Whats your favorite Linux distro and why?

[IceDigger]

For me it would have to be Xandros.

Ease of use. Very good Samba connectivity. Best explorer thing around. Fast. Debian based. Good hardware detection. Comes with crossover office! Very good cd burning integrated program into it's explorer.

 

[it290]

Gotta be Gentoo. Very easy to use and you can customize/optimize everything. Never has package management problems either. I also like the way the init scripts are handled. After that it would probably be Debian.

 

[slinga]

Knoppix...I have a fear of committment.

 

[Gallstaff]

The day developers start making games for linux and linux-based os's i'm so ditching windows.

 

[it290]

Well, you've got id... and Epic, kinda sorta. It's too bad Loki isn't around anymore.

 

[Gallstaff]

Well I mean like easily for linux. I want to pop the cd and have it work without any prior modifications or tweaks.

 

[it290]

UT2003 for Linux can install directly off the CD's.. not sure if they did that with '04 or not. All of the Loki releases came with installers as well, obviously. And Enemy Territory can install directly under Linux as well. I dunno if Doom 3 is going to ship with a Linux installer, but I'm betting the client might be a bit late (as it was with RTCW).

 

[Curtis]

I'm still trying to find a distro I really like. I'm waiting for the Mandrake 10 ISOs to be mirrored on a server close to me, so I'll give that a go when I can get my hands on it. I guess to that end, Mandrake is my "favourite" distro. In practice I'm really happy with my Smoothwall firewall, but that's hardly a general purpose distro.

My biggest beef with Linux at the moment is the number of hoops I have to jump through to get my damn fonts looking good on a laptop LCD display. :rant

 

[it290]

Huh? What desktop environment or WM setup are you running? Both GNOME and KDE have had configurable antialiased fonts for a good while now.

 

[antime]

I use Fedora, simply because I've always used Redhat (since 4.something).

UT2004 has out-of-the-box support for Linux. Run the install script and there you go.

 

[Curtis]

Originally posted by it290@May 8, 2004 @ 07:31 PM

Huh? What desktop environment or WM setup are you running? Both GNOME and KDE have had configurable antialiased fonts for a good while now.

I'm running Mandrake 9.1/KDE 3.1 at the moment. There is something odd about the way the anti-aliasing works with my LCD - black text on a white background always appears to have bleeding sub pixels around the edge of the text. Looks quite bad.

I'm also still tweaking the fonts in Firefox - I just can't get it looking right.

 

[antime]

Make sure you're actually running at your panel's native resolution. If you have subpixel antialiasing switched on, you could try switching it off or see if there's a problem with the colour order (see here).

 

[Curtis]

Check to all of the above. I've tried it all...I'll probably try it again when Mandrake 10 comes along. I've been spoiled by MS ClearType is all.

 

[it290]

Hmm, for me it's the opposite, I use CRTs and ClearType is pretty much unusable with those, whereas the regular Windows 'font smoothing' just sucks. At least KDE/Gnome offer some options in that regard. Firefox looks great for me too, maybe it has something to do with the way I have it compiled. Not quite OS X quality, but close.

 

[ExCyber]

I like Gentoo, for the simple reason that it basically gives a level of control approaching "compile from scratch" while automating away the tedium - among other things, this does away with the particular dependency hell of having to run actually unstable libraries in order to run nominally unstable apps. In general I don't think there's an OS that I truly like, it's just that Gentoo sucks less than everything else I've tried so far. <_<

 

[Krelian]

I've been using Mandrake since 8.1 (currently running 9.2) and have been VERY impressed with it's intuitivness and all around great community support.

I haven't moved to MD10 yet either...

~Krelian

 

[Curtis]

If you still haven't moved to 10.0, do so now. It's simply amazing. The shift to the 2.6 kernal is actually noticable - everything feels lightning quick on the desktop. I've also resolved my issues with fonts - if anyone cares, go to http://vigna.dsi.unimi.it/webFonts4Linux/ and get the script to download all the lovely Windows fonts. You won't regret it.

 

[mtxblau]

I started with Mandrake, but to resolve dependencies and such, it's much harder to just go to the web ala google and type in the package you need - this is what I've done w/ SuSE. That, and the implementation of apt isn't as good...

That being said, I imagine the mythTV PC I make will be a mandrake machine.