/me used:
1. mdk 8.0 8.1 9.0
2. redhat 9.0
3. now using debian "woody"

"Debian is the Cadillac of Linux - If you know you know!"

You can say that again. Actually I havnt really used any other distro. I started using linux about a year ago. Walked into a public library one day with the hopes of nabbing a linux based book and ended up with this strange little publication call "Debian GNU/Linux" by O'reilly. It was based on Debian Slink. Now I have a hybrid Sarge/Sid on my desktop and woody on the router and web/mail servers. Been an interesting year. There are OTHER linux distros? LOL

Yeah my first distro was slack when I was in high school. I had no real support and couldn't even get X to start in anything but 640x480 mode. I gave up really quickly (~2 months or so). Couple o' years later I tried RH and was annoyed by the fact that windows ran faster (and more reliably) than it. Kind of lame. I recently (at the beginning of this year) tried debian. WHAT AN OS!!!! Lightweight, powerful. Package management kicks arse. I disagree about the grocery getter comment (although being an Australian I know nothing about cadillacs) I believe it's really utilitarian. Slack's nice but I don't like having to install everything from source all the time. I don't mind it now and again but all the time is too much. RH wa just plain lame. Mind you I never really got into it and messed around with the settings simply because it repelled me so quickly.

hyp_spec used slackware before he used debian, but still loves both, he is running Sid right now because he doesn't have time to compile stuff on slackware and maybe because debian is faster :P

Redhat 7.3 then Gentoo, for a couple of weeks, and Discovered Debian. Never Looked Back.

It ain't a Cadillac, Its a McLaren F1 complete with Gold Plated Titanium Tool kit (apt-get).

Was using and getting real comfortable with Red Hat 9 for the past couple of months. Thought I'd give Debian a try this past weekend. Got thru the install(the easy part) and went toe to toe with the configuration hell that I heard so much about. Just made it out of "config hell" today with a nice Debian install on my box. Apt-get is wonderful and makes all the crap I went thru configuring Debian worth it. Just installed Synaptic and now everything is squared away for now. Best ditro available nuff said!

As main system for an extended period:
Suse 6.4
Mandrake 7.1
Mandrake 8.0
Debian 3.0

On what is Corel based?

If that would be the truth I would be delighted, but as I heard some try to impose it as a standard package management tool for the so called linux standard!!!!

I hope that debian will impose it's position and let poeple know that linux is about being different!!!! not about being stupid and useless to the user (I'm thinking at windoze and rpm now)

Just as I suspected: RH being so blated helps them to get people into the linux world, and debian being so configurable and flexible helps debian to get the best linuxers!!!

The truth is that I've been using numerous distributions over the past two years or so, but I first started with GNU/Linux software by purchasing a book called Linux Configuration and Installation by Volkerding, Reichard, and Johnson, way back in 1995, and I used Slackware 2.3, which came with that book.

I used Slackware mostly as a local system for editing and as a terminal dialup server, using minicom, kermit, or some other terminal dialup program.

In 1999, I bought a laptop computer and purchased Caldera Open Linux eDesktop 2.4 and at the same time got broadband ISP service with a DHCP server providing Internet access. eDesktop installed so effortlessly on the laptop, and even repartitioned it for me that I was very impressed.

I used that for nearly two years.

In 2001, I bought a Compaq Presario desktop system, purchased extra memory, extra disk, and set out with the idea of loading several operating systems on this computer. My idea worked, but only up to a point. Only some systems supported this configuration.

At that time, Mandrake 8.0 and 8.1 worked very well on it, so that was what I mostly used, along with Red Hat 7.1 and SuSE 7.2. But believe it or not, Red Hat 7.2 flatly wouldn't work on that system -even though Red Hat 7.1 had been installed and working on the same system - USB keyboard regression issue.

Finally I decided to dump the system and got a Dell Dimension 4100. It was at that time that I started to work with Debian. I got the system installed, but it wasn't very easy to configure X, other than copying configurations over from other systems, so I got a copy of Libranet from a friend, and from there, I really learned Debian.

I've since gotten better at editing X config files, so I probably could go back and do a raw Debian installation, but with distros like Libranet, LindowsOS, and Xandros available, not to mention the rash of GREAT Live CDs from Knoppix, Mepis, and Morphix that have become available, why bother (other than to deeply learn how to do it)? For every day use, any of the systems I mentioned work just fine.

I still like Mandrake as a desktop system, and I use it and keep it available. But I've become a Debian convert, and I love updating my own system when I want with what I want. I see no other system with that degree of flexibility coupled with the ease in which I can do it. "From scratch" distros are the ultimate in flexibility and getting exactly what you want - with speed, but they take an awful lot of time to set up. Gentoo Linux has proven to be erratic for me, personally, with little, if any gain, over what I have with my Debian systems.

FreeBSD might provide an alternative to Debian, but I have a feeling that Debian software will remain a keeper for me.

I do have long range plans to revamp my system and put some BSD systems on my primary partitions and some Debian systems on my logical partitions, then maybe Mandrake and Lycoris, just to have some easy to use desktop software handy for a change of pace.

Debian is my favorite, though.

I must be a big geek because I've only ever run Debian. I learned all I know about Linux on Debian. I started about five years ago, and I've never had any reason to switch. Though I've been flirting with the idea of switching to Gentoo just for the optimizations. Of course it's just as effective (but unfortunately not as easy) to compile the deb package from source with my optimizations.

Has anybody noticed any speed differences between Gentoo and Debian? I'm too lazy to do any quantitative analysis myself.

When I used Gentoo for a bit, before Debian I didn't notice much diffrence at all, if any. Speed crtical stuff like the Kernel are easy enough anyway (and are compiled for diffrent setups aswell).

So I wouldn't bother. It takes ages to install anything. Do you realise how long it would take to compile every single package just for kde?

I prefer Fluxbox, but I see what you mean. I did do a bit of dabbling into optimizing myself though. My biggest accomplishment was recompiling X. It took about five tries before I got it all right, but I think it was worth it. It seems to be running snappier. Again, I'm too lazy to do anything quantitative.

Other programs, e.g. lame and mplayer, I think are worth recompiling with optimizations. I definitely saw improvements in these two programs.

heh, I installed Gentoo on my main rig about 2-3 months ago. A month later I installed Debian on the router box. Now, a month or so after that I'm still running Gentoo on the main rig. Debian has failed to make a fan out of me, I'll take hours of compiling packages over Debians BS any day of the week.