So, I've been very happy with Ubuntu since Hoary, but 8.04 has been a disaster for me in just too many ways - and manually editing configuration files doesn't lead to the expected results, and the Ubuntu Forum is of little help (too many newbies, not enough people to solve the tough stuff) so I'm back on the distro market.
Actually I would have just gone straight for Fedora-9, but a well-timed rm -rfv (thought I was still inside the trash folder) got rid of my Fedora iso before I could kill it. So right there - my level of sophistication.

When I last used Suse (10.0) it was still dependency hell, and many obscure packages were broken, or not available - this is what got me on the debian side of things. - so a large package selection would be a plus.

I tried Fedora 7 and Fedora 8... which was a pretty pleasant experience for the most part. In F8 the update option for cp was ignored, but that's the worst thing that happened.

Easy (and I mean EASY) access to Samba and NFS shares would be a big plus.
An officially supported realtime kernel would be great!

Anyway, I feel adventurous, but I'm not the kind of guy who likes to tinker a lot. I want a working system with little to no fuzz. I've already tried Slackware - not an option.
Gentoo? - Saboyon... Saboyan... Sambayon? is probably more like it. I love the Gentoo Wiki, and it has helped me out many times, but as I understand it I'll have to compile pretty much everything - I don't have time for that considering the number of programs I use. - I know absolutely nothing about Portage though.

PCLinuxOS - what's new with that? A lot of people like it I hear. - But I know absolutely nothing about it, and a quick google search wasn't too informative either.



I give this thread a 7 on a pointlessness scale of 1 to 10, but who knows... it might just amount to something.

It happens to the best of us. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to double-check before using rm -rf only to realize as you hit enter that there's a symlink in there you forgot about.

Gentoo is my distro of choice (erhmm...lately I've been digging more into LFS, so that's not carved in stone, but I'd be a liar if I said I didn't learn a LOT from Gentoo). If you're looking to up the ante in the quest for "Linux guru-ness", Gentoo would be a start.

Unfortunately, it's not terribly well suited to "ease of use" and "low fuss" systems. Gentoo has a ton of amazing administration scripts and packages, but getting to the point of maintaining it can be a time-consuming task.

Sounds to me like Fedora would be the route to go for you, since you had little trouble with it.

Hmm.. Interesting.

I fell victim once to an errant rm -rfv as well so don't feel too bad; more than would like to admit have done the same.

As for the distros, here's some '2-cents' type of info, about as pointless as the thread itself as it will really be up to you what you want to try out next

I figure, if Slackware is out of the question for you, than Gentoo would be as well. As for Sabayon, AFAICT is is kinda like the 'Ubuntu of Gentoos', ie a Gentoo system with a load of automagical tools and GUIs.. Note that I have never tried Sabayon, and I did try Gentoo once for a minute, so I could be somewhat off base here..

Not sure what you mean by a 'supported realtime kernel', but I would think that by avoiding distros who patch and customize their kernels (Ubuntu-style), you could always keep a supported kernel-- by using a distro that uses an unmodified kernel. Compile it yourself if the default configuration of the distro doesn't have the options you want.

I'd like to suggest (if you have high speed internet) that you download and try out EasYs Linux. What can it hurt to try, right? Yes, it is Slackware based, but it's called "EasyS" for a reason, and it's a one-CD download. You can see its info & stats on Distrowatch.com and/or easily find its homepage with Google. It isn't jammed full of apps by default, but installing stuff is as easy as using pkgtool (menu driven) or slackpkg after selecting stuff from the humongous Slackware package repos all over the net. It's 100% compatible with Slack, and uses a mainstream kernel that you can rebuild without weird issues.

Good luck, whatever you decide on!

Sasha

I need a realtime kernel for midi instruments and audio editing...
But I just reinstalled XP because we started doing the lan party thing again, and decided to move my audio stuff back to XP - It's not a linux-vs-windows thing - more an asio-vs-alsa/oss thing - so I'm probably not going to do much audio stuff on linux, but it would be nice to have the possibility without having to patch the kernel - I can do it, but it confuses me to no end, and I have to worry for the whole compile time if I didn't miss a vital option or something. Fedora gets the realtime kernel from CCRMA, Suse from Jacklab, and Ubuntu has one in the official repos - they're all fine, but I don't know about other distros.

I'll go install Fedora 9 now, but I'll try Easy's - at least in a VM and see how it does.

I'm still trying to get youtube working on this GPL lovefest of a distribution... If the intention here was to manually pleasure Richard Stallman (this is after all a family friendly forum) they've done a great job...

It's nice to see that the guru of guru's shares the common man's problems - looking for a way to get flash, java + gstreamer working I stumbled upon this bugreport:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=439858

edit:
Yay, pulseaudio!
Fedora sees my soundcard, but pulseaudio claims they are not there... not even the on-board - I can listen through my USB headset though!
Maybe I should mike the headset and connect the mic to the amplifier.

Kicked Fedora-9
Their version of the x-server is incompatible with the nvidia driver (at least the nv driver loads correctly), + the same audio problems I got with Ubuntu. I see no reason why they didn't put virtualbox-ose in the repos - my vm's are incompatible with the non-free version, so that would leave me to compile it...

Easys is a nice effort, but it misses too many packages. I would have to compile dozens of programs myself - I might be wrong, but I couldn't figure it out any other way.

PCLinuxOS 2007 - now that is one ugly son of a bitch. But it did everything right so far. The repositories are very slow though - I'm downloading with 200kiB max. From the Ubuntu and Fedora repos I got between 800kiB and 1miB/s which is where my provider caps it.

It is definitely not the full-load that Slack or others are by default. It's a 'one-app-per-job' sort of configuration. But rather than compile what you want, remember that it is 100% Slackware compatible; so if the stuff you want are available as Slackware packages (as in 'already compiled') simply download and install a Slackware package-- presto!

Of course, if what you want is obscure or out-of-tree stuff, then yes, you would need to compile them-- no different than with any other distro.

Anyhow, best of success in your continued search!

Not really that obscure...
Listen (music player)
Virtualbox
gstreamer good/bad/ugly
Tracker or Beagle
Samba Server and Client. - if it isn't pre-configured it's a bitch to set up.
I tried the Slackware Package search, but no luck:
http://packages.slackware.it/
(Is that the right place?)

I've been genuinely impressed with PCLinuxOS so far.
Gruesome name.
Looks amateurish.
But no suprises so far. Flash and multimedia codecs were pre-installed.
It has the latest development version of openmovieeditor in the repos!
That's a first. That alone doesn't make a distro, but it's a good sign.