Opinions on the different Linux distributions

In My Humble Opinion
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I would like to see some Dopers opinions on the different Linux distributions out there. I was going to ask which one was believed to be the best, but I didn’t want to limit the discussion to my own limited view of what might be best. Right now, IMHO, I am leaning towards the Mandrake 7.2 distribition. It is based on Red Hat, ships with KDE as the default environment (but it comes with Gnome and others), and is targeting itself to the desktop. It has a good graphical install utility also. There is also a distribution out there I am keeping an eye on called MaxOS, which is being built from the ground up rather than being based on previous distributions like Red Hat or Debian. I would like to hear which dist. you use, why you like it or would recommend it, its shortcomings, is it your primary OS for posting to the SD, or whatever it is you use a PC for, etc.
Thanks

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I’ve had great success with the newest (don’t remember the number) distribution of Red Hat. Great install interface, fairly robust hardware detection, etc. Before this distribution, I preferred Mandrake.

Fenris

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      • I bought Mandrake 7.2 and installed it on my old 6 gig HD a short time back, just to see what all the hubbub was about. Mandrake is said by many to have the easiest install routine, but that is strictly an opinion, and probably an opinion of someone experienced in UNIX systems. If I didn’t have two hard drives on my computer it would have overwritten Windows: just looking around during installation the only partitions I could get it to allow were a 20 gig (the primary Windows drive) and the 6 gig secondary drive. In other words, I tried to set it up to create a partiton on the primary drive (without actually installing there), and couldn’t figure out how. If you have one HD on your system but want both OS’s, good luck.
        ~
  • The install routine is also supposed to have a stage where it detects local printers, but that never happened -somehow it got skipped. I can’t seem to get it to “re-do” that part, either. I haven’t bothered to try to find out how. (—I can’t seem to locate any How-To books in the local monster bookstores about using Mandrake. I have seen books for Suse and Red Hat.)
    ~
  • Much of the hardware and accessories I have don’t work under Linux: the Winmodem, the scanner, both printers and the USB toys -Zip drive, game controllers, MP3 player. Linux has nothing to substitute for DirectX, so many (most?) games won’t run under it.
    ~
  • The alleged “free software bonanza” for Linux just ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. Most of it is just not very impressive. And you’ll see there’s only about four different kinds of Linux software available for free: text editors, mail programs, Windows emulators and piddly little entrtainment software, like Pseudo-MineSweeper or Fractal Explorer (which is kinda interesting, for about a half-hour). I have never seen any Linux application software for sale in any regular retail store yet. ~ And so, the main reason my Linux installation is so “stable” is that I never use it for anything. It’s only still there because I don’t need the hard drive space, and I don’t want to pay $70 for Partition Majic to get rid of it. (-How much does a 6 gig drive cost now anyway?-)
    ~
    –From the general mood of this post you might get the idea that I don’t really know a lot about UNIX, and you’d be right. Even if I did though, it wouldn’t be worth my time to try to make everything that doesn’t work on Linux, work. I don’t know much about Windows API programming either, and yet everything I plug into Windows does what it’s supposed to. Some software does cause Windows to crash, but that’s just a consequence of the complexities of both, and you can usually find an alternative Windows software title if you just can’t stand the one you’re using. If you eliminated all the Windows software with bugs, you’d have, , , -about as much software titles to chose from as Linux has. Not a heck of a lot.
  • Linux isn’t realy a good consumer product yet. Some people use it for technical reasons that they can justify and a lot of others for bragging rights, but there’s just lots of everyday stuff you take for granted that Windows does automatically, that Linux doesn’t do. And might not for some time. For the most part, I honestly think most people whining about “having to use Windows” are sheer posers, pretending they know better. It’s almost like whining about the line voltage of your wall sockets: “120 and 240 volts sucks. 165 volts would be so much better, and it’s not a monopoly, man, 'cause that ain’t cool.” - MC
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Lots of whining cut out. I remember your help threads and answered one or two of them. The problems you had are a) you expect the computer to do everything for you magically, and b) you want Linux to be windows. If you’re not prepared to read the manual, learn something about it, and get drivers for your hardware, then ANY operating system besides windows (not just Linux) is not for you.

MacOS is much easier to use than windows for a person who knows nothing about computers, but I have a hard time using it just because I never use it and I’m not familiar with it. OS/2 is easier to use than windows, but do I know how to make [insert program or hardware here] run on it? Nope. Does that mean either of them is an inferior OS? No. It means that I’m an inferior user on those OS’s.

Many hardware vendors tend to make drivers ONLY for windows. If you want to use your stuff on any other OS, you need to make it work. Sounds like your gripe is not with the OS, but with the vendors that don’t provide drivers.

Does Linux have a higher learning curve than some other OS’s? Yes. Does that mean you have to be a genius to use it? Of course not. You just have to be willing to read the documentation and use the help resources that are available. So MC, if you don’t like it, fine. Nobody is forcing you to use it. You prefer windows? Good for you. Everybody should use an OS they like using and that they feel comfortable with. But don’t belittle another OS just because you aren’t willing to learn how to use it.

I’ve installed Red Hat (5.1, 5.2, 6.0, 6.1, & 7.0) and Caldera (2.0) dozens of times on many different configurations (including laptops), and they work just fine.

Be glad I got to you first, and not Friedo. :slight_smile:

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      • Linux doesn’t do nearly everything that Windows does. Most people that ask “Should I get Linux?” don’t know that -they assume that Linux is as easy to install as Windows (it ain’t), that Linux will work with everything Windows does (it don’t) and if they don’t like it, they can just ‘delete’ it and keep Windows (they can’t). The first version the OP mentioned was the one I tried, so I don’t see anything I said as being out of line. - MC
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My first Linux was a Slackware release from about 8 years ago. I never got any of the GUI to work so it was purely command line stuff to teach myself UNIX. A couple years ago I installed Mandrake 6.0. It was a pretty easy install, but it had problems with my monitor and graphics card setup. And that PC had a winmodem, so I could never surf with it. Just recently I’ve installed Suse 7.1 Professional. The installation was completely painless and it came with loads of useful stuff such as StarOffice 5 which I like much better than MS Office. I’d be typing this from Linux except another crap winmodem is preventing it.

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I am currently using TurboLinux 6 on one of my other machines. So far I have found Linux to be a bitch of an install, but I think that is the nature of it. At this point, I can only compare TurboLinux and RedHat, as they seem to be the two major distributions here in Japan.

I think the most interesting thing is that an IT manager that I know told me to get into Linux because “it’s fun!”
…a week later I knew what he meant - that is how long it took me to get the thing running with no problems.

Anyone else on TurboLinux?

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A few weeks ago I installed RedHat 7.0. I found the installation to be a breeze – if you can install a recent version of Windows, you can probably install this Linux distribution. Ok, ok, that might not be quite true; if it doesn’t autodetect all your hardware you might be in for some work. But you can get most all of your hardware information from Windows, if you already have that installed, and print it out, just in case that is necessary. There is next to no typing in the installation process: there is a very nice GUI.

The only possible difficulty is that perennial nemesis, partitioning. I can’t vouch for the Fdisk route, but the Disk Druid partitioning was relatively painless. I, however, installed it on a clean hard drive, so your mileage may vary on that count if you’ve got more than one OS on the same disk. Still, for anyone with some experience, that will probably pose no more than a minor problem.

LILO was very good to me, and automatically set up a dual boot. I installed the Gnome desktop, and it seemed to me that anyone familiar with Windows 9x would not be at a loss there. On the desktop there was an internet connection “wizard” for modems, so you can have near instant connectivity. (Presuming it works – I use a cable modem, and needed to manually configure things for it.)

I have had only the best of experiences with it, but I have very limited knowledge of other distributions, so I cannot say I speak from a position of authority on this subject. I’ll call RedHat 7.0 my favorite, because I love it and it’s given me no problems, but I have not tried much else.