Other distros?

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JusTertii

Other distros?

Post by JusTertii »

So, I was wondering if anyone has come across any other cool distros? (I like Mint, but a change is as good as a holiday - or so they say!)

So far, I've been quite impressed with:

Elementary OS - it looks like a nice Mac-inspired way of doing things. I even had a uni student hipster mistake it for Mac :lol:
Puppy - absolutely tiny. I can fit it onto an old 256MB usb, and boot an old computer wihout a hard drive.

What do you all like?
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Pierre
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Re: Other distros?

Post by Pierre »

Zorin O/S

- not sure about version 9 - though.
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MartyMint
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Re: Other distros?

Post by MartyMint »

Antergos and Manjaro...running installations of those two in Virtualbox.

Really liking Manjaro...
JusTertii

Re: Other distros?

Post by JusTertii »

Hi Pierre, what's your favourite feature of Zorin?

MartyMint, I've heard good things about Manjaro, but haven't heard anything about Antergos. What do you like about these OS's?
jahid

Re: Other distros?

Post by jahid »

xubuntu ---an elegant xfce desktop...
scryan

Re: Other distros?

Post by scryan »

REALLY like Arch. If your willing to edit your own config files, their wiki will teach you how to do it and you only have what you want. Can't imagine needing another distro as this one can be whatever combo you want, but I would bet others like Gentoo would work just as well. I do like the fact that arch is RIDICULOUSLY up to date (basically get the latest version later that day) and has been completely stable.

Really depends on what your trying to do and what you value though.
Fuzzy Penquin

Re: Other distros?

Post by Fuzzy Penquin »

I like the various Puppy distros; I currently have an older Puppy Slacko (I need to update that, lol) and the latest MacPup on file. I love how MacPup looks great, and is super-usable on very old hardware (like Win98 era laptops with very weak hardware). Long live the Puppies! I'm also pleased with SolydX so far, which makes a great in-between distro for stuff not powerful enough to run Mint, but not quite weak enough to require Puppy.
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Re: Other distros?

Post by MartyMint »

JusTertii wrote:
MartyMint, I've heard good things about Manjaro, but haven't heard anything about Antergos. What do you like about these OS's?
Manjaro is a nice way for me to get my feet wet with Arch-based distros.
Takes a bit of getting used to...but I'm liking it.
scryan

Re: Other distros?

Post by scryan »

MartyMint wrote:
JusTertii wrote:
MartyMint, I've heard good things about Manjaro, but haven't heard anything about Antergos. What do you like about these OS's?
Manjaro is a nice way for me to get my feet wet with Arch-based distros.
Takes a bit of getting used to...but I'm liking it.
I have never played with these, but I don't quite get it.

To me arch is great because you build it yourself. It is IMO the ideal distro if you want to learn and THE WORST if you don't :P
I find the arch docs to be amazingly thorough and almost every problem I have had was easily fix in a fairly straightforward step by step manner.

I can see the appeal of an arch system that is built for you, or however they work... But it seems like that would negate the main benefit of arch (how easily it is to fix a system you were so instrumental in assembling.)

I mean no offense, but it seems as though people like them to make arch "easy". But if you pay attention and read, arch doesn't require you to know THAT much at the start.
I just have always seen people talk about the spin offs, or trying to get help on the official forums/upset that they are turned away and it seems like "Why didn't you just use actual arch?"
I mean no offense and understand we all have different preferences for how much we want automatic config/stability/up-to-date/ect... But yeah In my head when ever I see discussions of Manjaro or Antergos I cant help but think "Why?!"
Spinoffs of debian/ubuntu/mint make sense to me, as they change the DE for you, or the default setup.... But Arch darn near has no default, so I don't really get it.
killer de bug

Re: Other distros?

Post by killer de bug »

scryan wrote: To me arch is great because you build it yourself. It is IMO the ideal distro if you want to learn and THE WORST if you don't :P
I find the arch docs to be amazingly thorough and almost every problem I have had was easily fix in a fairly straightforward step by step manner.
Arch is cool because it's a true rolling release with always the last softwares. So I can understand why people like Manjaro which make things easier on a Arch-like system :)
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Re: Other distros?

Post by MartyMint »

scryan wrote: I can see the appeal of an arch system that is built for you, or however they work... But it seems like that would negate the main benefit of arch (how easily it is to fix a system you were so instrumental in assembling.)
I got over "playing" with my installs about 8 years ago. I want to install...and then get on with my business.
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Re: Other distros?

Post by MartyMint »

scryan wrote:But yeah In my head when ever I see discussions of Manjaro or Antergos I cant help but think "Why?!"

Because Arch is unnecessarily complicated. The Arch folks know this, although publicly they'd deny it. Anything they perceive as making Arch "common" lessens the geek factor.
They want you to go through the "trial by fire" they did. Almost like a gang initiation.

I don't subscribe to that philosophy.
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Re: Other distros?

Post by all41 »

This is like a golfer on a dream vacation in Florida--play everything you can.
When it's all over and you are back in your nest, you will return to your favorite local course.
Everything in life was difficult before it became easy.
scryan

Re: Other distros?

Post by scryan »

MartyMint wrote:
scryan wrote:But yeah In my head when ever I see discussions of Manjaro or Antergos I cant help but think "Why?!"

Because Arch is unnecessarily complicated. The Arch folks know this, although publicly they'd deny it. Anything they perceive as making Arch "common" lessens the geek factor.
They want you to go through the "trial by fire" they did. Almost like a gang initiation.

I don't subscribe to that philosophy.
Ehhh, if you had trouble fine...

I didn't know a ton going into it (as in I tried gentoo first but couldn't figure out why I had no desktop :lol: )

I have found arch to be the easiest most straight forward distro I have tried. It did require more to get it working, and while I have appreciated the learning opportunity I DID HAVE to learn more... But yeah fixing problems on every other distro has been SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult and required more time then with arch. Just my experience... There wiki has had step by step walk through on fixing literally any problem I have had.

But to each there own, no one right distro... even if it seems like there is to me :P
betchern0t

Re: Other distros?

Post by betchern0t »

I have used SuSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, DSL, Mint and Arch. SuSE and Red Hat remain the most like a heavy duty enterprise OS and are good in that setting. Although when trying to connect SuSE to a SAN we had big problems getting drivers to work and eventually the organisation shifted back to windows.

I extensively use Ubuntu as a server at home command line only. This is where my comfort zone is at present. Like everything to use an OS at a high technical level you have to do it all the time otherwise you spend a lot of time researching.

I chose gentoo when I wanted to bootstrap my understanding and for what it is it is really cool. I wouldn't have thought a source code based distro would be that slick. At one stage the Indonesian government stats organisation was using gentoo and doing standardisation and control using portage packages.

When I got tired of learning - it is consuming and I have so many other things I want to do - I shifted to Ubuntu. When Ubuntu went to unity I shifted to Arch and even wrote some of the doc on their wiki. However I could never get things just right. My bug bear was dual screen with two screen sizes. Arch works really well if you have fairly vanilla wants and hardware.

I then shifted to Mint which was all that Ubuntu used to be and more. Very slick setup under cinnamon. I recently did docco on connecting linux to a windows enterprise network. Mint 17 did well but not perfectly. Only one Linux distro that I tested did perfectly.

Cheers Paul
Nili

Re: Other distros?

Post by Nili »

Debian
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/dev/urandom

Re: Other distros?

Post by /dev/urandom »

JusTertii wrote:What do you all like?
In terms of coolness, probably Void Linux. It does many things quite differently.

Other than that, http://distrowatch.com :)
parzzix

Re: Other distros?

Post by parzzix »

I think Crunchbang is about the coolest and most simplistic of the lightweight distros, I used to have a lot of fun with it.
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Re: Other distros?

Post by Fred Barclay »

If you want to look cool (and be able to scare other people when you tell them your computer is specifically designed for hacking) use Kali Linux. :wink: Or if you want to try to circumvent the people using Kali, try TAILS.
Other than these not-so-helpful answers, I love anything Debian. Lots of options here. I've also heard good things about Slackware and Arch Linux, but never tried them myself. Of course, you could do us all a favor and design your own Linux. Might be fun, and who know, you could make a great system.
How about Pear OS? Has anyone tried it? I've heard that it's defunct, but that some blokes might try and revive it. It did suffer from a lot of problems, but it must have been nice to have a free "Mac" without such harsh restrictions as the real one.
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JusTertii

Re: Other distros?

Post by JusTertii »

Fred Barclay wrote:If you want to look cool (and be able to scare other people when you tell them your computer is specifically designed for hacking) use Kali Linux. :wink: Or if you want to try to circumvent the people using Kali, try TAILS.
Yeah, people already think I'm a HK h4xx0r when they hear I use Linux :lol:
Fred Barclay wrote:Might be fun, and who know, you could make a great system.
Might be fun, but unlikely with my current workload. With my programming skills, pigs will fly before I make a *working*, yet alone *great* system. But thanks for your support :D
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