Distros you wish to try

I don't consider myself a distrohopper, a person who jumps to different distributions in less than a month. I'm a firm believer that if a distribution works out of the box (no need to deal with wireless drivers, smooth multilib support, etc) then you should stay using that, mostly because most distributions offers the same stuff: the linux kernel, apps you normally need, and healthy array of libraries.

Most of the time I've used Debian or debian-based distributions. It's what I know best so I stick to it... on the other one I've never touched any distributions utilizing RPMs (yum), unless you count my server experiences with centos.

So yea, are there distributions out there that you want to try out? I might give Salix, Funtoo, and other advanced distros out there. Although I'm not fond (never been) of a person that likes to compile everything myself. I can't imagine compiling a whole environment like KDE just to see it take hours and hours...

Right now as we speak I'm downloading Fedora. I think Gizmo said something about how he loved fedora but I'm not sure myself. My interest grew when I saw Korora project in which I imagine is the "Ubuntu" of Fedora.

You should try Linux Mint that's a great stable os that works right out of the box!

I have

I'm gonna say this and hopefully expand on it the next few days but jesus, Fedora 20 installation was amazing. I didn't even have to configure the gtk applications to display as if they were part of oxygen look and feel. My only little problem is that yum keeps running into gpg key problems with some repos I added which is pretty annoying. Partially my fault for not knowing much about yum and how to add those keys. Just to say that I was pretty pleased on how the KDE experience was with Fedora 20. The multilib seems already enabled, not only that; I felt that yum was a saner choice than apt-get, I especially loved that it provided a "yum whatprovides [insert library file]". I feel that it's more cohesive than apt, which is split into apt-file if I want a similar functionality or dpkg -S.

One more thing: I still don't like the partition manager, not sure if it's the right word. I have this uneasy feeling that I might get rid of my /home partition by mistake. I've been spoiled by Debian's installer I guess... it's pretty straightforward to state what you want.

Maybe I'll do a reinstallation and retain my /home to see how it feels.

But yea... I'm almost sold... I feel like I'm betraying Debian :'(

P.S I don't know much about yum but... yea... time for the man to teach me the ways

OH yeah I see hmm that sucks well Debian does have a lot better support in software and stability in it dont betray debian plz haha try it out you will be very suprised and happy with it!

I know what you mean about getting uneasy and double-checking. When I started swapping to other distros for the first time I would spend like 10 minutes double-checking my partition choices haha. I wrote about my Fedora 20 experiences, although the tone of my blog post may sound a little negative I actually liked Fedora, yet I couldn't get 3-4 steam games working even when I installed the dependencies, it also didn't detect direct rendering. It was puzzling and disheartening

I'm gonna grab a laptop soon. I've heard Korora is pretty neat so... maybe I'll give it a spin. I mean come on, we all know I'm going to nuke my laptop with GNU/Linux

I think Fedora runs games as well as any other distributions but... I don't know what was going on with the libraries. I couldn't run a simple game as Mount and Blade: Warband or Monaco, it would open and close and ldd ( a tool that prints shared dependencies ) kept reporting that there were missing libraries even though I installed both the 32/64bit :/

By the way, Manjaro is really nice. I actually wish they dared to do the following: Create a true stable distribution with long term support (maybe a 2-3 year cycle) than being a rolling release distro.

Whenever I decide to get a new computer, I will probably let my current computer run Debian. I am toying a bit with Debian in my multi-boot setup, and I have to admit that I think it is a very nice and solid system. I also have Slackware installed, but I found it to be a bit too time consuming. If I had more time on my hands, I'd like to use it more.

Oh and speaking of time, I'd like to give Gentoo a proper try. I just fear that between working full time, online studies and games, I'll not really have the time I need to get into it properly.

To answer booman, rolling distributions CAN break stuff. But how high likelihood there is of breakage really depends on how much the distro make use of testing repositories. Arch use vanilla software from upstream sources, and always trying to use the latest stable releases, which also generally mean untested. This makes it likely to contain undiscovered bugs.

Manjaro have their own repositories (does not use Arch repos) and their software is not as recent as Arch, so they are definitely less likely to have any breakage.

What Daerandin said. I also join him on his sentiments on Slackware, a rock solid distribution yet it's too time consuming. I think what annoyed me more was enabling multilib, imho it should have been an official support, not a third party one.

I'm glad you are enjoying Debian, Daerandin.

If I had no other responsibilities (studies and work) I'd definitely be taking the time to learn LInuxFromScratch. I don't imagine I would actually want to use something like that as my primary system, but it would be very interesting for the learning experience.

@booman

I was just recommending a friend to use Mint MATE. It's his first time using linux.

It's weird that you are "stuck" with Fedora 16. Is it still being supported?

You already know which distro I'm going to choose...

1. Debian (minimal install then proceed to choose whatever I want)
2. Linux Mint KDE or MATE
3. Ubuntu
4. Fedora 20

By the way I discovered new distributions today...

Bedrock linux
GoboLinux

And they are not your traditional linux distributions. I like where GoboLinux is going.

Elementary OS is a simple os that has a dock, app store of it's own that really is just a web search, and the EDeb package installer. The only fricking thing that keeps me from using it is that it can't be put on a USB and be made to boot. I want it on my netbook because I think it would work best on it as an OS, but I decided I would build ARCH up instead for that little project.

I can say that I am a distro hopper though. In one week I had been bouncing back and forth between OpenSUSE, arch, slackware, windows 7, windows 8, Fedora, Netrunner, and Bodhi because I wanted to find what worked best on my Lenovo B575 (Arch was the winner BTW but I went back to ubuntu because I had backups for it only). Daily I did about 6 installs and constant benchmarks from graphics to IOPS to scans to ram tests to disk fragmentation fixes to segfaults to kernal panics. EVerything I could thin of to break it, overheat the laptop, anything. Windows actually broke the most with ubuntu coming in after that. I guess I could say fedora was the winner but I never got it to run in the first place. I'm not sure that even counts.

I would also like to try straight up Unix, like old arse 7-inch floppy / cobol based / punch card based / fortran dependant / forth based unix. The kind that ran with 4-bit vacuum tube processors that sat in barns on some college campus. I think that would be awesome.

And BSD I guess. I mean the hubub was BSD until slackware shook it's butt and every male dog within the vicinity decided to lay waste on it, more or less. Might as well see what was up.

Just for note I don't just get the newest version. I go from version one up. Ubuntu 3 was my fav of the ubuntu line tbh. Popups came when something broke. It was great.

Oh and freeDOS....... Because why not.

I'm meh about it. SteamOS will be better when they make it applicable to not just one type of computer.