Most popular distro: Zenwalk??

[Alina]

I recently added all the important Linux distros in a wiki based software guide and I thought that maybe Fedora will come out first, as being the best but SURPRISE, Zenwalk did. What is it with this distro? Is it really better than Fedora?

[adwilson99]

I've not really used Fedora and I don't want to start any flame wars, so maybe I'll just share what I like about Zenwalks (though I should also point out that I'm actually using Slackware and Puppy Linux as my main distros at the moment)

Zenwalks "feels" fast. I think this is mainly because it uses the XFCE desktop by default, not Gnome.
I like the "Zen" like feel of Zenwalks, it's not cluttered as it's principle is 1 app per task. This is great for newbies who don't care what they use so long as it works, but I must confess soon gets boring for those of us who love choice and want to try out all the latest apps.
The last thing that drew me too it and this is very subjective, is that for my hardware at least it worked.

It should also be noted that it has been a while since I tried Zenwalks, but this is the blog with my hardware and experiences.

Linux Notes

[Alina]

Thanks very much Wilson. I would really want to hear some other users opinion coz it's a little puzzling to see that Zenwalk is so popular

[techieMoe]

I would really want to hear some other users opinion coz it's a little puzzling to see that Zenwalk is so popular

The same could be asked of any popular distro. Take Slackware, for instance.

[carlosponti]

why is popular synonymous with better? I cant see that just because the distro is more popular, which I still don't see how that adds up, doesn't mean its better just more people like it. I definitely didn't much care for zenwalk on a whole. I got along with it just fine just had issues i didn't care to deal with.

[techieMoe]

why is popular synonymous with better? I cant see that just because the distro is more popular, which I still don't see how that adds up, doesn't mean its better just more people like it.

True. Opinions of course are going to vary. There are a handful of people (mostly movie critics) who didn't like the recent Transformers movie. It's overwhelmingly popular here in the States. To those critics, popular did not equal good. I must add that I am not one of those who disliked the movie.

The same goes for Ubuntu, Slackware, Debian, or Gentoo. Any one of these could be considered "popular", but that doesn't necessarily mean they're "better" for any one person than a distribution that is more obscure.

[msodos]

I have tried many different distros over the the last couple of years, and have settled on Zenwalk. Ubuntu, in all it's variants was unstable. Debian was never current with it's software. I also tried at least half a dozen others, and never found the simplicity and comfort level that I have with Zenwalk. ZenWalk has never crashed, and using XFCE, it is the fastest and cleanest of all those I have tried.

I am also seriously considering trashing my Windows box, which I maintain for no good reason that I can think of, and replacing it with Zenwalk also. I am tired of trying distros, there are too many.

[Freston]

Heheh... Techiemoe, don't you think Zenwalk is so popular because it's Slackware based?

No, but seriously, it's a very clean distro. Stable, fast, it will revitalize otherwise obsolete hardware. And as far as the 'one app per task' goes, you can install your favorite apps after the install... instead of removing the things you don't need, as is the case with many distro's.

That said, I'm a bit surprised as well...