I use Ubuntu, not necessarily because it's the best but because it is so well-supported. Any problem I have or adjustment I want can be found right away on their forums. They also have a huge amount of packages.

The base distribution is very small (so it will fit on a CD), so you will need to spend some time with Synaptic/apt-get to get the system up to speed. On my laptop at home, I have no internet access so for that, I installed Fedora, another very good distro that comes with everything on the DVD.

I prefer Gnome to KDE, but use Kate for most development.

I'm on Ubuntu right now, though I dual-boot it with WinXP for games and such.

I've tried to get into linux before, but I always went back to MS products, due to the lack of linux drivers for my GPU (Radeon HD 2600 AGP). ATI just recently got its act together and released working drivers, and it really made the difference for me. Compiz + Gnome skins basically blow away anything OS X and Vista have to offer. And it's crazy customizable.

On a more practical note, Ubuntu with Gnome is really stable. I may try out KDE 4 once it gets stable enough, but to me, Gnome seems a lot more simple and straight-forward than KDE.

I have used Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, Debian, and Gentoo. I always end up coming back to Debian though. To be specific Debian Testing is what I run on my Desktop and EEE PC. On my server I run Debian Stable. I usually do the base system and install what I need from there manually. My window manager preferences go OpenBox, XFCE, Gnome, then KDE so that might explain some of it.

Kubuntu is my primary desktop distro, i liked ubuntu also, FC was ok.

For small and portable distro, try Puppy linux.

By far the coolest distro is the SATANIC EDITION UBUNTU LINUX 666!. Complete with compiz flames :P

My personal preference is Gentoo/KDevelop. I've been meaning to give Code::Blocks a try but haven't had a chance yet.

Quote: Original post by Barking_Mad
Kubuntu is my primary desktop distro, i liked ubuntu also, FC was ok.

For small and portable distro, try Puppy linux.

By far the coolest distro is the SATANIC EDITION UBUNTU LINUX 666!. Complete with compiz flames :P

"Linux for the damned!"

Lol.

I personally use Ubuntu on all of my machines, but I've had good experiences with Fedora and SUSE too, both of which I've played with and used (at least briefly).

btw, Back Track is a security/hacking/verifying oriented distribution. It's typically booted as a live session (from a CD, USB flash memory, etc.). I could be mistaken, but I don't think it's really intended for day to day use, such as a home desktop computer. Either way, it offers some very, very nitfy tools and even ships with patched drivers for network snooping out of the box. I had fun breaking my own network with it. :-)

WOW! So many Ubuntu fans out their.

Well, I've installed Ubuntu, so I'm going to go with it for awhile, and lol on the Ubuntu 666 edition even though when I torrented it I was hard pressed to find out that the .iso file was 686MB instead of 666MB.

I

I switched to Debian a few years ago after Ubuntu upgrade failed yet again. Ubuntu is nice but upgrading from one version to the next is prone to problems. After the switch I discovered a few more things that I liked about Debian over Ubuntu:

* vastly bigger repository
* Rolling release if you use the "testing" distribution.

I really like that last bit. No more upgrading in big chunks. Just little bits here and there every day over a long period. Of course "testing" has some downsides. It can be a rocky ride at times, especially soon after a stable Debian is released and lots of frozen packages move from unstable to testing, but otherwise it's great.

I "use" Ubuntu. It's the only one that I have ever tried, and I picked it because of the ease of installation in the latest version. I was incredibly pleased with its installation; it couldn't have been easier if someone came to my house and installed it for me. I didn't want to play with partitions, etc. since I didn't want to have to touch my existing Windows installation (plus I know nothing about the topic).

HOWEVER, I rarely used it seeing as I have no real incentive to not use Windows, and I already have my useless junk vital resources on Windows.