best non-mint distro

[dante19992]

i wanna kno the best non-mint distro. whats your guyz opinions?

[libssd]

The real answer is "Whatever floats your boat, and works on your hardware."

For me, on an Acer D150 netbook, Ubuntu 10.04 is my primary Linux distribution; everything works, and I like the UI. LMDE is my sandbox, mostly to learn additional skills. I am not particularly fond of the Mint menu approach; yes, I could disable it, and create a "traditional" panel, but why bother, when that's what I get by default with Ubuntu? Other people may feel (strongly) otherwise; if it's good for you, it's a good distro.

[rivenathos]

Debian, obviously.
PCLinuxOS is a good choice, as well.

[dante19992]

after a little research im thinking i might try opensuse. i wont bother with debian cuz i might as well just use LMDE.
anyone here tried it before? any good? i have read reviews saying its wonderful and reviews saying its crap so i just wanna get in a few opinions. also keep ur favs coming im gonna spend a while distro-hopping

[Illuminati2012]

OpenSuse is nice. It has one click install for video drivers. Helps cut down on headaches. Also OpenSuse Gnome in the next release with have Gnome 3.0 and Gnome Shell, so it might be a good option if Unity in Ubuntu is junk.

Easy one click video driver install:
ATI http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:ATI_drivers

Nvidia http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers

[dante19992]

what about propietary drivers? like the broadcom sta?

[Illuminati2012]

Install broadcom in Opensuse http://opensuse-guide.org/wlan.php and http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get- ... ckman.html

[dante19992]

meh i porbly am not even gonna use openSUSE the live cd has taken 45 mins to boot already and its still not done thank u for ur help anyway

EDIT: oops my bad. it appears there was a download issue and so it did not download correctly

[Nexus]

Best Non-Mint... For me that would be Ubuntu Studio... I install half the packages from it into Mint as it is. Depending on how the next couple of Mint releases go I might give OpenSUSE another try, I really like the Gnome 3 concept.

[dante19992]

yha i never tried ubuntu studio but openSUSE seems good for a lappy

[dante19992]

yha i never tried ubuntu studio but openSUSE seems good for a lappy

[MerelyJim]

CrunchBang (#!) works wonderfully on my Acer D250 netbook.

Formerly based on Ubuntu, now on Debian, it's a great place to find out more about Openbox WM as well as xfce.

[Kendall]

Yes I'm a bit biased on this one, but my personal favorite non-Mint distro is Peppermint OS.

[Elisa]

It depends on your purposes and needs. General: SkoleLinux (http://www.slx.no)
Then there are some little BSD based for firewall and gateway needs... See http://www.distrowatch.com

[MerelyJim]

Yes I'm a bit biased on this one, but my personal favorite non-Mint distro is Peppermint OS.

I think we have to be biased enough to admit that we even use another distro in order to speak with any authority, so I'm biased as well...

[dante19992]

now see i havnt even heard of most of these.

[MerelyJim]

now see i havnt even heard of most of these.

In all fairness, I download and use a lot of these distro's for testing. I have two laptops running LinuxMintDebian, one because I couldn't get the Debian download to recognise the NIC, and the other because I wanted to see how much difference there was between the 64-bit version of Mint10, and MintDebian; plus, it gave me an unfiltered install of Xfce when I downloaded it. The third, I run CrunchBang on my netbook.

If it wasn't for my distro-hopping nature, I'd still be on Ubuntu.

It's fun to explore...

[DrHu]

I don't know, I am pretty much roosting here at home on Linux Mint, although I do use the LXDE version, not Gnome or KDE

But, to answer, I would say, first check the well known, such as Suse/Opensuse and Fedora

• But, since finding the Debian way, I have been more fond of apt than rpm for package management..

[dante19992]

is peppermint any good?

[MerelyJim]

As to Peppermint, I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but I've heard good things.

Running Openbox uses next to no system resources, which is always a good thing, but most people find manually adding/removing manually installed programs to your app-menu a pain.

The big question-mark is weather any Ubuntu-based distro is going to follow down the path of Unity and Wayland with their next few versions. Something nice and Debian-based won't change all that much once you get used to it...

Still, it's a bootable ISO, and if you use a flash-drive or CD-RW, all you've lost in the test-drive is a download...