Linux distros

[ailmarfarm]

Hi, I have been trying out various Linux distro's on an 'old laptop'. So far I have tried Red Hat 7.5, Mandrake 9 & 10, Suse 9 and Fedora Core 1.
I have tried to install other ones, Debian was too hard to install and setup, others such as live cd's etc just would not install onto my system.
I am only playing with these systems and not doing any real work with them, but it seems to me that Fedora wins hands down. I have been able to set up Fedora and the various applications without too much hassle.
I look forward to the next complete release of fedora.
All the developers are doing a stirling job, well done.:)

[Ug]

Quite a few there. ;)

[Jman]

It's all about choices. I'm glad you have tried several distros and are liking Fedora.

I also appreciate the work of the Red Hat developers. A few of them may post here but many are on the Fedora mailing lists (http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/communicate/).

There wasn't a Red Hat 7.5, though there were 7.3, 8, and 9.

Everybody's looking forward to Fedore Core 2. :)

[Ug]

When it finally arrives.

[ailmarfarm]

Oh yes, it was 7.1 actually. A cover cd from a magazine, Linux has come a long way since that release I am happy to say.

[imdeemvp]

i love redhat/fedora because it was my first linux love!

but i have to admit mandrake has the most and better organized distros there is....slackware is nice too but not recommended for newbies....:D

[s0lus]

I have tried several distros myself...(RedHat, Mandrake, suse, and Fedora)

Out of all of them, I have found that Fedora has been the easiest to setup, detection of hardware was excellent, and worked wonderfully fast. The only downside I have had so far was not being able to update my Nvidia Drivers so that I would get a faster frame rate with my Nvidia Geforce 5900 Ultra 256mb card which is currently only putting out 240 FPS while running glxgears....disappointing....

cant wait for FC2 to come out...hopefully my gaming situation will be resolved...

[mark]

I've also done a fair amount of distro sampling, most recent vintages being Red Hat, SuZE and Fedora. I've had (by far!) the best, least-hassle experience with Fedora. ALL of the developers (RH & community) deserve applause - thanks to them, I was finally able to completely wipe XP off of my laptop - giggling hysterically & laughing maniacally all the way!

[Nefarious]

I've had my experiences with sampling Linux Distro's and I'm just happy to get rid of Windows period off my Laptop. Not yet ready to go 100% with my Main Computer, but any servers I setup, you'll know that I'll be using Fedora. :-)

Also, you might be seeing my name as a developer if things go even better with FC2. We'll just have to wait and see.

[z1xq]

Fedora sucks if you dual boot XP.

[Nefarious]

Why have XP with Fedora? Just get WINE and get rid of Windows period. :-)

[Thoreau]

yeah i have tried Suse, Mandrake, Redhat, Gentoo, and FreeBSD( i know i know), and Fedora.

I like Gentoo, just for the pure hardness of the whole damn thing. But i love Fedora becuase that's what i use to get my work done. Now if only Novell's IM client protocol worked in GAIM... i could throw windows out the window. *sigh*

[swag]

Originally posted by z1xq
Fedora sucks if you dual boot XP.

Ehm... Why? No problems with dual boot here.

[Lugh]

I have been using Linux for about two months now. I think I have burnt out a hard drive trying the different distros of Linux. I keep coming back to three, Fedora (of course), ArkLinux and Xandros. I am pretty much satisfied with Fedora and Ark; I keep coming back to them. Xandros has an easy printer installer thingee as well as an easy partition/network browser thingee. But, I don't like the Debian packaging and Xandros wants you to buy (BUY! Sounds like MS) new stuff. With Fedora and Ark, I have not been able to install a printer from my home network. This is a must. Whenever, I try to file share between Fedora and Ark to Linux, it never works.

I too dual boot with XP and Fedora and occasionly get an error message. Its been an easy work around, I just press the 'reset' button and GRUB boots fine.

[aditrus]

yeah i have tried Suse, Mandrake, Redhat, Gentoo, and FreeBSD( i know i know), and Fedora.

I like Gentoo, just for the pure hardness of the whole damn thing. But i love Fedora becuase that's what i use to get my work done. Now if only Novell's IM client protocol worked in GAIM... i could throw windows out the window. *sigh*

Nice to know that i'm not alone with Novell + Fedora. I'm also waiting for GAIM to work with Groupwise IM. I'm happy that Novell made a Groupwise client for Linux. Almost like the windows counterpart. The GW client for linux made me 99.5% Fedora user in a days work. I'm so amazed that my Fedora works seamless with snapserver shares, windows shares and Groupwise.

[Jman]

Moved to Linux Chat.

[rkl]

In my time, I've tried Lindows/Linspire (OK, but no programming tools and I'd rather not pay for Click'n'Run stuff that's free with other distros), SuSE 9.1 Personal Edition (again, deficient in a lot of software - no wonder it's a free download now - not a good ad for their Professional Edition at all), Red Hat 7.X/8.X/9.X (nice once you've got used to them and pretty well the "standard" out there for several years w.r.t. third party software), Debian (horrid, horrid installer...but that was a couple of years ago - might have improved since then), Mandrake (OK, but no real advantage over RH/FC really), Slackware (horrible installer again), Solaris x86 (stopped half way through installer - can't handle extended partitions, making it useless) and Fedora Core (which I'm happy with - until FC2, still similar to RH 7/8/9).

One thing I've noticed is that some distros still amazingly persist in using lilo as a bootloader (which FC has marked as deprecated in FC1, FC2 and FC3, but hasn't had the guts to drop it yet). GRUB is so superior to lilo that I find it shameful that any recent distro would still use it - it's actually now become a showstopper for me for Linux distros - if I'm not given the option to use grub, I won't use the distro. You might find that fussy, but when I'm dealing with multi-distro installs on one hard disk, I do NOT want to have switch bootloaders to a clearly inferior one, just because a particular distro is still living in the mid-90's.