Open Source

The first Linux I ever used was Slackware, and while I don't use it any more still have a soft spot for it.

Without paying for anything, to learn RHEL I use CentOS.

Ditto for SuSE with OpenSuSE.

The nicest looking (that I've used) has to be Mint.

I use Suse everyday, the greatest distro for me. And then again Slackware is a favorite.

I like Simply Mepis over all as the most direct type of Linux to use. Its portable just like puppy, installs easily on desktops, reads and writes to NTFS files easily and you can add all the multimedia stuff to it once you find the codecs.

The one problem is that sometimes it doesn't play well with the touchpad mouse on a few laptops.

Mepis is based on Debian and uses Synaptic (apt-get) to do its updates and so on.

My fav. distro has to be Fedora... it was the first Linux I've ever touched and it was also my training ground (later I switched to RHEL).

Nowadays I barely use it, but you know you always have a special feeling about your first <anything>.

Linux Mint is also the most user-friendly distro I've ever used... even though I'm not really a big fan of Debian-based distros.

My 1st was Slackware in late 1993, or was it 1994? (second beta if I recall correctly)... distributed on 3.5" floppies... used the distro for quite a while until RedHat came out. Switched to Fedora at Core3 and am still running it (FC12) along side an old IRIX6.5 machine (O2).

Just setup a new HTPC running Mythbuntu (9.10). Nice distro, but no RAID so you have to install some extras by hand. Still playing around with it.

I have tried a number of different distrubtions and have opted for Fedora Core on my home main system, OpenSolaris on my test home system, Mandriva on my laptop, puppy linux on usb for troubleshooting windows systems & have now discovered PClinuxOs as a live CD/DVD backup system.

I use GNU/Linux