Thinking of switching distros.

Syth

I installed Fedora Core 2 on my new PC, and quite frankly, I'm disappointed. I had Red Hat 9 on my old laptop for a few months before this and it was way more stable than FC2. Programmes jsut closing, becoming unresponsive for a few minutes, and other microsoft patented technologies. Hence I would like to switch distros. I don't really want to start a flame war, but I'm curious what people would recommend. I'd prefer if you had tried a few distros, so any suggestions?

nadir

gentoo

i have to type gay crap here cause you need a minimum of 10 characters to post for some odd reason

aidan_walsh

Shouldn't the hyperlink itself count?

Anyway, I've had Fedora Core 2 installed with a while now, and aside from problems with up2date (which should really be removed in favour of yum by default by now), I've had none of the issues you report...

Syth

Don't really think i'm ready for gentoo just yet.

doodle_sketch, strange... Wonder what coul be causing it them?

OfflerCrocGod

Syth wrote:

Don't really think i'm ready for gentoo just yet.

Give it a shot - it's not as hard as it may seem just give yourself plenty of time for the installation and make sure you have the installation guide with you, it's really worth it

flamegrill

Install Mandrake 10.
Install Slackware.

Cry.

Search the board, or get banned.

Cry.

mneylon

Try Debian testing. You know you want to

Stark

Try Mandrake 10.0. Using the latest development release of Mandrake myself and it is very fast and responsive, it seems to have sorted out the interactive performance problems that earlier 2.6 kernel based distros had.

ssh

If you really enjoy a good bit of waiting and thumb twiddling, then go for gentoo. You'll learn lots. But as far as I am concerned, gentoo is a learning distro and not (much of a) doing distro.

If you have a specific set of tasks that you need to do with the computer and don't mind the odd problem, just use Debian Unstable. If you want really out of date but very reliable software, Debian stable is good.

DivX

Check out Distro Watch, should give you an idea of what to expect.

oscarBravo

ssh wrote:

as far as I am concerned, gentoo is a learning distro and not (much of a) doing distro.

Why do you say that? It's my desktop system, and I do everything with it. I've also learned a lot.

halenger

blacknight wrote:

Try Debian testing. You know you want to

Gotta agree with you.

Great as a desktop/server/anything. I use debian (sarge, i.e. testing) on my work PC. Can't say I've had any issues with it really.

nadir

as far as I am concerned, gentoo is a learning distro and not (much of a) doing distro.

Ahem! any points to back that up ?

my desktop too, on both my machines,: stage3 installs are quite fast for servers, if you need serious speed for setting up a server go for slack or debs.
Apart from that ....

leeroybrown

I'll add myself to the list of Debian Testing advocates. I admin servers running Woody/Stable and Sarge/Testing and upgraded my desktop from Woody (with backports) to Sarge last night. Sarge should (never use the word 'will' for Debian releases) be going Stable within a couple of months too.

cravian

I'd suggest Gentoo also.

You don't have to compile everything if you don't want to as there are some nice new binary only distros available, then you can learn at your leisure.
It's the best (fast, responsive, lots of choice) Linux distro I've used and I've managed to convert a few people at work from Mandrake and Red Hat. Couldn't convert the Debian guy though, he's kinda strange...

mneylon

There are two questions you need to answer before choosing a distro:
1. What do you want to do with it?
2. How comfortable with linux are you?


If you are not too comfortable with linux (ie. tweaking settings etc.,) then you should stick to:
- redhat / fedora / redhat clones
- mandrake
- suse

If you are comfortable with linux then go with debian (either testing or unstable)

maxheadroom

blacknight wrote:

If you are comfortable with linux then go with debian (either testing or unstable)

Or, if you are comfortable with linux, and don't mind setting everything up manually once and then letting some excellent distro tools make maintanence and upgrades really easy, go with Gentoo. Although, I wouldn't be so quick to reccommend it if you're on dial-up.

nadir

i run it on dial up, no prob, sync once a month, takes about 4 hours to get all the downloads, you can just run a fetch
emerge -uDf world

ssh

nadir wrote:

Ahem! any points to back that up ?

Yes... the aforementioned "sitting around twiddling your thumbs waiting for programs to compile" thing. You really don't gain a whole lot over a binary only distro... even if your list of optimisation options for gcc is 3 lines long. It's not that it doesn't have *anything* going for it, there is good stuff there... but I couldn't imagine using it on a bleeding edge software based desktop.

dubhthach

Ye could always give FreeBSD a shot as well. Reminds me of installing Redhat6 (ncurses based installer) i havn't done any serious playing with it but it's definetly worth a consideration for those who are into Unix clones

ssh

This is true. FreeBSD is nicely put together. It's binary package management stuff isn't quite as noble as Debian or Mandrake's, but if you really feel the need to compile everything from source, cvsup is a nice way of doing it.

And sure a bit of ncurses never hurt anyone :-)