What Linux distro should I try?

[StarshipTitanic]

I plan on building a crappy computer out of some spare parts I have and trying out Linux. I'd like one that lets me toy around and also gives me a functional GUI so I won't get completely lost. I've heard the names Ubuntu and Gentoo tossed around by some people I know, but I want more opinions.

[Mobius]

if the comp is old and not too well endowed ramwise; i'll advocate Xubuntu or Fluxbuntu. They comes with a light WM.

[Starglider]

I plan on building a crappy computer out of some spare parts I have and trying out Linux. I'd like one that lets me toy around and also gives me a functional GUI so I won't get completely lost. I've heard the names Ubuntu and Gentoo tossed around by some people I know, but I want more opinions.

Vanilla Ubuntu. It's about as mainstream as Linux gets right now and the big userbase means that it's ridiculously easy to find free help/support if you get stuck. The default configuration works fine on essentially any 21st century computer. Gentoo is a whole lot of extra hassle for zero real benefit to the average user.

[Braedley]

I switched over to Ubuntu and I only look back for developer games. And even then, my computer is booted into Linux at least 90% of the time (compared to windows). There are still some things that I need to work out, like keytouch for my media keys the extra buttons on my mouse, but other than that, every thing works great.

[Surlethe]

I use Ubuntu; it works great, except for gaming. That's why I have my small-ish Windows partition.

[Xisiqomelir]

I'd say Ubuntu as well. Version 7.04 unless you absolutely must have 100% stability, in which case you want 6.06

[RThurmont]

I concur with the suggestion that Xubuntu or Fluxbuntu would make good choices, however, depending on how ancient it is, you might also wish to consider DSL, Puppy Linux or Dillo. Also, there are a number of other fine distros out there such as Mandriva, which should not be entirely discarded in the Ubuntu hype. I like Ubuntu a lot, but to be fair, it does at times attempt to hold the user's hand waaay too much, and I find that to be annoying at times.

My personal favorite distro is Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop. I have SLED 10 running on a vintage 2000 Dell 8100 with a 1.4 ghz P4 processor, 384 mb of RAM, and a relatively good graphics card. The machine is a tad below reccommended specifications (which start with 512 mb of RAM), but runs fine for me, even with GNOME. SLED makes no attempt to hide functions from users or talk down to users, and its the only distro I've seen that ships with tools like Xnest. The one big downside of SLED is that it doesn't officially support XFCE, which, depending on your hardware, you might well want to use, and getting XFCE from the OpenSuse 10.1 repos is a major pain. The default alternative desktops with it (aside from KDE and GNOME) are the aggravating TallWM and FVWM.

[Pu-239]

Lightweight distros like fluxbuntu/xubuntu tend to be less user friendly though. My PIII-766/512MB plodded around w/ regular ubuntu okay for my mother's needs (though it's now upgraded to a PIV-1.3GHz/385MB)

[General Zod]

The latest build of OpenSuse is fairly user friendly and easy to get the hang of. It took me hardly any time at all to install it onto a partition.

[RThurmont]

I have several install CDs of Open Suse 10.2 but haven't used it yet, but it does look hawt. Especially Kickoff...

[Hugh]

Lightweight distros like fluxbuntu/xubuntu tend to be less user friendly though.

Puppy Linux is an major exception to that rule It's amazingly friendly, except for the installation. But it's a load-to-RAM live CD, so it's not really necessary to install it.

[Resinence]

Ubuntu and derivatives, OpenSuse or mandriva are the most user friendly in my opinion, don't touch Gentoo unless you know what you are doing (and I mean know, commandline stuff). Unless it's a REALLY ancient machine, there is no real need to use a minimal distro.

[Alferd Packer]

At the risk of me-tooing, I have to suggest Ubuntu as well. I just installed 7.04 on my old Toshiba laptop and I'm really enjoying it. It was very easy to set up and configure, and using Automatix, I was easily able to get the barebones Ubuntu installation up and running with a robust bunch of software.

[Pu-239]

Does slackware even have any real package management? Or do you have to manually hunt down dependencies (which makes it worse than gentoo, which at least does that for you). apt-get/aptitude is the only reason I use debian-derived distros everywhere from desktops to servers.

I don't think he'll like it, it's not a GUI distro I think. Might be better off manually trimming down a ubuntu or using straight debian (then again, I don' think that's GUI by default either, I vaguely remember having had to apt-get gnome/gdm - the last time I installed it was on a server w/ a minimal CD though)

[Pu-239]

Might be better off manually trimming down a ubuntu or using straight debian

Best yet would probably be not bother with trimming down at all; whatever one you take, do the full install up front. It will probably save issues later, and 3-5 GB of hard drive space really isn't that much for any computer newer than about 5 years old.

Well, he did say it was an old computer... my T22 running xubuntu is about 7 years old (going to switch to fluxbox, XFCE is also rather slow, though that probably wouldn't make as much of a difference than if I stopped using Firefox, which I won't). Also, I kinda meant killing off the nonessential startup services like the hplip service, mdadm, etc. That said, yeah, knowing what to kill w/o creating issues would be hard.

Compiling stuff from source does still require the development libraries installed, which are dependencies. Also, unless you use stow, uninstalling source compiled stuff is next to impossible of author of software did not include a 'make uninstall' (and using stow requires digging through makefiles if the makefile does not use a prefix variable). Even if you install everything, libraries grow obsolete (a lot of software requires the latest version of a library installed). Compiling also takes awhile to do on a slow computer. And I thought the avoidance of compile times was the whole point of avoiding gentoo? The APT repositories for debian derivatives are also quite large.

What does one do about security updates for stuff such as Firefox when there's no repository such as apt-get? Correct me if I'm wrong, but slackware doesn't have an auto update mechanism, so one has to manually download and install packages, which is just an invitation to get lazy and not update. [EDIT: Well, there's slapt-get, and reread what you said and noticed easy updates, still doesn't notify when updates are available (granted, straight debian and gentoo don't either, but we're primarily talking about ubuntu)].

The handholding done by Ubuntu for updates and package installs typically is useful, esp people who don't have time/too lazy to mess around w/ stuff. It amuses me how you bash Gentoo (which at least has some kind of package management and automated compiles) and advocate Slackware.

He's clearly migrating from a windows environment, so doing it in steps is a good idea- it's not like the CLI is completely gone in a gui distro. THings can be learned as needed. W/ slackware, he wouldn't know to type in startx once he got to a bash prompt (although he does now) and would just immediately give up on Linux. Certain tasks may be easy (eg, startx, ./configure && make && make install, but tracking down and knowing what they are may be annoying.

EDIT: As an aside, I've found awhile ago using Linux from Scratch to be very educational. For obvious reasons, not user friendly (think unautomated gentoo). I've used it back when Firefox was at Phoenix 0.4 on a Pentium I @120MHz on 64 megs of RAM- obviously Firefox will not currently run well at all on that now, and it was annoying to maintain.

[Hugh]

Compiling stuff from source does still require the development libraries installed, which are dependencies.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Slackware libraries include the development files by default; there are no separated -dev packages to hunt down. An even nicer surprise was that packages have few dependencies (one or two, usually), so lack of automatic management is not such a big problem. And while Debian has more officially supported applications, unofficial Slackware packages are plentiful (check out www.linuxpackages.net). I suspect they're easier to make.

All thing considered, Ubuntu (or one of its cousins) is probably better suited for a non-technical person. But for a power user (or an engineer ), something like Vector Linux will be easier to understand. I've seen it happen.

[RThurmont]

In my opinion, for a total n00b to attempt to use Slackware OR Gentoo would be a complete disaster, and pointless, given that you have so many more n00b friendly distros out there, that unlike Slackware and Gentoo, are actually optimized for use on older hardware in the default
install.

IMO the beauty of Linux is that there is a distro for every purpose, and a purpose for every distro, and neither Slackware nor Gentoo, IMO, fit the bill as a general purpose n00b friendly distro for older hardware.

[Pu-239]

I suspect they're easier to make.

Yeah, probably, since there's very little metadata you have to create. I used to make debian packages of everything I installed on my machine, so the package manager would track them. Then I got lazy and just used stow to make everything compiled from source uninstallable (now I'm even lazier and just install stuff to it's own directory in ~/.opt/ w/ symlinks to ~/.bin , unless it's a library- no su to root required to update things. ).

Speaking of regressions, the security update to vnc4server on etch was annoying and pointless, since anybody who cares about security tunnels VNC through SSH- apps wouldn't start at all- ended up installing the debian package on top of ubuntu- so you do have a point.... I'm just lazy and don't bother reading all the changelogs, easier to just fix problems as they occur.

[RThurmont]

If you are willing to actually change things with your OS and dive into the differences, why leave Windows at all?

Because Linux is cheaper, and increasingly, better. Really, the ability to tinker was not the primary motivation for my starting to use Linux in October (rather, I really wanted to find a better OS than Windows that, unlike OS X, could run on all of my hardware, and additionally I had just discovered with the Mac I had purchased how slow OS X actually was). I found myself really enamored with Linux, and later discovered the joy of tinkering with it, but I'm extremely glad that my first Linux installations were as easy to do as they were (with the exception of WiFi...ndiswrapper was the first really hard thing I had to do).

It's my firm opinion that for the average consumer right now, Linux can offer more value than Windows Vista or OS X, but if you hit consumers with an even remotely difficult installation process (ideally, it should be easier than installing Windows), a lot of them are going to jump ship at that point.

[Pu-239]

In my opinion, for a total n00b to attempt to use Slackware OR Gentoo would be a complete disaster,

Slackware isn't that hard, once you get to know it, which admitably takes some effort, but Linux is not Windows, it is going to take some effort to actually understand it anyway.

If you are willing to actually change things with your OS and dive into the differences, why leave Windows at all?

that unlike Slackware and Gentoo, are actually optimized for use on older hardware in the default install.

If I put a slightly beefier harddrive in my P1 box with 16 MB of RAM, a full, default install of Slackware would run just fine. Since the hard drive isn't big enough for that, during install, I uncheck a few of the fat programs I don't need, and it still works fine. What is the problem with that? Slack can also be easily installed from floppy disks, for those machines that don't have bootable CD drives, which as far as I know, is not a common feature.

Actually, bootable CD drives are a pretty common feature nowadays, at least since the Win98 era.

I ran Linux from scratch though, and I shudder at the thought of 16 megs of RAM- even running a lightweight WM on 48 megs of RAM, it kinda blew chunks. That said, browsers using the gecko engine tend to be fat. I'm not a big fan of text mode browsers, since the layout becomes messed up when viewing pages that are formatted only w/ CSS instead of tables. And nowadays, I can't stand not having my bloated apps (firefox/thunderbird, netbeans, java software, etc (Java's packaging makes it annoying to wade through all those directories w/ vim)).

RThurmont- Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing. That said, that's kinda the basic idea of making it more user-friendly. Also, most people do have a few proprietary apps they'd like to keep using, or games, so Linux isn't really for them.


That said, I personally prefer Linux since the command line is actually usable w/o too much work (using CLI on windows is somewhat annoying due to the huge # of flies w/ spaces in them), free dev tools (MS has them too, but usually cut down in some way, and CLI tools suck), huge customizability of everything, SSH and SSHFS, easy scripting already learned for free thanks to knowing the CLI (no need to learn stuff like WSH).

It just "feels" more stable (eg, explorer will often hang on a certain tasks, such as looking for a network drive that is down (although Linux apps will hang too on NFS disonnect, the lack of integration alleviates this somewhat, and I can always do lsof|grep [mountpoint]; killall [processes having files open on said mountpoint] to fix the problem)). Oh, and computers envitably will run into problems, and when they do on a Linux system, I usually can pinpoint exactly what the problem is, while it is a pain on Windows. That, and beryl/compiz

Most users don't really have a good reason to switch (other than it makes it harder for them to compromise their systems w/ malware, at least before malware devs catch on (security through obscurity is still some security). Most of the above doesn't really apply to the average user. The other biggest reason to switch is the large library of free software that is bundled/only runs (well) on Linux, but a large number of those (Pidgin, gimp) have windows ports.

[Hugh]

Also, most people do have a few proprietary apps they'd like to keep using, or games, so Linux isn't really for them.

Like what? Photoshop 7? World of Warcraft? These, and many others, are known to run on Linux (via Wine, but that's a technicality).

(security through obscurity is still some security)

Obscurity? What obscurity? Linux is open source And if you think crackers have few reasons to attack Linux boxes, think of all the Web servers out there. Shouldn't there be a lot more Linux malware on the loose by now, if it was as vulnerable as Windows?

[Pu-239]

Also, most people do have a few proprietary apps they'd like to keep using, or games, so Linux isn't really for them.

Like what? Photoshop 7? World of Warcraft? These, and many others, are known to run on Linux (via Wine, but that's a technicality).

(security through obscurity is still some security)

Obscurity? What obscurity? Linux is open source And if you think crackers have few reasons to attack Linux boxes, think of all the Web servers out there. Shouldn't there be a lot more Linux malware on the loose by now, if it was as vulnerable as Windows?

Photoshop 7 is old. CS3 will not run on WINE. What about recent versions of Autocad? Though to be fair, these aren't really "consumer" apps, they're really for the corporate/professional environment (those who aren't using them in such an environment are probably pirating it)- most people should be satisfied w/ gimp. Problem is when people actually need full office compatibility, or financial software, some proprietary browser plugin (this annoyed me last semester, professor put up crappy MathML for assignment only readable w/ a plugin that only ran on IE- all physics/math people should use LaTeX ), or whatever other corner cases they will encounter.

As for security, I was talking more about Linux as a client- I'm not saying Linux is more insecure, it's just that having a smaller userbase adds additional protection (obscurity was not the right word).

[Hugh]

Gosh darn, asking a user to read the fucking on screen instructions is so impossible!

True A lot of people don't even scroll (on Web pages). Reading is out of the question. But that's not the operating system's fault.

And if you think crackers have few reasons to attack Linux boxes, think of all the Web servers out there. Shouldn't there be a lot more Linux malware on the loose by now, if it was as vulnerable as Windows?

Humourously, if you actually look at the facts, you'll find IIS6 on Win2k3 has had less security problems than Apache on Linux.

Now you sound like Steve Ballmer Seriously, ever heard of Code Red?

Webservers, first, have nothing at all to do with the consumer situation, where the only problem is the moron between the keyboard and chair, and secondly, Linux loses that battle anyway!

Oh? A Windows (XP) installation has about 30 ports open out-of-the-box. A Linux system, only 5 or 6. Even without a firewall, which do you think has more potential holes? I have a firewall, and it's plain scary to see the number of connection attempts it catches - a dozen every 5 minutes, sometimes more.

The thing people say that most just use email and web browsing is just false. Some people use tax software, which is, you guessed it, Windows. Some people use Microsoft Office and Money, and OOo is no replacement at all, hence Windows. Some people use these silly programs to print out greeting cards - Windows (which actually comprises all the over 40 women I know...).

Have you actually tried to run any of that software in Linux? You might have a few pleasant surprises. Granted, not with MS Office; you-know-who took care of that. As for Open Office not being a replacement, I've had mixed reports. You can't expect two word processors to behave the same with a document "formatted" with TAB and ENTER. In any event, OOo is not the only Office suite available for Linux.

[Xisiqomelir]

As Microsoft puts it, the Total Cost of Ownership is probably about the same, if not higher with Linux.

According to the IDC study, sponsored by guess who.

[phongn]

Now you sound like Steve Ballmer Seriously, ever heard of Code Red?

Code Red has nothing to do with IIS6 or W2K3. Go look up security reports - the IIS6/W2K3 combination is highly secure.

Oh? A Windows (XP) installation has about 30 ports open out-of-the-box. A Linux system, only 5 or 6. Even without a firewall, which do you think has more potential holes? I have a firewall, and it's plain scary to see the number of connection attempts it catches - a dozen every 5 minutes, sometimes more.

Fortunately, XP SP2 and Vista have built-in firewalls enabled by default.

Have you actually tried to run any of that software in Linux? You might have a few pleasant surprises. Granted, not with MS Office; you-know-who took care of that. As for Open Office not being a replacement, I've had mixed reports. You can't expect two word processors to behave the same with a document "formatted" with TAB and ENTER. In any event, OOo is not the only Office suite available for Linux.

If OOo wants to be a real replacement for Microsoft Office, it must import Microsoft's formats and do it well. And while OOo may not be the only suite on Linux, it's the only one that even comes close to MS Office.