What is your favorite Linux distro and why?

[gmbrdilos]

Okay so now that we got a decent amount of mixing for the OS, What about applications?

Is there an IE for Linux? I have not really looked but how hard is it for someone like me who grew up on DOS and has been stuck on Windows XP for the past 10years to switch over to Linux? Can I still run my angry birds, my sega emulators, my office 2k3, my password holder for online sites and ftp programs and all? Does Linux come with all you need or do you need to get more things for image and movie manipulation? Linux = similar to MAC/OSX (which is similar to unix I thought) so I would think that all of those things would be out there. I just have never really looked for them. Will I find that I will be spending vast amounts of my free time looking around at source forge for things? What about movie codecs? Is there a killer LINUX/UNIX codec pack that plays everything bulletproof?

Most Linux distros come with all the basics preloaded (office word processing, media player, web browser, etc.) unless you specifically get minimal versions. Software isn't always the same but equivalents exist.

[ibanezfoo]

I was a longtime Ubuntu user until they upgraded the GNOME interface. Made me snap at that point. Tried Mint, seems to be alright.

CentOS is basically branding scrubbed Red Hat. Fedora is the consumer Red Hat.
I'd recommend Ubuntu, but in my opinion they took the easy to use a little overboard.

Fedora is bleeding edge Red Hat. A public beta basically. After kernels and packages have been marked stable they will eventually find their way into the ES release.

CentOS is a mostly a brand stripped and binary compatible Red Hat but there are a few differences and they do have alternate repositories.

[bigmike82]

Fedora is cool in that it gets updated all. the. damn. time. By the time you've got a system configured just the way you like it, you're already two releases behind. Bleeding edge indeed.

[stilly]

Awesome! I am going to load Fuduntu tonight onto a laptop because it seemed right. This will be the first of many. Thanks for all the input here and in pms, This has increased my world of knowledge a LOT.

Great. And I just found out that I have chosen a discontinued project that I am going to guess will not be supported and fizzle out sooner than later...

[meaty-btz]

Screw VLC, buggy as all else. I run most vids through command line. More stable and way more control. But as with all things linux based you have to know WTF you are doing.

I am pretty Minty, even though he is an anti-gunner, so I don't donate.. just leech.

[stilly]

Yeah, I have heard about Mint...

[zio707]

I use openSUSE, no good reason other than probably because the VOIP and media servers I install/design run SLES.

[Deadbolt]

only thing i can contribute to this is : if you insist on linux, please standardize all environments. Developers thank you. Drive labels, drive aliases, etc... we can cope. Just please make the environments uniform, whatever it is you choose

[the86d]

Awesome! I am going to load Fuduntu tonight onto a laptop because it seemed right. This will be the first of many. Thanks for all the input here and in pms, This has increased my world of knowledge a LOT.

Great. And I just found out that I have chosen a discontinued project that I am going to guess will not be supported and fizzle out sooner than later...

I have tried multiple versions of *buntu, and only like 2 installed and booted out of like 10 installs on functional hardware. I am pretty anti-*buntu at this point.
One of them actually booted to the installer as it should have, but couldn't see the HD drives, another installed completely but failed installing the bootloader. Most distros that I dislike take forever to install...

[Jason95357]

I use CentOS on all of my personal systems (a couple servers, home laptops). I've used it for a long time. I started using it for my servers when it became mature and I got tired of Fedora's shorter life-span. I started using Fedora when RHL (previous version of RHEL) stopped at RH9, and had been using it for my desktops since RH7 and for servers since RH5.

Fedora is great if you want to use the latest and greatest. However, support for any given Fedora version ends when two releases later are released + 1 month. A release comes out about every 6 months, so that means the most a release is supported is about 13 months. For servers, this is especially a pain to reinstall, but for my simple desktop needs, this is far too annoying as well. These days, I just want to use my PCs. I don't want to reinstall it all the time.

I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux at work, for two reasons: 1. they want someone that the non-Linux guys can call up and get support, 2. it does have better patch management support. CentOS will get all the patches, but you can't track it to RH Bug or Security Errata numbers or CVEs. You can do this with RHEL. With RHEL you can test a specific CVE's patches and deploy the same exact patches every time over and over. CentOS you are often limited to the most recent release of updates.

Another downside with RHEL/CentOS (vs. Fedora or other more often refreshed distros) is that it gets long in the teeth with versions. This is great and very stable for servers. From a desktop perspective, as non-FOSS drivers aren't supported by RH/CentOS, sometimes there is breakage with nVidia and other chipsets. I haven't run into this much lately, but then I have an nVidia update that I've been putting off for 2 weeks because I don't want to troubleshoot it if it does break. I've very cautious and knows what will "break" my system and know how to carefully roll things back (enabling keepcache in /etc/yum.conf helps).

For the casual user who doesn't care about a production environment Linux, just go with Ubuntu LTS. I'm probably going to set up my in-laws with Ubuntu 12 LTS in the next 6 months as they have WinXP and support for that OS is drawing to a close. They don't need a new PC, but Win7 would probably be rather sluggish. Over the years I've been transitioning them to all FOSS desktop applications (LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.), so I believe a transition for them should be fairly painless.

[sbrad39]

OpenSuse and Kororaa

[CaMakarovnik]

Mageia on the desktops and Mint on the netbook. But I had to enable the root account on Mint, just don't want to deal with sudo every 5 minutes. Still use Mandriva 2010 on the laptop - its RAM bound and I don't want to update to something newer.

I use Puppy to boot to a USB drive if I am using someone else's PC, and Gparted for disk troubleshooting.