Other Linux distros

[Fred Barclay]

Just curious what other versions of Linux you've tried. If you want, tell a bit about it, what you liked and what you didn't care for; or just give a simple list. So that /dev/urandom will not be unhappy, please do NOT confuse Linux with *BSD .
EDIT: Let not thyself misalign GNU/Linux and *BSD, lest the wrath of /dev/urandom, that great and terrible guardian of the gates of the Berkeley Software Distribution, decend upon thee.

1.Debian Stable, Testing, and Unstable. All very nice. I don't care for Gnome 3, so my first move is either to get rid of it or, assuming I didn't install it in the first place, to install Cinnamon and MATE. Stable was nice, but a bit boring, aka stable, so I moved to Testing. Still too stable for my tastes, so I'm now running Sid (Unstable).
If I wasn't running LMDE, Debian Testing would be my distro of choice. Sure it'll have a few bugs, but I feel that I could work them out; and I appreciate the newer software that it contains as opposed to Debian Stable.

2. Fedora. Ugh. (Sorry). Perhaps apt spoiled me, but I can profess no great love for yum. I hear that they're going to replace it, though. If Debian didn't exist, I could perhaps use it; but I currently don't care for it.

3. CentOS. Why? I'm not running a server. I can't even remember how long I tried it, but it wasn't very long. I think perhaps I tried it as a VM back in my Windows days, and maybe started on the actuall installation but aborted it mid-stream later. I really do need to give it a fair chance, and I might try it again one day.

4. Kali. Now this is second only to Mint in my admiration. It uses Classic Gnome (or whatever they call it now--Gnome 3 supposedly made to look like Gnome 2). It's designed for hacking and penetration testing--legally, of course. Neither I nor Offensive Security (the Kali developer) advocate black-hat hacking or other illegal activities. I used it to develope certain skills and to test my home for security. I replaced it with Debian, but I'm thinking of going back.
Besides, with a motto like, "The quieter you are, the more you are able to hear." it just has a "cool" factor.

5. TAILS. Perhaps the polar opposite of Kali, TAILS is designed to hide you and keep you hidden. It uses Tor to mask your ip address-- and it also comes with i2p functionality if desired.
There is some debate over whether US agencies such as the FBI can circumvent Tor and track you. TAILS is designed to still try and protect you in the event of a catastrophic deannonymization. It is live-disk only (you can't install it) and will not access your hard drive unless you specifically order it to. Therefore, if it is hacked, all you have to do is shut the system down, and there will not be evidence that you were using it.
(This is within limits, of course.)

6. Ubuntu. Who hasn't tried it? I don't get Unity, and it seems so slow on my system, so I have left it alone after a brief trial. However, a Ubuntu VM did get me thinking seriously about Linux.

7. Almost forgot. Linux Mint! I've tried both the main edition and the LMDE edition. My system couldn't handle the Mint 17 Cinnamon very well, so I moved to Xfce. This still wasn't that much better, but my machine had indicated a preference for Gnome 2, so I tried MATE. It worked pretty well--I eventually upgraded to Mint 17.1 when it was released with MATE. Still I missed the Cinnamon desktop. It just seemed like exactly what I wanted.
So I was thrilled when I tried LMDE Cinnamon and found it faster and smoother than Mint 17.1 MATE. I moved over to LMDE pretty quickly and haven't looked back yet. I'm looking forward to the release of LMDE Betsy.
With that said, Mint isn't perfect. LMDE is pretty old--Betsy should fix that--and sometimes things don't go perfectly. But to date, Mint is the best system I've tried, and the one that will be my /home.

As they say, Windows close and doors open, the journey begins...

UPDATES:
1. Just installed Ubuntu MATE. I'm impressed so far.

[jimallyn]

My Linux experiences are somewhat limited, I guess. I first used Mandrake, then Xandros 1, 2, 3, and 4. I am currently using Mint (Cinnamon) 17, but I do have several other distros installed on this computer: Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 13.04, and Peppermint 5. I installed the Ubuntus so I could support some friends of mine who are using them, and Peppermint I installed because it's one of the distros I'm considering installing on my friend's computer. I really liked Xandros. It was really polished and everything worked well together, better even than Mint. But, Xandros went out of business, so here I am. Oh, I also have Raspbian installed on my Raspberry Pi.

[RacerBG]

So that /dev/urandom will not be unhappy, please do NOT confuse Linux with *BSD

So there is *BSD? I though it was Linux distro! Joking of course but /dev/urandom will quote me on that I'm sure.

Now to the point:

1. Debian Testing/Stable - I'm currently on Stable. Boring but rock solid. Testing was still stable for me but eventually systemd banned me from Jessie.

2. Mageia - nice and cool but with dependency hell in mind.

3. Arch - bleeding edge but a lot of manual work and house keeping is needed.

4. openSUSE - the best KDE distro and YAST is very powerful.

5. Linux Mint - my first love was Nadya...she was sexy...

6. Ubuntu - this was my first battle with Linux versus my crappy Windows 7 in 2012 and after 1 year a girl called Nadya call me to join her.

7. Others - CrunchBang, Zorin, Puppy, Manjaro.

[Pierre]

- ZorinOS is nice & aimed at beginners / XP abandoned users
based on Ubuntu

just pulled that one & replaced it with:
- HandyLinux is very basic & aimed at beginners / XP abandoned users
based upon Debian

[900i]

You Guys missing out on the greatest distro ever,

http://crunchbang.org/

[RacerBG]

You Guys missing out on the greatest distro ever,

http://crunchbang.org/

No, I'm not missing it. ^^^

[Bolle1961]

CrunchBang development has stopped
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 93#p416493

[900i]

CrunchBang development has stopped
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 93#p416493

Nope

http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=38926

[Flemur]

I've tried maybe 8 or 10 or so distros, and when I'm done customizing they all look and act and perform almost exactly the same way except for their "package managers", of which Debian/Mint/Ubuntu has the best, Fedora (?IIRC) the worst. Whenever I use some DE other than fluxbox, I end up replacing it with fluxbox, because fluxbox is the best (!)

If I start with Arch and install just the stuff that I need to run fluxbox and use USB/cameras, etc, it performs the same as Mint with the extra stuff removed (mintUpload, etc), but with a *lot* more hassle than Mint (same boot time, same memory used by the OS, same responsiveness). Similarly for a Debian minimal install vs Mint: same final result, but Mint is easier.

Edit: tho not linux, I programmed with Unix/X/Motif/C from about the time Unix came out, 'til PC's got popular. Mostly math, graphics and engineering applications, not any system or server stuff.

[xenopeek]

I've had a lot of fun trying out new distros over the years, but have lost count of how many and which all I've tried Scroll back through DistroWatch Weekly issues and you'll probably find all I tried in their review section. I've found my home on Arch Linux, and run Fedora on the side.

I think Linux Mint is a very good choice for many people, else I wouldn't be here, but as a Gnome Shell user (and preferring btrfs and systemd) Arch Linux and Fedora just make more sense for me. All that technology is not as well supported on Linux Mint / Ubuntu. Aside from that, I've found I have less issues with Arch Linux than I had with Linux Mint / Ubuntu and the issues I did have were much easier to solve. Arch Linux has cut back the amount of time I need to spend on maintenance.

[excollier]

CrunchBang development has stopped
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 93#p416493

Nope

http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=38926

Yep.
The Crunchbang name is being retired and the community is trying to develop someting similar to it, but they may not use the name.

[niowluka]

1. Ubuntu - 5.04, my first Linux. It was a so unstable I'm surprised I lasted so long, a few months in the end. I was complete noob back then, but I did have some CLI experience from uni.
2. Suse - huge relief after Ubuntu. Very stable and Yast was great. In fact, because it was so stable and Yast took care of all the admin stuff, I got bored and wanted a new 'challenge'.
3. Slackware - and challenge it was, lots of manual work. I loved the simplicity of it, though. And I learned a huuuge amount about Linux using it. There is a saying 'If you learn Ubuntu, you know Ubuntu. If you learn Slackware, you know Linux', and I totally agree with that, frankly, all distros look very similar to me these days. The most stable, configurable and powerful distro I have used. Together for 5 years or so, I still think it's 'the best'.
4. Arch - similar to Slackware in many respects, but 'bleeding edge' meant it was very unstable, which was a deal breaker for me. We never got on, although I did end up using it for a few years (mostly because I didn't have time to change it).
5. Mint - full circle (sort of). Mostly because of easy, regular updates (only security level though) and repos. Works out of the box, I did my tweaks here and there, and that's all I need.

I also briefly tried Gentoo, Mandriva, Crunchbang, plus a couple more I can't remember ... Oh, and btw, Windows free since 2011

[altair4]

Historically:

Red Hat
Don't remember the version. CD's used to come with books on red hat.
S.u.S.E
This was back ( V6.1 I think ) when suse was spelled that way.
Debian
One word: Wahoo!

Then I went "a little bit crazy"
Caldera
Lycoris
Anybody remember Lycoris?
PClinuxOS

Then I got " a little less crazy"
Debian
One word: Wahoo!
Mint
Xubuntu

I have 30 other Linux distros ( although 5 or 6 of them are Mint ) as VBox guests at the moment so it's very possible I'm going crazy again.

[exploder]

Wow! There is someone else that has ran Caldera!

[Reorx]

I became Linux curious in 2009. I bought an inexpensive netbook (Asus) as a testbed...

The first distro I tried was Fedora - that lasted a little less than a week! Nothing multimedia worked - codecs, java, etc. are not open source and therefore were not included in the ISO. They could be installed but for a newbie, it was too annoying to stay with Fedora.

Next I tried Linux Mint - between 2009 and 2011, I dual booted Mint with WinXP and, in 2011, I went "Mint" full time - both at home and at my office. I have been using Mint ever since.

Along the way I tried but never actually installed - Bodhi, Sabayon, & Peppermint.

I have tried and use Clonezilla though only for imaging and restoration. Love it for its purpose.

I have a 2004 Dell Inspiron that ran XP at my office for 7 years. When I went "Mint" in 2011, it got put on a shelf, I recently pulled it off the shelf and installed the 32 bit version of LXLE on its massive 20GB HD!. I was pleasantly surprised to find that everything worked perfectly right out of the box. The interface is familiar enough to be usable even for an LXDE novice.

My first office Mint laptop was a Dell Vostro that came with Ubuntu (pre-Unity) installed. I was curious so I booted it up. I tried it for about a day or 2 before wiping it entirely and replacing it with Mint for office use.

I currently have 4 laptops running Linux Mint - 2 Dell Vostros (1 at home and 1 at work), a Dell Inspiron (experimental machine), and I still have that Asus from 2009 - it's still my only dual boot machine (with WinXP). I have also infected other members of my immediate family with Mint laptops - wife, daughter (2), brother-in-law, & niece.

[z31fanatic]

My experience with Linux is pretty limited.
I started with Ubuntu 12.04, then 13.04, then went to 14.04. It was mostly just playing around with them. I didn't really like the Unity desktop.
Last year I tried Mint 16 in an old laptop and it ran ok. Again, I would play with it occasionally but never use it as a primary OS for my computing.
Been using Windows since 2000 and was bored with it so last week I installed Mint 17 (cinnamon). Also I played around a bit with Xubuntu and Zorin. Xubuntu was too bare bones for me. I like Zorin though.To me it feels just like Mint with the only difference being the color theme.
I really wanted to try Deepin but I could not get it to install. Installation would always fail.
I still have a Windows PC though. It's a little Zotac Zbox MI320 with Win 8.1 which I use as a Home Theater PC. Unlike most people, I actually like Win 8.1. It is very stable, runs faster than 7, uses less resources, and it's more secure.
I also like Mac OS. My wife has a Macbook Pro and I play with it sometimes.
But yeah, Mint will be on my main laptop from now on.

[cllvt]

Let's see ...

1) Mint 13 on an old P4 - still using
2) Puppy - strictly live to recover files from a dead Windows PC
3) xubuntu - not bad
4) PCLinuxOS - not too bad either, but liked Mint better
5) openSUSE - had install issues
6) lubuntu - again OK, but liked Mint better
7) Linux lite - great OS, stable, easy to use, lots of features, great support in forum
8 Zorin - for a real resource constrained PC, works pretty well
9) xubuntu - was a little flakey on my machine
10) Debian - I personally found it more difficult to use than the Ubuntu based Distros and some issues on my machine.
11) LXLE - wasn't too bad on my old pc, but just didn't like quite as much as Mint or Linux lite
12) wattOS - I put this on an old pc laptop and it runs well, resource use in amazing. A few issues with install, not as beginner friendly and a small community that currently has new registrations blocked so support is the issue.
13) Linux Mint 17.1 - KDE, Mate, xfce

There may be one or two others, but that's most of them. The ones still loaded:

Used frequently:
Main desktop: Linux lite (now 2.2) - Linux Mint 17.1 xfce - Windows 7 (multiboot config with common data files)
Main laptop: Linux 17.1 KDE

Loaded but not frequently used:
Mint 13 Mate (on a desktop occasionally used)
Zorin (on a spare computer that will probably be given away)
wattOS - on the old laptop, rarely used

That's it. Personally in an OS I like an uncluttered desktop, multiple workspaces easily available (I use the mouse wheel on 17.1 KDE and xfce). I also like the ability to have different backgrounds on the desktops, just keeps it clear where I am).

The other piece is good support when you need it, and Linux lite and Mint both have great forums, helpful members, not a lot of "attitude" and condescension towards beginners. I would be hard pressed to choose one over the other, I recommend new Linux users try them both and pick what they like.

Chris

[killer de bug]

On a production system:
- Debian
- Fedora
- OpenSuse
- Linux Mint main
- LMDE

In a VB:
- #!
- Manjaro
- SolydXK
- arch


I'm not really adventurer. And I tend to prefer the Debian base. I'm an apt fan boy

[z31fanatic]

*update*
I was finally able to install Deepin today, so now I am dual-booting Mint and Deepin. Very cool.

[viper37]

Just curious what other versions of Linux you've tried. If you want, tell a bit about it, what you liked and what you didn't care for; or just give a simple list. So that /dev/urandom will not be unhappy, please do NOT confuse Linux with *BSD .
EDIT: Let not thyself misalign GNU/Linux and *BSD, lest the wrath of /dev/urandom, that great and terrible guardian of the gates of the Berkeley Software Distribution, decend upon thee.

I tried many Linux distros over the year, trying to learn the beast. I am still much, much, much more confortable in a Windows/DOS environnement than any Linux OS, though.

Still, the distros I tried:

• Slackware. Before there was a GUI. When it was touted to me as an alternative to Windows 95. When we needed a dozen floppy disks or so to fit an OS for installation. I quickly went screaming back to Windows 95.
• Some Red Hat distro. Can't remember the exact name, but this one had a GUI. It was a long time ago, over 10 years ago, IIRC. Didn't find it usable as a desktop replacement to Windows, and I was dual booting, so I uninstalled it.
• Ubuntu, some older version, pre-Unity. Didn't work with my wireless adapter, that was the end of it.
• Mint. Pre-cinammon, I think, or maybe with the first iteration. I loved it, really. I used it on an older computer that was connected to my network via cable, so no wireless driver problems here. Unfortunately, I really disliked the then policy of wipe-everything-out to install the next version. So I wiped everything and went to the next distro.
• OpenSuse, KDE. Nice little desktop. I wanted to make a server out of this one, for office and home. I tried, I really tried, but I never really loved it, so it was left abandonned. I thought it relied way too much on the command line and ask me for password input way to many times.
• Ubuntu Unity, pre 14.04 and 14.04. This was from my HTPC, on older hardware. I managed to find a wireless adapter that worked with NDIS wrapper, and after a bit of struggle to make everything work, find my way around the new GUI, and I was set up. Seemed to work fine, except it can't going into standby, even if I deactivated everything. And eventually, trying to fix this, I fracked some thing up, making the desktop barely usable. Since I didn't really liked Unity anyway, I flushed everything and went on to the next distro.
• Linux Mint Cinammon 17.1. I use it on my HTPC and on what will be my future NAS/backup/cloud server to exchange some files between office and home. My HTPC is complete, except I can't seem to find a way to make the fonts in the applications bigger. this is really bugging me. I actually would have liked a Windows 8 style tile interface for this one, but I managed to make do with Cairo dock. Oh, and a new wireless adapter USB 3.0 that works natively in Linux. Nice. On the server front, nothing much to say for now, I'm slowly trying to find my way around it, this is kinda new for me.

Aside that, I have used a small utility software called Sardu that let's me boot from a USB key with multiple Linux distros and anti-virus softwares using their own customized linux OS. So, I've used livecd Ubuntu, Mint, Tails, Kali, PCLinux OS KDE, TinyCore and many others to, but "used" should really have quotes. Mint 17.1 is the real first Linux distro I'm using on a regular basis. I've also installed an early beta of SteamOS, it looked nice, but it wasn't for me yet.