OT: "Best" Linux Distro?

[Jules Richardson]

Cini, Richard wrote:
> All:
> 
>  
> 
>             I'm thinking of ditching Windows totally on my desktop at home
> as I build my next upgraded x86-bsed PC. So, I wanted to take a poll of the
> group for a recommendation on which Linux distro to use. I downloaded Fedora
> Core, Slackware, FreeBSD, Unbuntu and Linspire. 

Always been a Slackware fan myself (used it since the SLS days, apart from a 
brief diversion to RedHat). It's less bloated than the likes of Fedora, but 
still comes with the option of a lot of desktop software.

Not used Unbuntu or Linspire so can't comment. FreeBSD isn't Linux, so can't 
really comment there either (although experience has been that it's brilliant 
for server-side but you'll have your work cut out configuring it to be a good 
desktop machine)

Personal observations about Linux over the years:

1) It's suffering from *serious* bloat, feature-creep and eye candy these 
days. Presumably the 'sweet spot' was 8-9 years ago when the ratio of clueful 
programmers versus muppets who contributed was a lot higher. Main problem's 
people launching into projects without any proper design or planning 
beforehand I think (both the popular desktop environments, Gnome and KDE, seem 
to suffer badly from this).

2) In the desktop world, there still isn't a decent graphics package (Gimp is 
awful to use) or audio processing app.  I'm currently struggling to find any 
half-decent OCR tool too.

3) Systems still suffer from rot, just like Windows does. After a while, it 
gets very difficult to be able to tell what bits can be removed because you're 
not using them (or that were installed in a bundle with something that you do 
use, and are just using up diskspace). Linux badly needs some sort of 
kernel-level package / module / library management (offerings like RPM tend to 
be too coarse grain IMHO)

4) WINE is actually pretty darn good these days if you want to run Windows 
apps on your Linux box.

5) The OS as a whole is one heck of a lot more stable than Windows.

>             Any thoughts from the group?

I'm leaning toward the "put a Mac on your desktop, put Linux on your servers" 
approach, myself. That is without having actually used a Mac since the LC days 
though - but I know that a lot of things irritate me about the Linux desktop 
world, whilst even more things irritate me about the Windows desktop world. :-)

I'm not convinced it's possible to produce a desktop environment with the 
open-source cooperative model without it turning into a giant bloated 
inconsistent mess!


HTH,

Jules