Windows user wants more power; What distro?

[AdamskiAirsoft]

The reason I'm looking at Linux, is because I'm "tired" of Windows. Windows is great, but I have now become limited to it. It doesn't surprise me anymore. If something doesn't work, it's fixed pretty soon because I understand how Windows works. It's also limitied on how much I can customize my system and how much control I am given.

I've been experimenting with Linux lately, but haven't been able to find a version I quite enjoy. The reason I'm asking now, is because I'm without a hard drive at the moment, and would like to look into it and prepare for when my new hard drive ships.

I have a 2.6 Ghz processor and 512mb of RAM.

I've tried

• Ubuntu and Xubuntu: Wasn't anything really wrong. Got my hardware all correct. Doesn't have everything I want supplied, which would mean building things myself, although not truly a negative against it. Personally didn't care for it though. Found it ugly, and tried too hard to be friendly. Rather just use another distribution that feels righter.
• Zenwalk: It was fairly nice. Didn't get my graphics card right, but easily fixed. Internet didn't work right away either, but fixed that easily also. I liked it more than Ubuntu, although still lacking in packaged programs I wanted. Felt righter than Ubuntu, just not as much as much as I'd hope.
• Arch: I've never been able to install it. I've tried .7 and "Never Panic" and end up messing up my hard drive. Although, "Never Panic" was running fine, got a kernel panic though. There was an "official" fix to it, but I tried a different fix that worked for someone else, IDE Legacy. Unfortunatly I've lost the jumper so I couldn't revive, and so I do not want to try Arch for a long time, probably until I get me a brand new custom computer that's up to date.
• Debian: Hrm. Seemed alot like Ubuntu, which is to be expected I guess.

Personally, Slackware "feels" righter than Debian so far. I've been thinking of trying out Slackware itself, but was looking at Gentoo also. I'm still pretty much a newb at Linux though. Any other recommendations though would be nice, even Zenwalk, Debian, or Ubuntu with reasons why, such as "x feature is great and will start to show off once you start this."

[flipjargendy]

Do a search on Google for something like "distro test."

There is already a sticky thread, titled "All New Users Read This First!," in this forum. You'll find the information you're looking for there.

You should do some reading on the distributions you've used. Ubuntu is a Debian based distribution. It'll help you figure out which one would suit you best.

Don't be surprised if this thread gets locked. There is an abundance of information on this subject that can easily be found. I've never seen a thread like this remain open for very long.

[oz]

Slackware is an awesome distro, in my opinion. The best thing to do is to keep experimenting. You can also look at the various Linux liveCDs to see if any of them suit your tastes.

Otherwise, you can look at the info in my sig to find the distro test flipjargendy refers to above.

[bigtomrodney]

Doesn't have everything I want supplied, which would mean building things myself, although not truly a negative against it...

It's worth saying that you don't have to build everything (or even most things) from source because they aren't included. Most popular distros have community driven repos that cater for anything that is missing or wnated. SUSE has Packman and Guru, Fedora has Livna and Ubuntu has more than I can count. Anything I've ever compiled has been by choice, at least in the last 2-3 years.

[abhishek456]

if you are choosing distro which provides more than one desktop environment go for KDE environment rather than GNOME or xfce

KDE provides better User interface than other environments

[ianj001]

Your question leads to a very subjective answer. I used to use Mandriva (and Mandrake before that) I recently changed because I got tired of waiting for updated packages (rpm's). I switched to ubuntu because it's very robust, easy to use and mostly just works (not quite a MAC but close). They also update their packages in a timely manner. For a Windows user it is a very familiar environment and has almost a 1 to 1 replacement for everything in Windows (it's hard to read Visio files but creating new diagrams is easy in many other applications). Everything else is taken care of. It largely depends on what you intend to use your machine for. Unlike the previous poster, i prefer gnome, I use evolution for my personal information management (PIM - email, calendar, contacts) I use OpenOffice for docs, I use firefox for browsing. - I stopped using Windows as my main OS over 5 years ago, I recently weened myself off Vmware for things like Microsoft Project (Openproj is a great replacement).

Hope this helps.

Registered Linux user number 454722