Pick me a new linux distro!

OK, so a little background. I'm getting sick of Windows, and I'm looking to go back to Linux again.
I have I'd guess an intermediate level of linux geekage - I have succesfully recompiled a kernel
So far I've tried:
- Gentoo (my fave, but requires lots of hacking to get right)
- Ubuntu (not so great, but that was a couple of versions ago)
- Linux Mint (pretty good, if simplistic, wifi worked well)
Others I've tried have been a long time ago, so my knowledge of them is way way out of date (Fedora 5, SuSE 9.1 et cetera).

Soo, I appeal to the good people of HF, pick me a nice distro! I like to be in control, but not to have to spend an entire week debugging ALSA drivers or similar. I have fairly common hardware, but good detection is a big plus. 3D graphics is not an issue, I'm using Intel GMA

 

I would say the new Ubuntu LTS is pretty amazing. They did a great job. The newer SuSE is decent..

I say Ubuntu.

 

I've been looking into Slackware for my next project. It might be a bit more hacking than you want but it doesn't look like much trouble. Much quicker than Gentoo(i've gotten about half way through Gentoo twice, that's a long project) rather.

only down side that i see is lack of , though there are ones available, also itlooks like you need 6 disks to install it, that's not good economy.

EDIT:: there's a bootable dvd that has everything neededfor an install.

 

Hmm, I've not checked Ubuntu out in a while, last time it was too much of a newbie distro, I like to get under the hood and tinker (different to having to hack it for ages just to get some semblance of functionality).
Slackware, hmm, how's wifi on there? I have Intel Pro Wireless 3945, so it's fairly standard, but then again the slackware guys were using kernel 2.4 up until recently...

 

^ http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20080505#feature
Here is a great article from yesterday on slackware 12.1(current).
(http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=slackware)
I'm definitely using Xfce on mine =D

I'm happy to see all theselinux threads to be popping up too.

 

Slackware is a very stable distro I am using it as my main OS
zenwalk is a complete distro also...
debian is easy to use and has a complete package management system
ubuntu has grown since 5.0 I run 8.04 in vmware-server I must say that it is very nice....

 

Thanks for all the responses guys - i've decided to go with Gentoo
I see from the handbook that iwconfig is now included in the live CD (wasn't around last time I tried it) so I shall be giving that a go.

 

Just because iwconfig is on there doesn't mean it will work. I had a few days worth of trouble in that particular area =p

Good luck, last i checked the gentoo livecd was <i>very</i> buggy. Have fun =)

 

Let us know how it goes. Personally, I use Ubuntu. I've tried half a dozen others, but that one was the most n00b friendly. I especially like that you can easily update from one version to the next without reinstalling, the other ones I tried had pretty unreliable updaters. And with a six month release cycle, updating is pretty frequent.

 

I agree with Hiptastic,, Ive used gentoo back in the day even from stage 1 compiles,lol..
Ubuntu is where its at now.. trust that..

 

i have been using puppy linux for a couple of years

but i am lazy and don't like fancy things

 

Ubuntu is great with detection. Really any new Linux is great with detection but sometimes the driver for the device is 'closed-source' and would be legally complicated to include in the default installer.

Suse 10.x is a freaking mess. It is easy to use and stuff but any customizing and you are dead in the water.

Fedora 8 (9) is great. I use Fedora 8 x86_64 SMP and I have uptime screenshots worth months. Right now I am building a new BSD flavor based off of NetBSD.

 

As everyone mentioned, I would probably go with Ubuntu. It's really user-friendly. However if you don't want to try that, there's also a really nice distro called PCLinuxOS. This distro is similar to Ubuntu but not quite as user friendly with less of a fan base then Ubuntu. It's also a lot like Windows XP, which might make the transition between Linux and Windows a little bit easier.

 

i don't get ubuntu

if i wanted to do all that root shit i'd just use slackware

puppy - runs in ram, no root, rocks and rolls on [nearly] the oldest computer you've got

i keep thinking about trying some big slow distro but after endlessly installing and then trying to remember the password i just typed so i can edit fstab or rc.local

i always go back

 

I would go with Ubuntu, it works well and requires little to no tweaking to get working properly. Even the 64 bit version, which is not as well supported, works very well right from the beginning.

 

I used slackware for years on my desktop / server. I hated that it didn't have a package manager worth shit. Ialso I wanted an OS that was better maintained by the developer.

I went to Kubuntu a few months ago and never looked back. I am currently running Kubuntu 8.04 (i think it .04 at least).

I would recommend Ubuntu / Kubuntu to anyone, any day.

 

Yes. All that root user and password stuff is known as security.

Puppy is nice. I ran Slax from RAM for a minute. Pretty much anything running strait from memory is fast.

The Ubuntu idea is that nobody should need to log in as the root user. Everything is designed so that the desktop user can perform the root admin tasks from their user account, provided they have the password. It is an extra security measure to make things easier for a user without making the desktop insecure.

 

if you are a single user with a dynamic dialup connection . . .

security, what is that?

to be fair, i was never able to get ubuntu running on my computer

[antique technology]

 

plus

the whole point of running in ram means you don't even need a hard drive

what are you securing?

i just want something that boots quickly and runs fast

[not brown either]

 

I've been on Suse10.3 for quite a while and it works exceptionally well.