Help me pick a distro!

[DEdesigns57]

So I have been looking for another distro to try but there are so many. I am currently on Mint 11 but have only tried Ubuntu. So I definitely would like to try a none Debian OS, to see the other side of the fence. But I also dont want to try something as intense as Arch Linux(from what I herd). I have decided between OpenSUSE and Fedora. Could some explain the highlights and weakness of both and Ill make my decision.

[Rubberman]

A more stable Red Hat alternative to Fedora (bleeding edge) would be a RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) clone, such as CentOS or Scientific Linux (SL). I am currently using SL 6.0 (workstation) and 6.1 (laptop - better wireless support), but have used CentOS in the past (up to 5.6). They are efficient and stable, suitable (and widely used) for enterprise class systems.

[jonyo]

just dive in a try a bunch, you're the best judge of what might suit you

or fire up the options mentioned and go from there,

best to run by someone, in detail, what you might be up to though.

and of course be well backed up

[jayd512]

Hello there!

I've not used openSUSE, co can't really comment on it. But Fedora was one of my mainstays for quite a few versions (up until 11 or 12).
I never ran into any real issues using it. The main complaints are the fast release cycles, and the lack of multimedia codecs.
Almost nothing (Flash, mp3, etc.) is included out-of-the-box. But it's not really all that difficult to get things going.

If you're looking for a non-Debian distro, try the search page on Distrowatch.
There are several Arch-based or Slackware-based distros that do a fair job of being easy enough to set-up, but still running the initial system under the hood.

[MASONTX]

I agree with jayd, try the distrowatch.com search page. They also have a brief description of each distro, and if you click on it, it will take you to a page which shows which version are out, and what packages are included in them.

[oz]

Hello and welcome!

You can find a couple of quizzes that might help you to decide what distro to run in the following thread, also:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/new...e-posting.html



Edit (07-30-12): OP has started a new thread on this same topic, so locking this older thread.