Which installable Other Distros have you tried and liked?

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Having used antiX, peppermint, salix, CrunchBang, PCLOS, element (defunct), SolusOS, absolute and Xange, I liked them enough to keep, and learned them. Contrarily, I tried Sabayon Gaming, KahelOS, ArchBang, Fedora LXDE spin, Vector SOHO and others, didn't them much at all and got rid of them quickly.

The latest Linux distro I'm enamoured with is siduction 12.1 -- http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=07252

Which have you tried and liked enough to learn a little about?
 


I like PCLOS because it's simple and I am far from a geek. I love the Synaptic Package Manager so I can actually get things up and running without ever seeing the dreaded terminal.
 
I started with Ubuntu. In fact, at that time, I thought that Linux was Ubuntu and Ubuntu was Linux. When my cdrom drive died and my hard drive failed, I had to find something that would run from a pendrive. After a lot of trial and error, I found Puppy Linux. I am still using Puppy Linux right now as I type this. This distro is Slacko Puppy 5.3.3 derived from Slackware.

A few days back, I messed up my server when I made an upgrade. At that time I was using Centos. Then I did some research on the matter and decided to change to Debian. The main reason being that I am already familiar with Debian in the form of Ubuntu. So now I have Debian 6 32-bit running on my server. With Webmin, Virtualmin and Usermin. I will go for nginx once I have figured out whether it's really better than the Apache which I am using now.
 
I only used ubuntu and Mint, haven't tried any other distro but I'll have a lot of free time this summer and I'll test a lot of distros to see which one suits my needs xD
 
I only used ubuntu and Mint, haven't tried any other distro but I'll have a lot of free time this summer and I'll test a lot of distros to see which one suits my needs xD

Very often the difference between the distros is just the desktop environment. Basically, there are only a few desktop environments in popular use.

The default usually is Gnome. Then there's KDE, which is a very detailed and heavy-weight desktop environment. On the lighter side, there is LXDE and XFCE. Of the two, I have a preference for XFCE but there are a couple of things in LXDE which I like to use.

So if you want to try them out, what you can do is install Debian. Then install all the desktop environments I mentioned. After that log out and log in to change the desktop environment.

If you want to try out Linux packages, install Ubuntu instead of Debian because Ubuntu has a more updated database of packages. Please note that although Ubuntu is derived from Debian, Ubuntu and Debian are not the same thing.
 
Distros I've liked include Ubuntu, which I use as my primary distro, OpenSUSE, which I used to use as my primary, Mint, which is pretty darn awesome but I prefer Ubuntu, PepperMint, CrunchBang, Adonis Linux, and most recently Fedora.
 
I've used Ubuntu, Kubuntu, SuSE, Debian and Fedora. Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora were my favorites out of those, and currently I use Debian and Fedora because of the bloat in Ubuntu.
 
I hadn't heard of Adonis Linux. Thank you for the reference, lucasbytegenius!
You're welcome, nyxcharon on Computer Forum is the guy behind it, and I've been following development for the past few weeks :)
 
Distros I've liked include Ubuntu, which I use as my primary distro, OpenSUSE, which I used to use as my primary, Mint, which is pretty darn awesome but I prefer Ubuntu, PepperMint, CrunchBang, Adonis Linux, and most recently Fedora.

Just had a quick look at Adonis. It claims to be lightweight but the iso file is 1.2Gb. That's big. Anyway I am downloading it now to find out more. In the meantime, how about telling us which features of Adonis you like best?
 
Adonis is big because it has a lot of packages included with it. Right now my favorite thing about it is the speed, it seems to be faster than other distros I've tried.
 
Adonis is big because it has a lot of packages included with it. Right now my favorite thing about it is the speed, it seems to be faster than other distros I've tried.

Is there any particular reason for the better speed? What is the desktop environment used in Adonis? I had a look at the screenshots but I cannot figure out what it is using.
 
It's using a modified version of Gnome 2, but others are also available.

The developer has changed deep system stuff to make it faster. Not sure about the technical side.
 
I always keep going back to Slackware as my primary OS. Right now I'm playing around with Artistx 1.4 and Kali 1.0. I'm an avid reader of different Linux Mags so I'm always test driving something new each month. But I really like distros that are geared to a particular purpose .
 
I use PCLOS on my desktop, but my Linux story is a used laptop I bought on Ebay for $21.50 (listed as for parts only) with no HD or CD and I installed Browser Linux on a thumb drive and have been enjoying it ever since.
 
I began quite a while ago now with redhat 5.2 followed closely by debian 2.1. I believe this was around 1998, and I have had a distro of some sort installed since then. To name a few distros I've tried, in no particular order; mandrake, suse, progeny, caldera, lindows, Linux from scratch, gentoo, arch, Ubuntu (and numerous spins), mint LMDE, fedora, redhat, centos, various BSDs, Slackware, slax, salix, sidux, puppy, damn small, vector, crux, knoppix... I am forgetting many many installs here. The point is I seem to have gone through periods of learning a lot about some of these, and some I formatted and never turned back in less then 15 mins (caldera and lindows, I'm looking your way). I spent a lot of time in Slackware with windowmaker, on a pentium 266, when my main machine (at the time an Athlon 900) was out of service, loved it. Have always had a distaste for RPM based distros and have stayed clear for the most part, with occasional check-ins to see what has progressed. Gentoo was always my favorite (technical distro), even with the 3day - 1 week install process compiling the entire distro from scratch pulling in the entire install over dial-up. But I always come back to debian, and usually sway between debian testing, and unstable.

Very often the difference between the distros is just the desktop environment.

I have to disagree with this. The difference between distros is much more than skin deep. Since as you say, changing desktops is usually only a command or two away. From my experience some of the biggest differences between distros, is package management, and the way startup scripts are handled. Once you start to (or as used to be the case, had to) configure things by hand, and delve into the system below the desktop, you very quickly realise just how differently some distros handle things. That's the beauty of playing with, and seeing which distro you like. It's why we all become comfortable with, and favour different distros.
 
In the past I have tried PCLinuxOS (http://www.pclinuxos.com/) and it was good and stable: very nice distro !!!
After this it became too heavy and a little annoying for me but I still think it's a good choice. Moreover, with PcLinuxOs, You can use Synaptic with rpm packages :)!
 
I started with Redhat 3 or 5, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo and bsd. Out of all of them the least liked distros was Early Ubuntu, Fedora and Redhat. Most liked was Gentoo, Debian and Ubuntu since I gave it another chance with 12.04 and bsd. Why I disliked Redhat and Fedora was the RPM package manager, apt-get and emerge are better in my opinion... YMMV though..

Cheers,
Charlie
 


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