Favorite Linux

[Kitsune]

Those here that use Linux, which is your favorite version and perhaps a bit about why?

[Bounty]

Personal favourite? Xubuntu. All the convenience of Ubuntu's support and package manager, with a neat lightweight window manager.

[R.O.A]

I like Fedora 9 because it was what we used the most back when I was doing G++ programming. I had a live USB version of it that worked well, until I made the mistake of renaming the drive causing it to fail. One of these days I will have to make another.

[DaveJB]

To be honest I've never been too keen on Linux, but the version that most impressed me was SUSE in around the 9.x-10.x generation, since it worked nicely and was quite easy to fix in the event of a misadjusted setting or bad kernel compile. While I thought Mandriva had better features, in my experience it was way too easy to cripple the OS and/or X-Window manager and have no easy way of recovering things.

[Uraniun235]

I don't use it at home, but while struggling with some shitty CTL "2go" mini-notebooks at work (and their awful awful awful 800x480 screens) I've so far had an easier time with OpenSUSE than I did with Ubuntu. And honestly from my limited experience it strikes me as more solid than Ubuntu.

[darkjedi521]

I've developed a preference for Centos at work. 9 times out of 10 just works with the commercial apps, without the annoyances of Red Hat license compliance, plus everyone else here uses that or actual RHEL. My choice of distro is determined by what Autodesk, Mathworks, and Sun bless. For my personal use, I use whatever Fedora's current release is or one of the BSDs depending on how current/off the wall the hardware is. I've yet to find a good off the shelf HPC targeted distro.

[Spyder]

Posting from Ubuntu at the moment. Tidy little OS once you install a theme that doesn't look like it's made from people.

[Dave]

I used to use Kubuntu, right up until 8.04 started hiccuping on shutdown
(PITA glitch, but limited to few users, so "Please wait for next version to be released!" )
and they went KDE4 only for the 8.10 release. I need(ed) a system that is 95% usable out of the box, and the KDE4 environment didn't promise that.

So I went with Ubuntu 8.10, and haven't looked back.

[Crayz9000]

So far I've been pretty happy with Ubuntu 8.10. GNOME doesn't grate on my nerves as much as it used to a few years back.

Before that, I used Gentoo until I finally managed to botch an upgrade and screwed it over. What I did kind of like about Gentoo was that I could pick and choose my application versions to a degree -- I don't really like the newer versions of Pan too much as they completely removed the killfilters in favor of barely-functional article scoring, so I was able to build and use the old version instead. Of course, the downside to Gentoo is that everything is manual, including the kitchen sink, and to make things work automagically takes some extra effort. Working full-time now, I don't really have the time to sit and babysit build processes anymore.

My first everyday Linux distro was actually Mandrake 9.2, which I upgraded through the various Mandriva versions afterward until I finally got tired of the glitches and incompatibilities in it.

[Pu-239]

Ubuntu, I just prefer the larger package repository that Debian variants offer over the RPM based distros. That, and I like aptitude as a package management tool, hate synaptic. 32 bit package support on 64-bit Ubuntu and other Debian variants is fairly crude though, but most people won't need that. Ubuntu does seem a fair bit more technologically primitive compared to Fedora/OpenSuSE, but it seems more stable in my experience, aside from problems w/ pulseaudio.

Seconded on a better theme. I use this tweaked for fatter scrollbars:
http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/ ... tent=79842

Solves the annoyance of hueg GUI elements taking up excessive space for the most part.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I'll have an Ubuntu, please.

[Gandalf]

I use Ubuntu, though it was either this or Knoppix.

[Turin]

I'm using Linux Mint 5 (x64) at home. It's a Ubuntu spin-off with a bit more of a "it just works" philosophy. Other distros might be slimmer, but having better support for the multimedia codecs, Flash, etc, right "out of the box" is nice; I can fix all that stuff myself but generally find it hardly worth all the effort of getting it to work (especially when it breaks after updates). That's probably not a typical Linux user philosophy, I suppose, but time I spend on the computer I'd rather be doing something useful with it. I'm becoming a big fan of MintInstall as well, which has access to the larger Ubuntu package repositories.

[rapidsquirrel]

I'm a bit of a Gentoo freak. I've tried plenty of other distros and a couple of the BSDs. Aside from FreeBSD, everything else just seems like a pain to me. Too many things installed by default and too many GUI configuration panels that don't provide enough choices.

Plus there is something satisfying about finishing a three day install process to get a system close to how you like it.

[Davey]

I've used Ubuntu 8.10 for about two weeks now after installing it in my laptop, but I've considered switching to either Debian Linux, Solaris 10, or FreeBSD when I get my new desktop. (I've used Solaris for a while). I will be watching this thread for more information, I could use the help. What I like about Ubuntu is that all I needed to do was install it, update it using the package manager, activate my display driver, install a madwifi driver for my wireless, muck around with the touchpad configuration in my xorg.conf, set up a theme, and that was all I needed to do. Practically worked right out of the box compared to Windows Vista.