Open Source

I'm using PCLOS and am pretty happy with it. Got tired of WinXPSP1 that MS refused to update for me, figured it was time for Linux.. Tried several live cds and PCLinux works best for me so far.

lp

I'm using CentOS. Since it's "RHEL equivalent", would this count as RHEL?

I used RedHat and Fedora before. But they were not what I wanted. Now I use openSUSE. It is very good, I feel. Why don't you try openSUSE 10.3? It is the latest version.

ps: archlinux is pretty good. i am runing it on all my computers.

Ubuntu is my favorite distro because the apt-get tools will help to install softwares and automatically manage the dependency problems.
I have ever used Fedora Core 3, which drove me to the wall when installing software manually.

I have used Mandrake->Fedora->SuSe->Ubuntu. Out of these I like Ubuntu the most - it really made life simpler (even if you don't mind working the command line).

Why? For newbies, I would say, the main points are ease of use/maintenance & ease of installation of software.

Ubuntu (which is based on Debian) is great for both since it has excellent GUIs for most configuration tasks. It also has Synaptic which is a nice & easy GUI to install/remove/search for software (uses the apt-get system which automatically resolves all dependencies to install software).

SuSe/Mandrake/Fedora are equally good in terms of GUI and also have good front-ends for software management. They use the RPM system - dependencies were an issue here but with yum (which is an RPM equivalent of apt) that is mostly taken care of. But definitely apt has a much bigger selection of prepackaged software.

I would say start with Suse OR Ubuntu - both are very polished - use each for 3-4 months and see which one you like best since these are the leading distributions. By that time you will have enough knowledge/information to make a decision.

One more thing - in case you face issues with the latest version, don't blame the distro and don't say linux is useless - all versions take time to mature and fix bugs. Just try the previous mature version. Google is your friend.

HTH

Hi All,
I like Redhat Linux ditros AS, ES, Fedora..., may be because I'm familiar with it, and looks to me quite stable, packages management is very good.
Added to that, various tools especially for entreprise applications.

I really like DSL (please excuse the profanity in the name of the distro ) because of its really small size. When compressed it weighs in at less than 50 MB and has a fully functional desktop (fluxbox), web browser (Dillo and Firefox), office suite (Beaver, FLWriter, etc.) and many other pre-installed programs. It is small enough to boot from a business card size CD and can perform a USB boot (with floppy support if needed). It also has really low memory consumpiton compared to other operating systems; for quite some time I dual booted MS-DOS (with Windows 3.1) and DSL on an old Compaq laptop I had sitting around and now it's not collecting dust anymore! Both operating systems coexisted quite nicely together since MS-DOS can be booted from a floppy and I can create a small partition just for Windows and a larger one for DSL, plus an additional partition for all my programs (I thought I would eventually install Wine so that I could use DSL in place of Win 3.1). DSL helped put new life in otherwise almost worthless hardware.