[//Nathan]

I found this... Informative. It's a wizard which asks you a series of questions probably anyone can answer, and recommends a Linux distro. Actually a few.

http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/

The top ones it offered me were Linspire and XandrOS. I am very familiar with Linspire (and have used it) but I'm not so sure about it. I'll have to give it another chance... Last I used was 4.5. 5.0 is out now. I have never even heard of XandrOS... Anyone?

It then offered a few others... Desktop/LX, Ubuntu (actually I have that installed on a partition), Kubuntu, Mandriva (aka Mandrake), MEPIS, SuSE, Debian, Fedora (just got done trying FC4). On these, it tells what one point it "failed" (versus your answers). Looks like I have a few ideas on other distros to try.

Of course, your answers will undoubtedly be different than mine.

Even if you use Linux, try it... it only takes a couple seconds, and I'd be curious to see if the Linux experts here agree with its recommendations for them. At least it didn't recommend me Slackware or Gentoo, which I understand require a more advanced knowledge of Linux than I've got.

[Vlad#]

I tried it, the questionnaire seems quite comprehensive, but it's no surprise that Gentoo was my distribution of choice

[William]

It gave me Gentoo as number 1, and Slackware as the second. Nothing else, really.

Seems pretty intuitive. Nice, clean, fast. I like it!

[Nimdock]

• Slackware
  
• Gentoo

[Tseia]

Gentoo and Slackware - I run Gentoo. Maybe it's time for me to try out Slackware...

[Michael Boutros]

It gave me Mandriva, MEIPOS, and PCLINUXOS as my mains and Kubuntu, Slackware, and Gentoo as my secondary. I was going to decide between Slackware and Ubuntu, because Ubuntu did not have KDE, but now that I have found Kubuntu I might get it.

[Stephen]

Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Slackware. So fairly close, I use Ubuntu, I used Fedora for about 16 months before that and I've used Gentoo a few times

[Wombat]

Debian, Ubuntu, Xanderos.

Not bad. I've used a Debian based distro a while ago (Novell Linux Desktop) and I was *REALLY* pleased with it. It was quite slow though, especially since having tried Gentoo (which was a bit faster, but I didn't do all the optimisations) and Fedora Core 4.

Edit: Actually I was mistaken NLD is based on SuSE.

I think I'll give Ubuntu a try (which is also a Debian-based distro IIRC).

This post has been edited by Wombat: 08 July 2005 - 09:25 PM

[//Nathan]

Ubuntu is Debian based, I'm running it and XP Pro dual boot. My complaint with Ubuntu is it has a "special" Firefox 1.0.2 but with the 1.0.4 fixes... I can't get extensions from the Mozilla site. TBH I don't understand what's so special about Debian... What is it? It's still Linux right? Is it just a really good distro others are based on? (Total Linux newb here. ) Ubuntu flies, I have the x86_64 build. I'm still running 32bit Windows, vs. 64bit Linux... Ubuntu is a little more responsive, cleaner... Windows boots 4X faster. Easy. But for just surfing the Net I love it. I'm still looking for one with multimedia support... I may just get a paid Linux one day, just because it makes all the licensing BS a non-issue. Makes Linux more at a level with Windows out of the box. I think that's worth paying for. Heck, it's cheaper than XP, and it's gonna be cheaper than that Longhorn upgrade. That one, Desktop L/X, was beautiful... It looked a lot like Windows XP. XP-ified Linux.

There's always Linspire. I actually have a license to it... when there was that MS settlement, Linspire ran a site that, if you gave them your settlement claim money (which had to be spent on MS competitors anyway, it was like coupons IIRC) they'd give you a license for Linspire and X months of their Click N Run service. It was really nice. It played every kind of audio I threw at it, but couldn't handle video. So the cost to own for me, with Linspire, would pretty much just be Click N Run membership. And if you cancel it, I'm pretty sure you can still access programs you've already downloaded. Download it once, you keep the online access to that program indefinitely. It's very generous from what I read. But it gets a lot of flack from the "Real Linux Gurus" so, because I know a thing or two about hardware (heck, I built a computer and it booted on 1st try, had no problems yet) so I'm giving the others a try, at least the more popular ones. I have a few yet to try before I go back to Linspire.

[Stephen]

Dark Reality, on Jul 8 2005, 08:04 PM, said:

My complaint with Ubuntu is it has a "special" Firefox 1.0.2 but with the 1.0.4 fixes... I can't get extensions from the Mozilla site.

Thats not a special version of Firefox thats a bug introduced by whoever built Firefox for Ubuntu, update.mozilla.org tells you how to fix it at the bottom of the page.

[aent]

It gave me Gentoo and Slackware. I have no idea why it recommended Slackware, I hate it... The reason it must have gave me Gentoo was because I chose portage for package manager.

[_]

Gentoo, Slackware.

[MutantMonkey]

Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, and Slackware. I use Ubuntu.

This post has been edited by jamies110: 08 July 2005 - 08:17 PM

[bfirsh]

Wow, it's right. Debian is a perfect match, and I use Debian everywhere.

[CTerry]

It gave me Ubuntu, Fedora and Linspire. I must say of the distros I've tried Ubuntu has been the least nasty, but in general I just don't like Linux (please don't hurt me)

[Cool Dude 2k]

I got Gentoo as 1st and Slackware as 2nd. I use Ubuntu.

[Michael_C]

We found 1 perfect match(es):
Fedora

In addition, we found these matches, sorted by how well they match:
Mandriva
MEPIS

[Ben Childs]

Found Fedora for me, so I went on to eBay and ordered the 64-bit edition of it
I really couldn't be bothered downloading it myself

[Scott B]

Mandriva, MEPIS, Fedora and SuSE. I used SuSE a few years back and I mucked about with Fedora Core 3 on my older PC. Hmm, I feel like changing to dual boot now

[Simon]

Never used Linux in my life, but apparently "Desktop/LX" is the best for me