What is your favorite Linux distro?
and possibly why?

Personally, I have Fedora 3 on my computer. I have used Ubuntu and Slackware, too. But I think I liked Ubuntu more, maybe because of its speed and easy installation of packages.

I'm not sure if this topic will survive the no flamewars rule. But in case it does, my choice is Arch Linux. I like it because it is lightweight and fast. The base system is very small and you add to it just what you want. Archlinux with XFCE desktop on my old PII-350mhz with 256MB ram was faster than my Athlon XP1600+ with 3/4 gig of ram running Win XP.

It isn't designed for novices, but if you are willing to learn it will teach you a lot about linux. The system is installed and configured at the command line instead of using GUI tools and helpers. And the community/forums are pretty knowlegeable and helpful.

edit: Fix typo at end of 1st paragraph.

I hope it does, thanks for doing this Milhan. There is a bewildering choice of distros out there and for relatively inexperienced users like me it's really helpful to know the merits and pitfalls of each. My thoughts were that people typically stick with what works best for them so seeing how many people use each type could narrow down the number of distros to try out.

Surely people on here are a little more mature than to flame other peoples choices aren't they?[

You see! Post one and I've a possible recommendation for the 8 X PII-450Mhz Dells I've sitting in my cupboard, and one I've never even heard of.

Thanks,

Mark.

PS. If this thread does get chopped I hope the mods don't blame Milhan, it was as a rsult of my request he did this.

I voted for Slackware because I like the simplyness.

redhat, for I am use it now..

Although I started out with Berkley UNIX in the 70's, I have used several distro's of *NIX since then. At present, I use a rehash of Ubuntu 8.04 known as Ultimate Edition 1.8. I like the distro for the intergration of compiz/beryl and the eye-candy helps me sell folks on Linux. Personally,anything I can do to forward the cause of open source is a good thing. Many of my customers (I run a small computer shop) have never heard of Linux or have no idea that it has advanced so much. The distro I run helps me convert people to open source. They see it and like it. Ubuntu has my vote.

linux from scratch (as I am building it now....)