Quote Originally Posted by JBorneu View Post
Hi there

I'm trying to find the distro that suits me best, but I'm still looking and considering. I think summing up my Linux experience will be the easiest way to help you understand what I am looking for in a distro. If you don't want to read it all, skip to my criteria at the end.



Jan2010: I installed Linux Mint on an older laptop because my good one was temporarily broken. I had no linux-experience before this. I liked it as nice plug-&-play desktop, but when I installed it on my good laptop (when it was repaired) I disliked the fact that I barely noticed a performance difference between mint on the old and the new laptop and Mint and Vista on the new laptop. So I removed it, if I put Linux on this thing (my good laptop) I wanna see it fly.

Feb2010: I installed Slackware, fully aware of all the warnings about the "learning curve". I actually found the installation very easy. More options than the Mint installer, but not more difficult, even though it was text-based. Two things drove me away from Slackware:
1 The package manager which does not check dependencies. I get how it can be a feature, but I don't like it. I want an advanced package manager which checks dependencies and installs them.
2 The KDE 4 desktop environment in Slackware 13 is buggy as hell.

March 2010: I heard about Gentoo but the installation looked like a horribly complicated process so I tried Sabayon. Buggy as hell. Nothing worked untill I re-emerged (re-installed for non-gentoo people) it. Very pretty, much eye-candy, which I liked, but way too buggy and slow. So I installed Debian, because it's generally considered to be a very stable distro. I didn't like it, but to be honest I didn't give it a fair chance. Most things didn't work out of the box so I just formatted my linux-dedicated partitions again. During my holiday I installed Gentoo Linux from inside a live Mint environment. It took 24 hours until I could boot (with my own kernel configuration, no genkernel for me, no sir!), 2 days before I had a working GNOME desktop and a week until I had wireless, but I enjoyed every part of it.

APRIL 2010: However, I accidentially let my system update itself from the unstable branch of the Portage tree (my fault, I know why and how I did it and what I shouldn't have done). About 80 unstable package installations later Portage refused to go on with the updates, and thank god I realised what I had done. It took me a couple hours to fix most of the damage and re-emerge the affected packages from the stable tree, but a lot of my configuration files are still messed up which gives a lot of errors and I think I have to do a clean reinstall to fix this mess (which I created myself). I still like Gentoo very much, but I'm not looking forward to reinstalling it, and cleaning out my configuration files is probably above my head.


So, these are the options I'm considering now:
- Clean reinstall of Gentoo
- Trying out Arch Linux
- Installing anything you might recommend with the following specifications:

* I want the distro to support Gnome and I want AMD64 support.
* An advanced package manager which is good with dependencies.
* Fast, 3 years ago this was a high-end expensive laptop so I wanna see it fly. No Mint / Sabayon slowness please.
* I prefer distro's which keep as close to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and other Linux standards as possible. I wanna learn to use Linux, not Ubuntu
* I'm not affraid of using a command line and editing configuration files.
* I prefer a source-based rolling-release distro, but I realize there are few of those around, so I'm open to any suggestions.

Should you know a distro without these features wich you really like and you think I should try, tell me why and there's a chance I just might do it.

Thanks for your time
WELL! i would recomend fedor 12 for you as it is very easy it also comes with great hardware support easy installation and grest package manager and also has "SElinux" which will provide you security as well.