key, then do a HDD install, on first boot you will connect to that AP (if you enabled start at boot). I would love to see this implemented in other distributions as well, it makes life so much easier for end users like me.
Wireless/Network:
Mandriva has some of the best network configuration utilities I have ever seen on any distribution (or OS for that matter). If you have a Broadcom card which is not supported by b43, but with ndiswrapper, you usually have to blacklist b43 and set ndiswrapper to be loaded at boot, then configure ndiswrapper. The drak tool does all this for you in an intuitive GUI, which leads to me using the GUI instead of the terminal. That is just one example.
Control Center:
The Mandriva control center is just brilliant. It offers a great way to perform maintenance, configure and install new software on your system. It is just as good as the SuSE YaST utilities (if you install gnome-main-menu in Mint you get, IMO, a better Control Center in Mint as well).
Package management:
Even if urpmi is a good package management system, I still prefer apt, as it is so much more versatile, but since people here seem to like gnom-app-install, they'll probably like urpmi as well.
I just love Mandriva, it's so intuitive and easy to use, an excellent distribution for anyone starting out with Linux.
And I am not saying Mint is crap, I think it is a very good distribution, but I won't say it surpasses "legacy & elder" distributions, from a newbie point of view it is just as good as Mandriva, and in some cases I think that Mandriva might be a *bit* better, other cases Mint might be a *bit* better.

[MagnusB]

I don't like Opera in Linux at all, seems to be unstable no matter what distribution I use, and it doesn't integrate with GTK or Qt. Firefox 3 on the other hand integrates nicely ith GTK, not sure about Qt though..

[GoustiFruit]

For now the latest Opera 9.50 alphas crash a lot less than Firefox 3 releases ! Just try some Flash sites and you'll understand.