What's the best Linux distro?

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I wonder which one to choose.

http://www.freebsd.org/

www.ubuntu.com

will be the premier flavour of linux, if it isnt already.

For?

For me it's:

Speed = Gentoo
Security = OpenBSD
Ease of use = Ubuntu

Suse or OpenSuse are both good distros too.

I personally use Ubuntu just cause it's pretty

But for the powerhouse in the bedroom, it's gotta be Suse.

If you're looking to switch for the first time, I would DEFINITELY use Ubuntu. I gave it to mum, who hasn't even had a computer in years, and she had no problem figuring it out. Its laid out enough like windows a first time user doesn't get lost, and the forum family are quite knowledgeable.

Another thing you could try is getting a few LiveCDs of different distros and trying them out. Then you could tell what one really fits you.

Just avoid 64Studio. Didn't work for crap, and theres something wrong with a 32 bit port of a 64 bit os that was ported from another 32 bit os. It's buggy beyond all reason

For me, it's Slackware.

FreeBSD and OpenBSD are not Linux distros.

Exactly.

I know the BSD's aren't technically Linux because they don't use the Linux kernel, but if they can run the same software, I would consider them too. Can they?

@tomadao Why do you like Slackware? It doesn't exactly have a reputation for user friendliness.

What advantages does OpenSuse have? I had to use OpenSuse in my Linux class, and it didn't seem as friendly as Ubuntu.

I have a Core 2 Duo. That will run 64 bit Linux, won't it? Are there any advantages/disadvantages to running 64-bit Linux instead of 32-bit?

I see several recommendations for Ubuntu. It certainly appears to be the most popular distro at the moment. It looks like Canonical officially supports Kubuntu and xubuntu as well, and it looks like the only difference is some packages. Ubuntu uses GNOME and Kubuntu uses KDE. xubuntu uses Xfce and has some other lighter packages installed by default. (Like abiword and gnumeric instead of openoffice.org)

I noticed Xfce lets you put icons on the desktop now. It also has a new file manager called Thunar. Xfce supports GTK+. Is there anything GNOME can do that Xfce can't? And what exactly is the difference between KDE and GNOME?

KDE GNOME and xfce are more like front ends for ubuntu. They are not just the appearance.

here is how it works to my knowledge.

You have the kernel, which is the bare bones of the operating system. It talks to the bios, which runs the hardware. It interfaces the applications to the hardware.

On top of that you have things like the file system. This is the minimal level at which work can be done by a human.

Above that we have the desktop environments, like GNOME. they allow a nice interface for the human and the machine. They dont all do things the same way. For example, KDE activates things with a single mouse press. They also arrange their menus differently.

KDE is heaviest on a machine, while xcfe is lightweight. There are actually less memory intensive desktop managers than xcfe, but thats the lowest that Canonical supports.

Above that you have special stuff, like compiz, which adds graphical glitz and effects to the desktop. Almost purely for show. I dont think xfce will run compiz for example.

Then, one layer above that you have the custom themes for the operating system. Custom log in screens, desktop wallpaper.. specially designed menu bars..

In ubuntu you can switch between Gnome, KDE and xcfe at the log in screen. Have a look here.. http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/xubuntu http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/kde

and a comparison of KDE and Gnome. http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/kdegnome

I use Gnome, but having looked at xcfe i can see some themes that look even nicer than Gnome. When I did a test install of Xubuntu I got it pared down to 140 megs of ram at idle. with youtube running, it was still only 150 some. That was xubuntu 7.10, released in october 2007! Compare that to vista, which eats a good gig without doing anything.

Ubuntu seems to be one of the "easier" distros in that it's preconfigured for the most part, although IMO it seems kinda kludgy, like Fedora and openSUSE. On the other end of the spectrum and distros like Gentoo and Arch Linux, which are minimal from the start, with users adding what they want. I like Arch compared to Gentoo since I don't need to compile much with specific options, and PKGBUILDs are fairly easy to use, although I imagine for something like PPC, or IME a K6-2, Gentoo would be where I would go.

Xubuntu. It's light on resources and it has a good user interface and stability.

All the BSDs have Linux binary emulation built into the kernel (they just need some libraries adding). It's also pretty simple to modify Linux source code to run on a BSD box natively. The only real differences are the kernel, the kind of file system used, and the way devices are handled. They all run a lot of the same software, like KDE/Gnome, GIMP, so to the average Joe look the same, when compared to Windows or OSX.

I've only really used OpenBSD (and OSX).

NetBSD runs on almost anything, but doesn't seem to be maintained well enough to make it useful on any of the stranger hardware (My Jornada 720 has JLime Linux instead of the hpcarm port of NetBSD, because JLime is actually usable without compiling everything from source, all without any docs, or even platform specific source code).

FreeBSD seems to have been going downhill, and seems to carry too much old code to be updated properly, or run as well as it could (I ended up using Gentoo on my Dell PowerEdge 1950 game server, because FreeBSD hasn't been updated to include 64bit Linux binary emulation, despite 64 bit being the norm for years, and the FreeBSD side being 64bit. The BF2 server package is 64bit unless you're happy running an older buggy version).

DragonFlyBSD looks to be something with amazing potential, but it's a still pretty new, so doesn't support as much hardware/software as the others. It's being developed as a Virtual Machine hosting platform, and has a lot of very up to date programming ideas going into it to maximise performance.

OpenBSD is the one I've been using constantly for 6 years on my firewall/gateway/router/load balancer/web server (and it got me using OSX instead of Vista, because underneath it's BSD). It's designed from the ground up to be as secure as possible, so it's very well coded (because doing the regular security audits on the whole codebase would be a lot harder otherwise), and easy to use in some respects because if it wasn't you'd take shortcuts that would reduce the security. It's not really a desktop system, although you can get all the usual stuff for it. It's more tailored to be run on a firewall/web/mail server, and has a lot of tricks for that purpose that won't be found outside very expensive hardware from companies like Cisco.

It's not just through it's Linux binary compatibility that you'd be running the same software, FreeBSD's ports collection has most of the available (Open Source) software ready to be compiled and installed. It's 'make install clean' ease of use is one of the reasons I like FreeBSD.

KDE, GNOME and XFCE are (graphical) desktop environments running on X, you can install them all and many applications can be used in either DE.

Redhat, fedora is the same but free. Run Fedora!

Why choose?

Try them all.

Multiboot.

It's no hassle to share/transfer data between them.

Eventually, you can pick one that you like as your "main" distro, and use VirtualBox to run everything else you like simultaneously.

Or install VMware, and you can just download an image of a fully configured install, and boot it right up, no installation or configuration needed at all.