KDE or Fluxbox, IceWM, XFce SOHO or not to SOHO

Dan C

Well, you got yourself mixed up with a few of the well-known Slackware flamers. Slackware is the best distro that 1995 has to offer but those who run it love it more than life. It seems to attract a rather 'strange' personality type... maybe pbuttive-aggressive is a better description. Don't confuse the Slackware community with that of Vector. Two totally different experiences.

Slackware is very stable and if you don't have the need for the newest and slickest GUI interfaces and if the old 2.4 kernel runs well on your hardware Slackware will do well for you. But be warned that it is NOT a newbie distro... one of the things that even Slackware drones will agree on (about the only one... and even with this a few people have strong feelings.)

There is no BEST distro. Your needs are very general and not much different from most other folks.

I run Kanotix because it has all the toys, it all works out of the box, and I didn't have to tinker with setting up sound or video or pen drives, etc. But if you like to tinker than Slackware or Gentoo are perfect for you. Debian 'testing' is also.

Everyone will tell you what THEY run, but no one who is telling you the truth will say what THEY run is the best for YOU. It's the best for them. It's like asking 'What is the best car to buy'?

Get yourself a whole bunch of liveCDs and give some of the distros a look-see. Personally I don't think you can go wrong with any of the distros that are in the top 20 on Distrowatch, with the exception of Slackware and Gentoo and Debian which require a more, shall we say, dedicated user.

I like KDE and hate Gnome. Others are just the opposite. Some folks like minimalist WMs like Flux or Ice. I think the apt-get (via the Synaptic GUI) package manager is the crown jewel of Linux. Others hate it and like RPM or emerge, or packman or Slack's .tgz or just compiling from source.

If you are a stability 'nut' but want ease of use, look at Suse or CentOS.

If you like the concept of Ubuntu then go with that (Gnome and Africa!)

PCLinuxOS is what Marndrake used to be.... but it is still in beta.

Asking what the best distro is like asking who is the best woman to marry. There is no right or wrong answer.... until you've tried a few of them (distros.... and women as well!)

Al