Looking for a new distro

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I've been using Ubuntu since last summer, and now I feel like trying something new. So, here's my wishlist of featues:

Must be light and fast.

Preferably includes GNOME as an option, though XFCE or any of the lighter WMs would be fine as well. I'm not much interested in KDE.

Needs to play nice with multi-boot set-ups and not feel any particular desire to kill my partition table (and bootloader) during its installation. This part is rather important, as I'm not really in the mood to re-install OSX and Windows. I plan on just clearing off some space for it and it had better be OK with moving into that space, no complaints about what the rest of the hard drive is doing.

Preferably includes proprietary Broadcom wifi drivers out of the box, or there is a fast, easy way of getting them set up. Until January 20, I will be relying on wifi, and might be able to sneak on ethernet for a few minutes to get the drivers set up, but it needs to be fast and easy.

I'm OK with having to spend a little more time figuring stuff out as long as it comes out working and isn't a complete nightmare to set up.

Should ideally come in a 64-bit flavor.

Any suggestions?

Fedora. I don't know if your broadcom thingy will work out of the box or not. I know it didn't on mine

I thought Fedora was more bloated than Ubuntu.

Gr. I managed to screw up something in Ubuntu, and now I'm stuck in OSX. Again. At this point I'll just be glad if I can get Ubuntu working the way I had it before...

The new fedora is a little bit less bloated than ubuntu intrepid. That just my opinion though. Could try CentOS if youi wanted.

You could try Sabayon, everything supposed to work out of box with that, I think.

OpenGEU 8.04.1 Luna Crescente - That's based on ubuntu though


What error did you receive in ubuntu?

If you want a less bloated, Out of the box Fast modern Distro check out Sabayon.
You you have a older system and you want a distro with a small footprint check out Damn Small Linux
If you like Ubunutu but your want more out of the box experience check out Linux Mint
Fedora is also a great choice.

I use Centos on my Enterprise Servers for Webhosting and works great but I would never use it for my desktop, it's not optimised for desktop use.

Check out Distro Watch it lets you compare linux distros so you can find the one just for you.

What issue / error messages are you having with Ubuntu?

Linux Mint should work fine. I have it installed with XFCE and its better than Ubuntu. And easier to install programs and use.

Sabayon looks intriguing... might just be my new adventure. I've been wanting to give Fluxbox a spin, too. Not that it's necessary to do so, with 4 gigs of RAM, but I like to squeeze out every ounce of performance I can.

Mint could also be a good try. I have an external hard drive now that I might use for some distro testing.

The issues I've been having with Ubuntu are fairly trivial, but still annoying. My keyboard configuration seems to be screwed up, and my function keys are not behaving as they should. Also, the "eject" button on the keyboard for the CD drive is inoperable, and it's not a hardware issue because it works fine in OSX.. All of this stuff had worked out-of-the-box just fine when I first installed Intrepid, so I assumed I had managed to screw something up while I was playing with a Russian Cyrillic keyboard layout. I backed up my data and did a clean install when I couldn't figure out how to reverse whatever I'd broken, and then my keyboard layout still came out wrong. All I have to show for my effort is that all the configuration I'd done to get Ubuntu the way I like it is gone as are.several well-configured Virtual Machines, including a killer XP system. Right after I'd finished my "pimp my FireFox" project too... it was pretty tricked out. Plus, during the install process I managed to kill my Vista bootloader (AGAIN) so I don't have access to Windows until I can get back to college and my Vista recovery disk in a couple weeks.

Well, I spent close to a full day downloading the Sabayon DVD, and after booting the livedvd environment liked what I saw enough to attempt an installation. NB: I said "attempt." It was rather a failure- the only thing I succeeded in was making every OS on my computer unbootable, including OSX and Ubuntu. I had thought it would not touch my internal HD, since I told it to install to an external HD, but I must have messed something up when I told it where to put the bootloader. It also temporarily broke most of rEFIt's features, which was a serious problem. Eventually, rEFIt revived itself and cleaned up my MBR for me. I assume Vista is still unbootable, as it always is after rEFIt creates a new MBR for me, but the recovery disk will fix that soon enough. Today, another try at Sabayon will be made.

But if anyone else is interested and is less sloppy about their installations: Sabayon is REALLY nice. It comes with Compiz Fusion by default. I was running the livedvd with KDE and Compiz (yes, Compiz in a live distro, wobbly windows, spinning cube, and everything), and it was still faster than an actual install of Windows, and much faster than the Ubuntu livecd. They also have a better rendition of KDE, at least to my preferences. You can also choose from GNOME, XFCE, and Fluxbox.

I'll give Sabayon a try then. On an isolated hard drive.

You and your test machine... I really need to get ahold of some cheap POS machine that I can play with. Preferably one I can keep plugged in to wired internet access. I'll have to Ndiswrapper my Sabayon install if I ever get to that point.

It is really cool, and may even cause me to switch over to KDE once I am brave enough to give another shot at installing it. The installation process is actually no more difficult than in Ubuntu, I just ran into problems because of already having loads of partitions and trying to keep it from touching my internal HD. Installing all packages (including KDE, GNOME, and XFCE) took just over an hour after I'd gone through the installation wizard and told it what I wanted. That is one of my favorite aspects of installing Linux: it asks you what you want for everything at the start, and then you can go do something else while it installs. With Windows, it feels like you have to hold its hand the whole way through. It'll start installing, and then 15 minutes in it will just stop and wait for you to tell it what time zone you're in.

You found a dual core in the trash? There's a couple old machines in my basement that I could conceivably dig out and use, but, since my father has always been a staunch Apple fanboy, they're all PPC. Meaning I could distro test... um... Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, and Yellow Dog. I think that's about it, and Fedora would probably be too bloated in its modern incarnations to run well. Gentoo is not something I'm ready for. Debian could be fun, but not fun enough on its own to justify digging one of the fruity iMacs out. I'll just have to try to find more friends majoring in computer science and bum off them to get an old Intel box. 'Course, I also would need to find a monitor that worked.

Orwell, if you need a good distribution: Debian Lenny is the best one available (according to my personal taste). I've been using Debian for 10 years now, b.t.w. Although I wouldn't say it has been "hassle free", but once the most vital things is installed, the distribution has always worked good for me. I think the Debian developers often choose good versions of kernels in their distribution.

Debian is definitely not the best choice for everyone, but if you're a patient man, then Debian could work out good.

If you're interested in testing different distributions further, then have a look at this.

Debian's a bit slow-moving for my tastes. It would be great as something to put on an old system for if I just needed to get my work done, but that's not really what this is about. I'm going to go run a backup now and nix Ubuntu for Sabayon.

You could try OpenSuse 11.1, KDE 4 is integrated pretty good with that distro. On the dvd, you have choices of whether to use KDE 3 or 4, gnome, and Xfce. The way they have gnome setup is annoying, at least to me. I also found OpenSuse to be a bit slow.

You could even try Microsoft 7. Microsoft is allowing people to download the beta version for free. You would have to wait until January 9th though.

Orwell, people throw away a bunch of useful stuff. I got a Dell Inspiron 1300 from someones trash and the box too. It worked, I just had to sanitize the computer and what not.