Quote:
Originally Posted by
rhfrommn
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.
Great choice! I would have to agree with you that among binary distributions, Arch has to be the fastest one out there because you configure exactly what you want. Based originally on Slackware and spun off from there, with the creation of pacman and a number of other tools, Arch is a very fast bleeding edge binary distribution. I have it in my collection.
For every day use, though, while I appreciate bleeding edge and I do experiment with many of them, I have found sidux, a cutting edge, Debian Sid based binary distribution, to be the ground that suits my needs best. I call it Debian Sid on steroids and mood stabilizers. The sidux team has come up with ways to tame Debian Sid so that it consistently works, yet have software that is about as up to date as anything you can get other than nightly builds of the code that you are interested in.
There are numerous great distributions out there, and I would not for a second try to criticize anyone else's choices. So many of them are excellent and they are all, of course, based on great free and open software (though some versions, particularly commercial versions, have a lot of non free software in order to meet their own needs and expectations, and that is fine, too, because it represents another choice).
So for me, sidux gets the nod!
