Which Distro?

[Jim March]

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 10:53 PM, Alan Dayley <alandd at consultpros.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 10:27 PM, Mike Bushroe <mbushroe at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am once again having trouble with my SuSe 11 system not booting. It
>> seemed to occur after I loaded the drivers in Windoze for a
>> video-to-USB converter. I tried downloading the latest SUSE 11.1 ISO
>> and do an update, but it still seems to get of the way through boot,
>> then die about the time it should be starting the Xwindow system.

OpenSuse 11.1 has been getting some bad reviews of late.

I tried Fedora 10 and the "updates breaking things" problem is NOT
gone.  Forget that.  I tried Fedora only because a) Ubuntu briefly
broke my laptop's sound driver (fixed now) and I wanted to play with
the "built in WiFi router" aspects of Fedora 10's Network Manager
implementation.  Wasn't worth the hassles.

I'm back on Ubuntu (8.10 Intrepid Ibex) and you know, it really works.
 I'm at a point now where I'm ready to call Ubuntu the winner out of
the major distros...the only other path that makes sense is to do one
of the "practically roll your own" like Arch or Gentoo if you don't
mind a steeper learning curve and more troubleshooting up front.  You
do have more control though.

I went through a period of hopping a lot circa late '06/early '07.
One that had a lot of promise but just a tad too flaky then was
Sabayon, which is a Gentoo fork with a lot of multimedia add-ons.  For
a while it was the official Beryl testbed distro before Beryl was
rolled back into Compiz.  Sabayon has done some updates of late that
are getting good reviews...might be worth a look if you're mildly
adventurous and into "cutting edge" stuff.

Jim