Debian (etch)

• excellent package management system
• high quality assurance for new packages (unstable->testig->stable)
• high availability update servers
• maintained solely by volunteers, no commercial company or non-profit foundation in the way, which makes the project also very democratic
• they take the OSS philosophy very seriously
• I don't want to change because I'm too lazy to "learn" how other distros have to be maintained some long time in the past I simply changed from Suse to Debian, because I was fed up with Suse's monolithic config file and in the end it was a choice I never regretted

EDIT: Anyway nowadays I only use GNU/Linux on my home server... so my focus is not desktop Linux anymore. But if I had to abandon XP for some reason, Debian would be my first choice.

I'm also waiting for ubuntu studio and try to get familiar with ubuntu in gerneral in the meantime.
I'll probably have to use XP sometimes, but I won't as long as I can help it.
If I wouldn't use Ubuntu I'd probably give debian a try

Well, in all truth I'm not entirely ready for Ubuntu Studio since I don't have a decent audio interface that's compatible with Linux.

question, since marketed as pro video/audio os, what packages do you find interesting in Ubuntu Studio? (for example, jashaka windows version is crashed in 2 clicks....)

I use Arch Linux, which among other things offers:

• Up-to-date packages.
• Simple, but still excellent package management.
• Easy to make packages using ABS.
• Rolling releases, you will never need to upgrade from one release to another.
• Configuration done by hand.
• Not too fanatical about free software. MP3-decoders, libdvdcss, win32codecs and such are available in the main-repositories.

I WANT UBUNTU STUDIO!! I've been looking for a linux thing like that for ages! THANK YOU UBUNTU!!!
And ubuntu beeing my fav distro!

Now will it actually include the latest stable lame encoder? They still haven't changed it in there package list.

I am actually existed! http://ubuntustudio.org/ (Link)

<- Sorry for over-use of smileys but I am really happy!

Well, two or three months to go eh?

dannyb37, and you are happy about what exactly?

smok3, I haven't tried anything similar to ubuntustudio yet, I simply hope that it comes with a low-latency kernel and working native audio production applications. From the (little) experience I have regarding audio applications I'd say that it can be a pain to set up those applications properly, so I hope that most important stuff is already set up and working.

"Ubuntu Studio is aimed at the linux audio, video and graphic enthusiast"

That, me in a nutshell!

Although when it comes to audio aslong as Lame, Grip and AmaroK (With my iPod, although I haven't tested this yet) work I'm happy.

Its the graphic stuff I wanna see.

Ubuntu and Fedora Core are my favorites.

Ubuntu was great, the ubuntuforum was great, but the ubuntuforum administrators were very rude :/ Thats the only downside in my opinion. Fedora Core is good to. Amazing installer, very nice graphics in general. But yum wasn't that great. I got horrible speeds on it. With the ubuntu repositories I got 300KBs, but it was well under 10KBs on Fedora Core.

I see that OpenSUSE is getting very little support here even though some (=majority) of it's features are much more complete and usable than in Ubuntu. Ubuntu is fine as long as everything works exactly like it's supposed to. If not, a new user is likely to be left totally screwed and clueless.

My Ubuntu experience went something like this.

I have two hard drives, one has Windows, the other is empty. I'm hoping to dedicate the empty hard drive to Linux, without making any changes to the Windows hard drive. I plan to select the hard drive to boot from in the BIOS settings.

Install Ubuntu. Everything seems to work fine. But without my acknowledgment, the installer puts GRUB in the boot sector of my Windows hard drive and not the empty hard drive. Oh well, just gotta live with it.

First startup. Ok, resolution is 1024x768 which does not look very good on my 1280x1024 TFT panel. No matter, I just install the nVidia drivers to fix that.

So I installed the nVidia drivers but still the greatest available resolution is only 1024x768. Google reveals that Ubuntu installer does not detect some TFT displays properly. Oh well, some manual X11.conf hacking and nvidia-settings and I'm good to go. The only problem is that the nvidia-settings tool overwrote my X11.conf with my custom modifications and 5-button mouse configuration, but no matter. I just edit them back.

It seems that Gnome hates my hardware. About once every five times I click on the X (close) button of a window (any window), the window just hangs. I have to shut the program down from the task bar. Oh well, I guess that's normal. I've heard that Linux window managers may not be perfectly stable yet.

I discover that one application I definitely want is only for KDE. I've heard that KDE is only "sudo aptitude install kubuntu-desktop" away so I'll install it.

Ok, so now I have KDE. Looking great. Except that for some reason every time I login, two configuration screens jump up and I have no clue on how to stop them from doing so. Also the mouse has a weird bug where it executes a left click by itself every two seconds for no apparent reason. Playing around with the mouse configuration tool solves this problem but the setting doesn't survive a reboot. I have to use the configuration tool at every boot to fix the bug. Also default sound card selection and mixer settings don't survive a reboot. Oh well, people did warn me that the current Linux distributions may have some rough edges. I guess I can live with them.

Since I started to like KDE, I decided to remove Gnome completely. Well, the suggested step (sudo aptitude remove ubuntu-desktop) did nothing and it seems I'm stuck with Gnome. The problem is that the old Gnome applications are visible in the KDE application menu but they obviously won't start without Gnome. Oh well, I'll just remove the shortcuts from the menus. The whole lot of them.

Firefox works pretty good except that embedded movies (= Apple trailers) do not work. No matter, I just install the codecs and media plugins to Firefox as per instructions. After that, Firefox does not start at all (core dump). I remove everything and reinstall Firefox. Still core dump.

So with a calm mind I booted into Windows and deleted the Ubuntu partition. Better luck in 2009 or so.

I don't know of any software that needs all of KDE to run, just the libraries should be fine. No idea why you had all your problems though, mine's been fine just by popping in the disc and installing (that's without dual booting, though.)

True, there are no embedded videos, but I'm not really fussed about that since I can get a direct link for the BBC and everything else I look at is Flash.

I think the primary reason is that Linux hates my hardware (or the other way around). I have a beefy Core 2 Duo setup with Asus P5B Deluxe/WiFi motherboard and a Geforce 7600GT display adapter. I've googled around and it seems that the Asus P5B motherboard (and Intel P965 chipsets in general) is very unstable with current Linux kernels/distributions. It's ironic since Asus motherboards are the epitome of stability under Windows. Apparently you have to have some scrap hardware from 2002 to use Linux properly. I guess that fits well with the whole "computing for the 3rd world" ideology of Ubuntu.


Yeah, that's not a big deal for me either. But the fact that Firefox died after installing the kaffeine plugin (or whatever it was) kind of is.

Ok, my last posts seemed to come out as very negative towards Linux in general. Allow me to correct myself. My criticism mostly applies to a certain distribution. I didn't explicitly state in the previous posts that my experience with OpenSUSE was much smoother (although not completely problem-free) than with Ubuntu.

In general I'm still very pro-Linux since:

• Both KDE and Gnome look smashing compared to Windows
• The command shell is light years ahead of cmd.exe
• The file system is light years ahead of FAT/NTFS
• A lot of good free software is only available on Linux

So, in conclusion, I would happily migrate to Linux permanently if only the hardware problems currently plaguing most distributions would be fixed.

Gentoo over here (and GentooX on the Xbox)

But im a gamer so the majority of the time I use XP

Kubuntu. Around 5 weeks ago I was making my first steps with Linux using the openSUSE distribution on both the GNOME and KDE desktops. I developed some preferences for the latter, hence I stayed like this for almost 3 weeks until I decided reinstalling the whole thing from scratch. I disliked the massive amounts of unneeded software bundled in the normal installation of openSUSE's DVD version, in addition to Novell's annoyingly slow Zenworks updating system which had caused me a lot of grief before. Out of interest I wanted to have a look at the differences found in alternative distributions, hence I decided downloading Kubuntu's CD bundle instead of going for the minimal installation of SUSE. This choice looks much more pleasing to me, Adept works noticeably faster than Zenworks and the distribution itself leaves a very tidied up impression.

During the last 2 weeks I've spent much time configuring and personalizing the system as well as its KDE desktop, and I clearly prefer it over Windows XP meanwhile. For my studies, internet and audio/video playback it's become the mainly used OS, but I haven't found satisfying alternatives to EAC+REACT2 and GordianKnot so far, hence encoding will stay a Windows job for the time being. The same goes for foobar2000's converter, which is often needed to transcode my lossless archive to different lossy formats for certain hardware players.

You have a solid point there. Nothing beats Ubuntu's aptitude system for package management. Poor package management was precisely my biggest annoyance in openSUSE.

I'm in fact running Kubuntu now. For some reason the 64-bit Kubuntu install went much more smoothly than my previous Ubuntu experience. No crashes, no weird effects, nothing. Everything works perfectly. So apparently installing KDE to Ubuntu is not really quite as simple as the installation instructions (sudo aptitude install kubuntu-desktop) imply.

Changed my mind.

I now use debian. It's a step up from ubuntu; seems faster, and I like that it isn't gunning for new 'just switchted from windows users' (which is also why I wouldn't recommend it to them).



OpenSuSE was slow for me, and YaST got beat by apt very much.



I got my computer in the last year and it works fine.

Gentoo... because I like to be able to be in control of absolutely everything.

i'm using Ubuntu to /use/ Linux while i'm using Slackware to /learn/ Linux.

Sidux for me

or in otherwords Debian Sid with a few tweaks

You didn't put Kubuntu, so I said Ubuntu :B but I love that OS, so customiseable, however I used to use Linux a lot now but now switched back to XPsp2 for Lightroom and Photoshop as I use these all the time (Will never get Vista... damn you Micro$oft)

Windows Vista is precisely the reason why I'm seriously considering permanently moving to Linux/OSX after ~15 years of Windows. I've had dualboot with (K)Ubuntu x64 for a couple of months now and I'm getting pretty comfortable with it. Multimedia and gaming support could be better though.

if you aren't using debian (sid!) or a derivitive i seriously question your ability to reason.

that being said, i LEARNED linux (and OS design) with debian and linuxfromscratch (and their associated plethora of reading materials) and tanenbaum's book "Modern Operating Systems"


later

Maybe we should get a 2008 poll for this as well. It would be nice to see if everyone is still using the same distro.

I switched to Debian "stable" a few months ago. My original vote was for Fedora, but I got tired of chasing releases and finding things that once worked no longer working properly.

Just an update: I'm still using Fedora (8 is going nicely) but I've defected to gnome for now. I've been a KDE user for 9 years but I decided to try gnome for a change and found it more polished than KDE.