What's the best Linux distro?

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Well... currently, I have a puny laptop, with Slackware, plain CLI on it.

(I got bored with it, and haven't gone back to load X onto it.)

my friend has slackware and the browsers keep crashing on him whenever he comes up on a page that has a flash video or anything like that. he's gonna be switching over to ubuntu soon enough, though.

My last experience with Linux was Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 and before that version 2.2, neither of which I used much. It wasn't easy to get Debian 3.0 installed on my then new laptop (additionally, the Windows XP partition wouldn't budge to make much room for it). I remember Debian being a hassle to get anything working: X and graphics, networking (didn't even bother with my WiFi card), and sound. (I am a technically inclined person, so these setbacks would have stumped 99% of computer users).

Well, I've got a new laptop now, and I've given half of my hard drive to Ubuntu Linux, and so far it's great! It really is as user friendly as Windows or Mac OS X. Canonical and the rest of the Ubuntu Linux developers are single-handedly responsible for making a desktop Linux, a Windows killer, possible. In other words, Linux can go beyond server farms and computer science majors' PCs.

Microsoft has much to fear (except of course my new laptop still came with Windows Vista—no Windows-less option plus I wanted some kind of Windows anyway).

I owe an apology to WP Ubuntu users for posting my anger over something from somewhere else, and I offer that apology to all via you, Mr. Lau.

I don't know about the best one as I've only used two, but I've found that Debian is extremely fast. It takes a while to boot up, but everything else is lightning fast. It takes two seconds or less (usually about 1 second) to load any given application. I was also able to download a 30 MB podcast in about ten seconds, though I think that has more to do with the speed of the network and the browser than with the OS.

From what I've heard from Slackware fans, its main advantage is that you can set it up to behave exactly as you want it to. It is the most customizable distro out there. The tradeoff is that there is more work in configuring it, which is what makes it so intimidating to new users.

Actually the most customizable "distro" is LFS (Linux From Scratch), which isn't actually a distro, but it allows you to build the operating system from the ground up. I don't know much about it, though; I should probably read up on it more on Wikipedia. It's something only a really advanced user would want to try out, but when one gains more experience, it will probably provide the excitement of exploration that Linux geeks crave.

Like Arch?

Kind of. Arch has a fairly similar idea behind it, but it's a little different -- Arch forces you to edit config files by hand and doesn't let you just dump the whole thing on the disk (or at least it did when I tried it last), but it has a package manager, instead of straight tarballs. Also, Arch is basically on a rolling release schedule, where Slackware does regular releases.

They aren't massively different philosophically, though. Both of them assume either competence, or at least a willingness to become competent. Both try to keep things pretty simple, although they do it in different ways.

I don't run Slackware anymore, but I used to run it for years, and it was the first one I tried back in '95. I'm on debian now, which is configurable, but does enough handholding/automation that I don't need to go low-level if I'm feeling lazy.

Depends on what you are using Linux for.

Bleeding edge/new: Fedora (I personally dislike because it uses RPM)

Server: Cent OS or Debian

General Purpose: OpenSuse,Debian,Ubuntu,Linux Mint

Power User: Arch, Gentoo

Security: BackTrack

LiveCD: Knoppix

Older Computer/ Smaller system: DSL,Puppy Linux, Xubuntu

Different Linux's equal different jobs

Fedora and Slackware

How about we look at the worst distros?

OpenSUSE, hands down (at least among the distros that I've tried). More bloated even than Vista.

After that... well, Slackware doesn't seem to have a properly functioning partitioning tool in its installer. Fedora has an embarassingly lilliputian selection of software in its main repositories, and tends to be a bit buggier and less stable than other distros.

Also, anything that defaults to KDE. KDE sucks.

I love KDE, as well as many of the applications that are made for it. It may be more convoluted than GNOME, but it has a lot of features, most of which I have yet to try out. I still primarily use GNOME, though.

Also, I don't see why defaulting to KDE would ruin the distro. You can always just install GNOME, provided that you have the proper package manager so you don't have to compile it from source.

I disagree that it's more featured. The interfaces of all the Qt/KDE programs are certainly more cluttered and obfuscated, but I think that's more just abysmal interface design rather than having a lot of features. Is there a single decent Qt-based GUI package manager? In Debian-based distros, the GTK Synaptic Package Manger is amazing and powerful. What does Qt have, KPackageKit which is less powerful than the noob-centered "Software Center" and doesn't even work half the time? And I know for a fact that there is not a single functioning Qt-based chess front-end in existence. Nor is there a decent Qt-based web browser, office programs (KOffice is much slower than OOo and not as good), etc.

And yeah, you can just install GNOME, but it depends on how KDE-centric a distro is, whether it's tightly-integrated into one desktop environment, whether other DE's are second-class citizens, etc. In PC-BSD for instance, you can basically only use KDE or stuff won't work.

Joe: I agree, GNOME is also bloated. However, unlike KDE, it doesn't suck. The UI in GNOME is intuitive and friendly, it behaves in ways that make sense, it's fully-featured, reasonably fast on modern hardware, looks decent without being gimmicky. Xfce isn't much better than GNOME bloat-wise, but it's buggy and undocumented. To get a non-bloated desktop environment you have to go down to LXDE, which is nice and fast, very few bugs, but it's missing a lot of functionality compared to GNOME.

Well, Opera uses qt on linux.

Personally, I prefer KDE to GNOME. But at least we had agreement on LXDE and Xfce. On low end machines, I'll use LXDE. As for Xfce, I don't really know how its developer want to position it. To me, they seem to be trying to out-weight KDE and GNOME.

Fair point, though I think I heard something about Opera moving to its own libraries. Qt also has, for some reason, almost all the LaTeX editors and Matlab-clone frontends (Octave, Scilab and FreeMat are all Qt).