I use Arch. It strikes me as the right blend of simplicity and usability (user's taste and all that crap). Besides the package manager is pure ecstasy. It's distrowatch.com btw

Quote: Original post by Yamian
I've been concidering getting a free Linux distribution, but there are so many. I'd be using it for programming mostly, so what do u think?

Flip a coin.

There isn't a foolproof way to pick a distro you'll like. Try a few and see which you prefer, or take Fruny's advice. Personally, I'd try Gentoo if your machine is reasonably fast (but then, I am biased...) and Debian or one of its derivatives otherwise. Be aware though that the Gentoo install takes a fair bit of fingerwork and time, even on a new machine. However, it does have an advantage for development in that you get a complete toolchain and headers for all your libraries by default, rather than having to install seperate -devel packages (yeah, I know it's a trivial thing, but it always annoyed me on Fedora).

Whichever one you pick at first, there's a fair chance that something about it will annoy you. If it does, try another distro until you find one that doesn't.

Quote: Original post by eedok
Did you try the What distro for you? In the faq?

That's a 404...

It's back up now

Hi there,

My friend and me and pure Debian people, that doesn't mean you have to be. I have another friend that used to run Suse Linux on his machines but after my preching he gave debian a try and have been using it since. The thing about debian is the apt package management system and vast package repository.

This christmas was went and downloaded a few of Live CD's for other distributions. We got Knoppix, Ubuntu, Suse and VLOS. The last one we didn't try yet.

Before i give a quite run down, here is the thing you should consider. Most distros (not debian) stick to a certain window manager by default, the two most common are KDE and Gnome. So you have to take a look at those two window managers to see which one you preffer more in the visual side. Of couse once you mastered linux a bit more you can switch from one to the other or even use others such as Window Maker or Enligtenment ( there are many others ).

Knoppix is quite sweet, the Live CD allows you to do a lot of things and comes with a good range of packages. I think there is also an option to install the distro from Live CD unlike all the others we tried. It comes with KDE destop by default. I'm not a fan of KDE as it resembles Windows too much including it's clunkiness but it has some nice features.

Ubuntu did impress as it booted by without any intervention and loaded all the drivers and configured wireless and display setting correctly. We tried it on three different laptops. Gnome 2.8 desktop was very polished and it had a nice range of apps installed. You can't install from Live CD but you can get a tiny image from the net that will isntall the exact system on your machine. You will be taken through installation by new debian (sarge) installation program. One problem and a major one at that we had ran into was the lack of packages available in it's repositories. And unfortuantly it was not compatible with debian package sources.

Suse did dissapoint a little bit actually purely because it didn't get the correct screen res automatically. I would have thought it would have the best functionality as it was the oldest of these distributions but I was wrong. Otherwise it was based on Gnome 2.6 and was quite sweet. Some vital apps were missing, like a movie player was not included. Also Suse is based on RPM package management system which is a bit infirior to debs. I don't want to start a flame work here but it's a fact.

Some more info:
We tried out VLOS 1.1 which turned out to have quite a sweet installation procecure but in the end suffered from wrong colour depth on the screen and was missing some basic command utilities such as pump and dhclient.

Xandros was another distro we tried and it was too corporate and windows like. It might be good for those who work a lot with windows and don't have much time to learn linux world. The installer was easier then windows one and quite quick.
It was suffering from the same lack of packages that VLOS did. The boot up screen was very cool though :)

Anyway, hopefully this will give you a good idea of some of the distos.

As you want it for programming, debian offers a lot of apps from it's default repository.

Dan

[Edited by - wizards on December 30, 2004 8:42:38 PM]

Another vote for Debian here. Even if you don't go with Debian, definitely stay far far away from RedHat and Mandrake. They tend to be bloated and buggy.