[IceFire]

As always I'm experimenting with Linux...I can never use it as my primary OS at the moment because I still play so many PC games and WINE just isn't there yet to help with that.  I'm secretly hoping that the pendulum swings in Linux's favour in a few years and PC makers start making portable code...but that probably won't happen.

Anyways I have SUSE 10.0 on my computer right now...was sort of alright.  I wouldn't mind trying something different. Everyone us on a Ubuntu kick these days.  I might try that.  What about Fedora 7?  I like to be different.  Anyone have any experience with that?  How easy was it to get it up and running and exploring the OS?

[Scuddie]

IMO, OpenSuSE 10.2 is currently the best linux distro that exists when it comes to the balance of stability, capability, and user friendly.  Ubuntu is a close second, relying more on user friendliness.  Anything made by RedHat (save for Enterprise) is pure horse****.  I would never trust an RPM based distro to be stable, capable, or friendly.  However, these experiences are quite old and bitter, and I cant say how better (or worse) the RPM system got in the past 3 years, so take this one as a truckload of salt.

But I still wouldn't bother with Linux quite yet.  While it may no longer be in the stages where every package conflicts with every other package, and dependencies take two days to find when installing a simple calculator program, it still has its problems.  There are still no set standard libraries for common resources the same way Windows has OPL, MSVC/.NET runtime, etc.  But (thankfully) it's been getting much better in this area over the last couple years.

[achtung]

I use Fedora 7 on my laptop and I must say I like it.

I used to use SuSE but due to my hatred of YaST and their patent deal with Microsoft I've totally abandoned it.  I find Yum much easier to deal with, with installation for most software being as simple as typing the command "yum install programname".  The default repos are kept well up to date, and adding extra repositories is usually fairly simple.  The only additional repository I've ever needed is livna, which allows you to get the "non-free" stuff needed for mp3 support and the like.

The default GUI is GNOME, you can get ISOs that have KDE if you like it.  With GNOME, you can enable Desktop Effects which add some neat little effects to windows, like a jello behavior.  I've never experienced a hardware compatibility issue with Fedora, other than the Broadcom wireless cards, which all Linux distros suffer from and can be resolved by using NDISwrapper.

Over all I'd say Fedora 7 is the Linux distro I've best enjoyed.  With excellent community support, and wide software availability.

[jr2]

Anything made by RedHat (save for Enterprise) is pure horse****.  I would never trust an RPM based distro to be stable, capable, or friendly.  However, these experiences are quite old and bitter, and I cant say how better (or worse) the RPM system got in the past 3 years, so take this one as a truckload of salt.

I had heard they were working on RPM system improvements / replacements.  IDK, I've tried Debian and Mandriva (Mandrake) Linux.  I have a knack for crashing Linux.  Since I like to play with settings, and since if you use Linux & change settings, you are supposed to be a s00par-haxx0r, I inevitably crash Linux, and wonder what obscenly obscure config file must be modified without the benefit of my X Window system... of course, I have no clue how to use the text edit progs for the command prompt only, and none of them could be as simple as MS Edit (Linus forbid!!), so I end up trashing the system & re-installing, having learned nothing.   

[Davros]

If you want to be different try Benelix

BeleniX is an OpenSolaris Distribution with a Live CD (runs directly off the CD). It includes all the features of OpenSolaris and adds a whole variety of open source packages. It can be installed to harddisk as well. BeleniX is free to use, modify and distribute.

The BeleniX LiveCD allows you to test drive OpenSolaris in less than 2 minutes. BeleniX can also be installed to USB thumb drive allowing you to carry your operating environment, applications and data in your pocket. The LiveUSB boots even faster than the CD !


http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=home

[castor]

of course, I have no clue how to use the text edit progs for the command prompt only, and none of them could be as simple as MS Edit (Linus forbid!!)

What are you using, Vi? You might want to give "nano" a shot http://www.nano-editor.org/

[jr2]

Ya, I think that was one...

[S-99]

Idk about you. Wine works fine for all of my games, i can play counterstrike, hl2, duke3d-hrp, quake3, the windows version of fs2 open. And that's really about all the games i have, i have some trouble with lego star wars 2, but i hardly touch that game unless i have friends over, so i'll check into making it work later. The trick to using wine is to install from your distro's repos and click on wine and install. After that go into console and basically type winecfg. After that click on the drives tab and click autodetect (that'll let wine see all of your drives and partitions). Then basically wine is configured. Find any exe or msi file, right click on them and always have the command "wine" always open exe and msi files. Now you have basic windows compatibility via gui in linux. After that it's all a matter of the programs you want to run, and actually a lot less of what you can't run. If you want to see if a program is missing requirements in wine, do wine through the console and it'll let you know if you need extra dll's or something, or if wine just plain old doesn't work with that program. Anyway, i also run dvdshrink under wine and ie6 for any programs that require ie6 to run that i may install(and people say that windows programs don't have dependency issues, there a bunch in there for most programs ).

I pretty much recommend anything debian based, especially including ubuntu. An extremely friendly distro that includes all of the codecs and stuff is linux mint, also if you're use to using windows all the time i would highly recommend checking out mepis linux. Fairly intermediate users felt very at home and impressed with mepis, mepis is also a livecd, try before you install. The only reason i went away from mepis was that i couldn't install a version of glibc higher than 2.3. Redhat sucks, so do rpms.
Also while you're at it, do as much research as you can into whether or not a program or game has a linux executable for it, or if there's basic clones of windows programs for linux. Linux can cover your back completely from windows when you really look at it. I moved away from windows xp two weeks ago, and quite to say i'm having a fun time on ubuntu feisty.

And wtf is up with the "yum" command, i know what it's for, but "yum"? That's ok, there's also a "pacman" command in other distros

[IceFire]

Thanks for the information and opinions.  Feel free to keep going...always like to learn bits and pieces about Linux through the forums.  I'm mostly just interested for hobby sake...I tried SUSE and now I want to try other things and see what they are like as well.  I keep hoping for the day that Linux offers such a serious competitor in the home market that Microsoft has to actually get up and treat customers like they are valuable again.  A competitive market would be so much more healthy than what we have right now...so I just want to be informed and tinker a bit

[Fury]

I just can't stand rpm based distros, compared to deb it is just slow and cumbersome. Supposedly Fedora 7 should have improved performance of rpm package management, but I doubt it now performs better than deb package management.

I too recommend Ubuntu, they have it all set up much better (read: user friendly) than Fedora 6 or other distros did. Supposedly Fedora 7 should now have some of the user friendly features that Ubuntu has had several releases back, like codec installation assistant.

Dell also chose Ubuntu as their choice of linux distribution, so we can only expect Ubuntu's popularity grow, even though most people here abhor Dell for everything except their displays.

[S-99]

Ubuntu besides debian itself is really about the best debian distro ever. Ubuntu is good, it is based off of the debian sid repositories, so it's not based off of the older debian repos. Ubuntu isn't a direct connection to the debian sid repos, it's stuff that the ubuntu dev's pick out for the next version of ubuntu that they feel is best. Plus ubuntu has is really good at staying current with the latest versions of linux software anyway, and every 6 months they make a new version based on newer stuff from debian sid repos. The debian sid repos is the latest software for debian that gets updated like weekly, in fact new versions of debian from sid repos comes out like weekly. You can see why ubuntu wouldn't want to have new weekly versions to come out. 6 months is a great method for picking stuff out of debian sid repos. Plus ubuntu has updates all the time, and it's not hard to find the latest software you want for it(it'll probably already have it anyway). Anyway, that yet another reason ubuntu is awesome, because all of it's stuff comes from debian sid repos, and not older repos for stuff like debian 4.0 which by default does not have sid repos in it (you have to put those in yourself if you want sid). Ubuntu is already made up from sid repos

EDIT:
And yes deb packages and apt-get is way more advanced and better than rpms and other packaging methods. Although i really did like autopackage which it's focus is on supplying software that can be used on any distro without worrying about binaries made for one distro.