Quote: Original post by Leffe
Hm, I don't get this Ubuntu deal -- Does it have anything that would make one choose this distro over Gentoo?

Ha! Sorry. Had to laugh at that. I'll mention one: you don't have to compile anything.

Quote: Original post by eedok
It all depends on what you think is right. Is a 48+ hour setup time worth a half second speed increase of everything?

Who gives a damn about speed? That's just an old Gentoo myth. Honestly, how many applications are going to benefit because I enabled 3Dnow! ? The thing about Gentoo is that you can update packages without destroying their dependency chain or messing up anything. I never need to switch to a new 'version' of Gentoo, because there really is no such thing. I don't deal with glibc dependencies, because I can simply compile against MY glibc.

Again, you pay in time.

Well... last night I was thinking about it... and this morning I burned an Ubuntu CD and installed the thing... and this post is being written in Ubuntu...

The installation was really quick and straightfoward. I don't know about the partitioning since I already had my partitions made but everything was great.

I am amazed at how well my system is set up and recognized. In only a couple of minutes I had done what it had took me hours to do in Slackware. Apt-get is amazing and I can download any piece of software I want with just a single line(or a mouse click in Synaptic). The system has been fast and responsive and it really has to be the best Linux distro I have tried so far(and I have been around the block a couple of times). GNOME isn't my favorite window manager but I am going to install Fluxbox and get it set up.

My verdic is a 10 out of 10 and I have to say I am impressed at how friendly the Ubuntu forums are. Definitly a distro worth trying.

I take it that there's nothing special other than the revolutionary binary packaging idea then?

Quote: Original post by Leffe
I take it that there's nothing special other than the revolutionary binary packaging idea then?

Ease of use. I would liken it to Fedora.

That's one thing I've been thinking about, being a Linux newbie, why other distro's come above the rest. So I guess its flexability, content (software), easy of use, and how updated it is?

Quote: Original post by WiseElben
That's one thing I've been thinking about, being a Linux newbie, why other distro's come above the rest. So I guess its flexability, content (software), easy of use, and how updated it is?

Well, linux is just the kernel, the packages around it (such as the GUI and other applications such as browsers) are so many you have to limit yourself to what you will be using.

Distros is all about picking "the best" applications for whatever diretion you choose. A distro focusing on say servers haven't the same need as some desktop computer.

Also, some key things comes back, like the package managers, where debian based (such as ubuntu) systems use apt-get and synaptic (the gui for apt-get) and others might use rpm's etc. This is basicly what divides the packages IMO.

The only real reason to know what you want is to try them all, but hey, they're free.

Albert

Edit: And why ubuntu comes out as a leader right now I think because 1) it's fresh 2) it's updated 3) it's debian based (apt-get is heaven on earth).

I'm now running Ubuntu on my new notebook. Ubuntu is pretty nice. Kind-of a Debian nice touch to something a SuSE, Red Hat, or Mandrake user would be more accustomed to. It took minimal setup. Some of which I had to stray a bit from my "classical Debian thinking" to do, but nothing difficult (few users are likely to complain about their resolution being too high, much less about opening an easy to locate dialog box to change it; this is on a 16:10 monitor, so it over-estimated my preferred resolution).

I cut my teeth on Slackware, and use Gentoo heavily... I recently tried Ubuntu, and have to say it's probably one of the best so far for desktop distribution.

To address the comments about speed, they actually still apply. I noticed a sizable decrease in performance (In the form of laggy mouse clicks, and desktop switching) switching to Ubuntu, though it's not enough to prevent me from running Doom3...

Vida linux on the other hand, takes a long time to install (About an hour and a half on an Athlon 1800 XP), but requires almost no input while it's installing, and when you are done, you have a fully functional Gentoo install that's very pretty to boot.

have you guys tried MEPIS? (www.mepis.org) another great distro for KDE fans... live cd autodetect hardware debian based lots of releases and Pro MEPIS is what you probably want to try out.