Question on Distros

[Rakeswell]

I've been running Red Hat 7, and finding it to be less than stable. It has crashed on me several times and has exhibited some rather annoying problems like the work-space thing on the panel disappears and resetting it does nothing. The system clock is always wrong and doing a date --set has no effect or causes the system to crash, or resets that clock applet, but it goes wrong again shortly. I'm using Gnome.

Small things, to be sure (expept the system crashes), but it's got me wanting to use a different distro. What do people think about Slackware? I don't want to start a distro war here, but am curious what people's first hand experience is. What have you guys found to be the most stable, most useful distro?

[pbharris]

i have yet to find a distro which is marketedy better than another, i have heard redhat 7.0 had problems. in any event there is a NHF on tchoosing the right distro. personally i like debian, redhat, slackware - in that order.

[bdg1983]

The only way not to start a distro war is not to ask in the first place. :D

Everyone has their own opinion, so I would suggest you visit the websites of all the distros you are considering, note the features, packages, versions etc. and decide from there. Most important is hardware compatibility.

I personally like Caldera's eDesktop 2.4 myself (although others here will not agree), but that is the choice I made.

I would imagine quite a few members here have taken distro suggestions from others only to be disappointed after installing and ending up switching to another.

Well, that's just my opinion...

[ifred]

:cool: Slac . . . ahh nevermind.

Just kidding . . . I second pbharris. Check out the NHF at:
http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/distros/distronhf.html

Also, another good way is to just try out all kinds of distributions. Check out www.cheapbytes.com (http://www.cheapbytes.com) for single distribution CDs or their mondo-packs with lots of distros. Their prices and service are grrrreat.

[ 21 March 2001: Message edited by: ifred ]

[crazyfish]

I have run Slackware on several different PCs with no problems to date. I love Slackware because they pretty much put more power into their distro by sacrificing ease of use. The installer is text based but if you are working with linux then what's one text based installer? Overall it's a great distro, and after being unsatisfied by Red Hat 7 I feel I made the right choice.

[scott_R]

I'm a little diappointed with suse 7.1. Not because they've done anything wrong, but because KDE 2.whatever is seriously lacking in some essential features. (active borders...I.E., move your mouse to the edge of the screen and you're on the next virtual desktop.)

Otherwise, Suse seems great, if thier software could keep up. I'm afraid I'll have to move back to mandrake, just to get better versions of stuff. Besides, Suse's update servers crash every few minutes...

[mvjh]

Hi, I.M.H.O Mandrake 7.2 is a good stable distro, and is based on Redhat 7, hardly ever crashes and is much easier to configure.
well worth installing. :)