Well it's definitely not the over hyped Ubuntu or any of it's clones and it annoys me to see so many recommendations for it from people who have basically used nothing else so can't possibly have a valid opinion on the matter.
I have used Linux for many years before Ubuntu was even conceived - yes Linux did exist before Ubuntu for all you bandwagon jumpers out there, and the other myth surrounding it i.e that it bought user friendliness to the Linux desktop is absolute tosh and an insult to those who have done a lot of work on other 'distros' before Ubuntu appeared
I've had a few favourites over the years, most of them sadly no longer with us.
Libranet was probably the first distro that had everything I wanted in a Linux system. Rock solid Debian with a friendly face and great configuration tools - The Ubuntu of it's time you could say, but better, much better IMO. On the founders death, his son lost interest and a great distro died with him
Then came Conectiva (sic) a Brazilian distro with great 'eye candy' and fabulous tools and one of the first to include all multimedia drivers as standard. It was bought out by Mandrake, which is why it's now called Mandriva and why it's so much better than the old Mandrake.
Then I moved to Slackware based distros, particularly Vector which has the right balance between Slackware solidity and lighter alternative desktops made to run lightning fast.
On my main machine I now use PClinuxOS (a Mandriva variant) and a mixture of Fedora Community Edition and Slackware variants like Vector or Salix on my lesser PC's
Vector is probably my current favourite, fast, stable and picks up new hardware effortlessly. I've got a hard drive with Vector installed and swapped it into lots of machines over the course of the last few months and it just reconfigures itself magically. Similar experiments with other distros are a bit hit and miss, so Vector is the one for me.
Honourable mentions to PClinuxOS, Mepis and the best Live CD ever - Puppy
Not that Ubuntu is rubbish, because it's not. I just want people to realise that other choices do exist and Linux was managing very nicely before it came along and will cope if it bites the dust.
Ubuntu's only contribution to Linux is the fabulous 'wubi' installer IMO. All distros should have it.
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What is your favorite linux distribution and why?Just like jplatt up there, I am divided between Slackware and gentoo. I've been a Slackware user since the switch to ELF in 1995 (or was it 1994)? But with time I noticed that serious questions about linux seem to be best answered on gentoo wiki and in gentoo discussion forums.. so I tried it and got hooked. Its package-managing system is a lot like freebsd, and close to what I would have done, had I been designing one, and the ability to switch between different versions of gcc/boost/jvm/opengl/etc on the fly is great, and just the whole programmer-oriented attitude is what I like.
Now I have bleeding-edge gentoo on two computers and slackware on one.
Linux Mint KDE
I love .deb packages (getdeb ftw)
Synaptic is sauce (apt-get install)
KDE 4.4 is awesome (pwns gnome, from the devs at BSD "gnome sucks")
Works out of the box (easy to do everything with)
Mint tools
its Ubuntu + bug fixes + medibunu + better software manager
puts quality over fixed release dates
Built on ubuntu which is built on debian.
Backtrack is another distro I like.
Fedora will always have a spot in my heart.
I am going to give FreeBSD and PClinuxOS a go too.What is your favorite linux distribution and why?
I divide my time between Slackware and Gentoo -- on the same box. Gentoo of course recompiles everything so it's always optimized for YOUR machine. Slackware is just a good no-frills unix-like distro. If you want to add a package not in the repositories you can usuallly get it through slackbuilds.org and the dyne:bolic live cd which is a multimedia distribution is built on it.
Both get my vote. They get my time and they get my vote.
Without a doubt Linux Mint which I have been using since 2007 which was Linux Mint 3.1 at the time and based upon Ubuntu 7.04
Currently installed
Linux Mint 8 based upon Ubuntu 9.10 (heavily customized) with additional packages sourced from multiple Ubuntu/Mint releases including
Ubuntu 7.04
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
Ubuntu 9.10 (Alpha 6)
Ubuntu 9.10
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
Linux Mint 9
LUg.
Ubuntu. Package management is awesome.
I've been trying to use Nexenta in VM since I want to get a little experience with Solaris and ZFS. It's like putting debian's apt-get onto the opensolaris kernel. The repository isn't very large, though.
For the non-expert!
Ubuntu.......because its just too easy, and no problems (about 1 year+). (%26amp; kubuntu, xubuntu, and lubuntu)
Tried Mint........its cool.
PcLinuxOS is real good.
Fedora is okay.
Tried Lindows/ Linspire way back......just could not get the hang of it.
gNewSense
=
gNewSense was started to provide an Ubuntu based free software distribution without non-free binary blobs in the kernel.
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http://www.gnewsense.org/
slackware but mainly because I have used it forever and know that what ever I want it to do, with work it will.
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