Which Distro?

airbornflghtairbornflght Houston, TX Icrontian
edited March 2007 in Science & Tech
Well, lets have it. I'm looking for a distro that is learnable, but not candy coated. The learning curve is not really of concern since it won't be my primary OS, but I want to figure it out in a couple weeks.

I also want to be able to customize it readily, and a big user base is needed. I've heard gentoo, slackware, and others. Which one do you think I should use?

Comments

  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited March 2007
    If learning curve isn't a concern and you want the most versatile distro available, your choices are Gentoo and Sabayon. I prefer Gentoo myself; by the time you finish the text-mode install you will know your way around the guts of most any POSIX OS.

    Ubuntu and Kubuntu are great if you're less serious about that learning curve statement. They're excellent desktop distros and a good place to start learning.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • airbornflghtairbornflght Houston, TX Icrontian
    edited March 2007
    Does it matter if I go 64 bit?
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited March 2007
    To be honest, for a normal desktop user, not really. Anything that takes advantage of 64-bit will run better than in 32-bit so stuff like big encode or render jobs will go faster. A few things don't run in 64-bit like Adobe Flash though there is a workaround: install and use a 32-bit browser. Unfortunately, even in 32-bit the Flash player is buggy as hell and crashes a lot. Way to go Adobe. ATI and nVidia have binary drivers for both 32-bit and 64-bit so that isn't an issue. I can't vouch for ATI's driver quality but nVidia's drivers are on par with their Windows counterparts in every respect.

    I've run Linux on 16-bit. It Works.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • airbornflghtairbornflght Houston, TX Icrontian
    edited March 2007
    Well I'm posting this from inside the sabayon live environment. I'm installing it right now, and I hope to god it just didn't obliterate my windows install, but the partition manager was a little foreign. It said it was going to install the grub boot loader. Will that automatically add XP, or am I going to have to add it myself?
  • jaredjared College Station, TX Icrontian
    edited March 2007
    Grub will usually automatically detect the XP install and config itself appropriately.
  • nonstop301nonstop301 51° 27' 24.87" N // 0° 11' 38.91" W Member
    edited March 2007
    Good luck with your linux adventure :)

    I haven't tried Sabayon or Gentoo and I'm currently using Ubuntu but at the end of the day it's all the same and if you encounter some major difficulties with one distro you'll find them with any other distro you switch to.
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited March 2007
    Meh, application issues don't typically go away but you can get away from dependency hell by switching to Gentoo, Debian, or their derivatives. Plus if you just hate KDE switching to a GNOME-based distro will likely improve your user experience.

    -drasnor :fold:
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