linux distros recommendations

[martinz]

I have not been following news on linux distros of late, and wonder if you guys have any recommendations for cool linux distros.

[clpo13]

I suggest either Ubuntu or Debian. I've found both to be fairly user-friendly and easy to set up. Ubuntu looks nicer and comes with some sweet graphical effects if you have the graphics card to support it, but Debian offers a lot more in the way of customizability. Both have fairly good hardware support, too, but there are notable exceptions (Dell computers seem to give Ubuntu some grief). Both use the GNOME desktop environment as default, but you can always get Kubuntu if you want KDE and Xubuntu for Xfce. I think Debian might have KDE and Xfce versions of it, but I'm not too sure about that.

Those are my picks because I've used them the most and had the best experiences with them.
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[spock]

Basically if you're new to linux, ubuntu (or one of it's variants), suse and fedora seem to be the best choices. Just because those seem to be the easiest, best supported and widely used distributions.
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[martin]

I tested Debian, Open SUSE, Kubuntu and Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is very very easy to use. However, you lack of some functionality because Gnome is more simple than KDE. One good thing about Ubuntu and Kubuntu is that there are millions of packages and updated (for some programs I still prefer to download the source code, compile it myself and install it).

Open Suse is also very simple. I didn't like the packages managment software but you can install other one. What I liked of Open Suse is YaST, the control panel. Very easy and useful.

Debien is a bit hard to install and a bit more to configure. The complete edition is about 18 Cds or 4 DVDs. I recommend you to download the NetInstall and then choose the packages you need (Xserver, KDE, etc.). It's not easy to know which packages you need to configure the hardware, the media codecs, etc. You need another computer with internet to look in the internet.

Good luck
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[x Deadman x]

Hey do you guys know what would be some good small linux distros? For example one that i could put on a 2 gigabit flash drive that i could plug into a computer and then run it on basically any computer that i would come by.

If i had it on a USB drive that i had linux on would it respond just as quick as if it was loaded on the hard drive, or how bad would the performance difference be. I know it does not take much of anything to run linux on a machine but would there be a big difference in performance.

[Celvaeti]

You know, there's only one thing that's preventing me from trying a migration to Linux. See, I have a computer that is showing its age more and more every day; modern applications seem to be built with the assumption that all end users upgrade regularly. Like now, for example: I am running Winamp, Pidgin, Firefox, and Thunderbird (plus the usual antivirus), and yet my computer shows a memory usage of 485 MB, right on my threshold for using virtual memory. I've heard that some distros are good for minimizing the "background noise" of idle processes eating memory, good for aging machines like mine...but I have yet to find a single Linux distro where my wireless network card works. I can never get the darn thing to work, no matter how much I try. If I could find a distro which doesn't eat all my system resources and which supports my network card...maybe Linux and I could be long-term friends.

Anybody know of any distros that might fit that? Ubuntu didn't get my card right, that's the most recent one I tried.

[mcwkm]

celvaeti - did you try the ubuntu forums to see if anyone has gotten the wireless card working? if your using a major distro like ubuntu and you can often find alot of support on it. use there search function or start a new thread and wait.

martinz - i would try one of the ubuntu variations. i like ubuntu gnome interface the most. if your using an older machine i would recommend xubuntu because its lighter on system resources. kubuntu is nice i just like gnome over kde, its really just user preference i dont see either being designed for specific users. if you looking a distro for something specific you could mention it someone might know of a distro that is better designedfor it