Besides Mandrake, what is your favorite distro?

[Ixthusdan]

If you frequent here, Mandrake is already your favorite distro. (Or maybe not!) And so, other than Mandrake, what distro would you prefer to use, and why would you use it?

 

Please use comparisons to Mandrake, and remember that expressing preferences is not the same as criticising someone else's choice! There are a multitude of distros out there, and this thread might be a good reference point for those who have only used Mandrake!

 

I have two to list: SuSE and MEPIS.

 

I like SuSE because, like Mandrake, it is a distro that shows the greatest promise of being user friendly. SuSE has some great gui tools, and yast might be better than mcc! This I do know: SuSE does an excellent job at detecting hardware during the install, and the installer is more polished than Mandrake. I have not compiled anything on SuSE yet, but will get a tarball of Pysol and try it out. SuSE is not free, but is worthy of financial support, just as Mandrake is.

 

I like MEPIS bacuse I tried it as a live cd, installed it, and found the rescue mode is useful even if MEPIS is not one of the distros loaded on my machine. I can mount any of my partitions with it, from a gui, and not a command line. I am in fact using it as a portable os for diagnosing problem pc's. MEPIS detected my hardware just fine, and comes with Nvidia drivers.

[phunni]

I like Gentoo - because it's the only distro that has let me set everything up exactly as I want with no extra "bloat"

 

I still sometimes get annoyed that I have to compile everything and it tales ages to install a piece of software, but that's not such a problem on my new PC which is a bit faster

[Gowator]

My favorite at the moment has to be knoppix....

This really impressed me, partly just down to the fact klaus has made it essentially by himself.

 

Its really well thought out and the hardware detection is ..... unbelievable.

some fo the detail is very nice... like the autodetection of a wireless card automatically brings up the dialogs for the wireless config.

 

As a Live distro its great BUT when installed to HDD it gives a slightly quirky Debian. That is it inherits a few simplifications to the init scripts that are not really relevant to a liveCD.

 

Using this has made me appreciate Debian though....

In a very weird way....

 

Its not like I wanna convert all my machines... its just very very good its there.

How can I put it, its like using the air all the time and never appreciating it ..

then one day you suddenly appreciate the fact there's oxygen in the air and its provided from all those tree's,

 

To me the Debian maintainers are like the 'Forest Rangers' living out there in the wilds maintaining our supply of oxygen. Not everyone wants to live out there but appeciating someone does and provides the stable base is quite humbling.

 

Like the kernel maintainers etc. we just tend to asume its there and always has been and always will be.

 

Somehow RedHat doesn't give me the same back to nature feeling as Debian. Its kinda like the manicured lawns of a stately home whereas Debian is the timeless forest.

 

Mandrake is getting too quirky for me.... (a bit of a contradiction consiering what I said about Knoppix) ... but for me the differences are there.

Mandrake is a middle aged distro... its at the point where it should be more stable and easier for noobies but it seems to be doing it in a strange way.

 

What I find with Debian is lots of config tools exist and the challenge is finding them....but when you use them they do exactly what you'd expect and tuning them by hand is easy.

 

With Mandrake finding them is easy, but working out exactly what they do is a nightmare. They seem to hide away what they do so much that when you decide you want to tune it a bit its next to impossible. (well its not but its usually easier to delete everything and start again).

 

I still recommend this as the best distro for noobies to learn but its diminishing fast. Its becoming more like a distro for noobies who don't wanna learn.

 

To me the challenge for Linux distro's like Suse and Mandrake is to become noobie friendly without loosing the power.

Im starting to get that sinking feeling... I remember all to well usuing MacOS5 or something. Everything basic was ridiculously easy ... DOH, just print to that printer and hey here it is.... BUT as soon as you wanted to try and get it to do something a bit different it was like coming up against a brick wall.

 

Sure it was possible with all sorts of addons and stuff.... it was just from a almost non existant learning curve to a quantum step making Neal Armstrongs small step look positively minisule.

 

This is a new challenge for linux, a new century and new users.

I for one don't wanna loose the basics of what linux is to a set of front end wizards. Im happy using wizards for convenience so long as they don't do weird things that I can't work out why.

 

To me it should be a progression from wizard to common tools (like linuxconf/webmin) to editing the files by hand. You should be able to start out at one end and then get into a bit more detail progressively but the current trend is that you start off pressing buttons without understanding how/why and the next step is so big you never make it.

[aru]

Besides mandrake which everyday I love it a little more my favorite distro is debian, after lots of years of hating it (I've always been a rpm guy (caldera, redhat, mandrake....), and I really disliked those pedantic debian users) I've ended up by installing a debian sid on my server (P200MX) and I'm really happy with the lack of problems it is given to me, the simplicity of it's configuration, and it's stability. All this yielding an old hardware server that rocks. Ops, my hart also belongs to Slackware, it has been some years of fun with it.

 

About comparations between mandrake and debian, well IMHO for me they aren't playing in the same league, so I can't say debian is better over mdk or viceversa in anything. Each one is doing for me what I want to be done, that's all. I won't change my desktops to debian and I wont migrate my server back to mandrake.

[Qchem]

I'm currently using Fedora Core 1 on my laptop (with Mdk 9.2 on my desktop machine at home). To me, FC1 feels very polished and as controversial as it is I actually like the unified feel of bluecurve. The desktop just looks nice and I prefer it to the Mandrake default, somehow feels more professional. The graphical boot is gorgeous too, a far better implementation IMO than any others that I've seen.

 

I currently rate yum as a better package management solution than urpmi although this is probably just due to the fact I've learnt the syntax for the conf file so it makes installing and updating from many repos a straight forward process, especially with the fat internet pipe I'm sitting on.

 

FC1 is a distro that wants to be completely OSS based, hence no ntfs support, no mp3 support and no dvd playback out of the box. I actually admire redhat for making these decisions, in the ideal world we should all be using OSS and oggs would be more widely accepted than MP3's, besides if you really want these features they are extremely easy to enable via yum or direct rpm installations.

 

FC2 (in testing now) looks like it's going to be a must install for me, latest 2.6 kernel with selinux and exec-shield enabled, Gnome 2.6 and a whole host of other goodies.

 

In some ways mandrake feels like a less professional attempt at a distro than FC, but at the same time it also feels more orientated towards the home user who doesn't want to spend his entire life messing with the distro before getting some work done. Mandrakesoft are going to have to make some big improvements before you'll see Mandrake X.Y on my laptop, although it will probably remain on my home desktop which is my general actually do some work and play the occassional game machine.

[Gowator]

Hmm,

Things like dvdcss and mp3 encoding are prettyy important for a home user.

I agree with Qchem that its ovcerall a good thuing and overall brave of RH but at the other end of the discussion is usability for noobies.

 

Like I said, I kinda admire the purity of Debian in this but that doesn't make it suitable for everyone....

 

The bottom line is if someone has consumer electronics then they must search out a bit more of the 'non-free' to get it working.

 

My recent experience was with Debian..... heck it took me forver to discover the non official Debian sources.... and in the meantime I had no DVD playback and no MP3 ripping.

 

If a vast number of people used Linux and Opensource then this wouldn't matter but only a few MP3 players actually do ogg. I don't know of any hardware DVD players that do....

 

In the end MP3 or WMV ??? or ATRAC.... which is the lesser evil ???

I dunno but I do know my DVD player and MP3 player both play MP3's..... and so I have no interest whatsoever in ripping to OGG.

[TopDog]

I haven't really tried many distro's... Mandrake 9.1 was the first one I've ever installed, and 9.2 still sits very nice on my desktop.

 

On my old laptop I run Fedora Core 1. After solving a problem with the sound-card, and setting up XMMS with Mp3-support, it actually runs very good an stable, though a bit slow. Nice as a stabel surf-box with WiFi (my card worked out of the box).

 

Other than that I love Knoppix, it's saved me several times when M$ boxes crash completely... though I've had some networkproblems with the 3.3 version, so I still hang on to the 3.2 version.

[bvc]

SuSE9

I'm with ya on that lx....for all the same reasons. It's a nice distro. I'd agree th

at yast is better than mcc. At first it doesn't seem so, but after you did deep, there's so much more it can do.

 

Slackware-9.1

ahhhh....what can ya say about good'ole slack :P . Light, lean, fast, stable, very well documented within itself (in the config files) a ton of pkgs, and complete control.

 

Compare? Not much to compare here, really. Overall, Mandrake is still the King of distros! IMO

 

I've used 8 distros.

[mystified]

I love Mandrake still but I primarily use Gentoo. Mandrake is a breeze to install, configure etc and I guess I'm looking for something a little more challenging. Compiling is a bit of a problem with my slow processor but, for the most part I don't mind. When I did my initial installation I did it all from within Mandrake so I still had an operable system and didn't have the downtime ppl complain about with Gentoo. I also like emerge over urpmi. Haven't had the dependency probs I sometimes run into with urpmi. And while install gentoo is extremely difficult to install emerge makes things easy. I recently upgraded to kde 3.2 and emerge did all the work for me. Same thing when I installed java. No setting up hyperlinks or anything.

[crock]

Knoppix.

 

It's saved both me and the neighborhood on several occasions. :D

 

It's Crock's official disaster CD.

[Guest anon]

For a server? Redhat

Desktop? MDK

[DragonMage]

Two of my favorites right now are:

knoppix -> The best rescue disc ever created, period.

Fedora Core K12-LTSP version 4.0 -> it's heavy, but it works. Everything you need for server is available.

 

PCLinuxOS is definitely up there for me although its dependance on broadband connection needs to be fixed.

[aRTee]

I like knoppix next to standard mdk and mdk-move.

 

Have tried/used RH and in the old days Corel -- but nowadays Xandros is too far from GPL, further than is necessary. (Don't even get me started on Lindows... :P )

Same for lycoris. I wouldn't be interested in any smaller distro, it's better to get momentum behind a larger one, preferably one that is true to the GPL wherever that counts.

I would go for debian if Mandrake would disappear and the community would not pick it up. This plan B seems not to be so necessary to have around nowadays though...

 

I have a SUSE 9 disc lying around that I really want to install, but I'm waiting for mdk10rc1 first, have some problems with beta2 that I want to see if they are in rc1 before sending in bugreports. After that, I'll give SUSE a spin.

 

FC I likely will not try, since there all the community gets is the beta/rc, but not the final. I'm betatesting mdk10 since I want to get the final and pass it around etc. I'm really happy with the community then official edition -- the latter will be the one I pass around, the former one I will use from the beginning (which will lead to the latter by upgrading).

 

In my experience, most people (that I pass discs to) don't really care if the software they use is 3.1.4 or 3.1.5 or so, they won't mind waiting a couple of months. Very few people actually want to have the latest and greatest, most just want something that works; mdk has been ok at that (for the people I know and systems I installed on), but the 'official' release will make it better.

 

Also, I'm still dabbling with the idea of talking to system integrators and having them sell mandrake systems along the no-os systems they sell currently; but the system they sell must do all: dvd playback (maybe even ripping, don't think that that would be a big legal problem here in Switzerland), cdburning/ripping, all video playback, webbrowsers fully functional (java, quicktime, realaudio, flash etcetc), 3d accelleration, you name it. I'm waiting for mdk10 (kernel 2.6 and kde 3.2) to give it a try...

[Gowator]

I love Mandrake still but I primarily use Gentoo.  Mandrake is a breeze to install, configure etc and I guess I'm looking for something a little more challenging.  Compiling is a bit of a problem with my slow processor but, for the most part I don't mind. When I did my initial installation I did it all from within Mandrake so I still had an operable system and didn't have the downtime ppl complain about with Gentoo.  I also like emerge over urpmi.  Haven't had the dependency probs I sometimes run into with urpmi.  And while install gentoo is extremely difficult to install emerge makes things easy.  I recently upgraded to kde 3.2 and emerge did all the work for me.  Same thing when I installed java.  No setting up hyperlinks or anything. 

Hey, Mystified.

Next time your bored....

Looking for some fun.

Try and old laptop with Winmodem and quirky PCMCIA....

Or one of the shuttles with nforce chipsets....

 

and then say Mandrake is easy to install and configure!!!

 

based on my hardware....its a complete pain.

though Im willing to accept its mainly my hardware but Mandrake just doesn't like it!

 

Even the Debian install was easier than Mandrake on the laptop.

(To be fair Xandros failed too)

But Lindows (Laptop edition) and Knoppix installed no problem.

However got mandrake move yesterday to give a try!!

 

Well see later

[chris:b]

and then say Mandrake is easy to install and configure!!!

 

based on my hardware....its a complete pain. 

Sigh, Steve. I wonder if you ever thought of getting real hardware? :unsure: