Kind of pointless, and even difamatory, asking for a "worst distro", IMHO. 'Cause everybody has preferences, and no distro can make everybody happy :-/

Said that, the distros I really don't like are the .?ubuntus and alikes, which tries to be as windows-ish as they can, and become VERY bloated on the process.

Some time I tested some distros on a Pentium4 with an old 40GB IDE P-ATA disk, and 512MB of RAM. Tried Debian, it ran fast. Tried Slackware, it ran REALLY fast.

Tried Ubuntu, it was... slow, compared to the other two. Tried removing all the eye candy, and then I got Debian-like performance.

Well, better said: IMO the problem isn't Ubuntu. It's the "bells and whistles" of Ubuntu, the things I think are an annoyance.

I liked KDE 3.5 myself. It was pretty decent and snappy on older hardware (well, P3 and P4 era). Then when a dist-upgrade removed 3.5 and installed 4.somethingorother, I felt like my Debian systems had entered some strange new bizarro world. KDE 4 just did not grow on me like I hoped it would. And the final straw was the loss of the ability to have a different wallpaper image for each virtual desktop.

At least, that prompted me to "shop" around for other desktop environments, finally settling on Enlightenment. Sure, there is still a lot to learn with E, but I am liking it so far, and it has become my standard on all my Debian installs, from the P4 boxes down to the P-Pro and P1 systems.

I heard that with KDE 4.3, the multiple wallpapers feature is back (according to a reply or 2 to a post I made in a recent Slashdot article). But it is too late. I am now fully converted to Enlightenment and will not go back to KDE. Granted, I will install it at some point when I get around to doing my Geekworks Presents: A Look at Desktop Environments video, but that is a long way off still, and even then, E will remain my environment of choice.

I hate KDE. I haven't tried the early versions (2.x or older).But I didn't like KDE 3.4 (I believe that's what it was), KDE 3.5 was even worse and KDE 4.x I cannot stand.

I like GNOME & XFCE both and Elightment is also decent. I don't like LXDE much but it still is way better than KDE.

[QUOTE=Scarletdown;3930597]At least, that prompted me to "shop" around for other desktop environments, finally settling on Enlightenment. Sure, there is still a lot to learn with E, but I am liking it so far, and it has become my standard on all my Debian installs, from the P4 boxes down to the P-Pro and P1 systems./QUOTE]

Congrats, I think E is pretty swell too. Does it & Debian run well on P1's? With how much RAM? Cause I've been looking for a distro for a P1/P2 computer with 128-256 MB RAM.

Analinux.
BSDammnit.
ARSolaris.

I guess it could be argued that Android is the absolute pits, if, as it appears, Google has closed-sourced a port of it to spy on the MAC-GPS data users innocently gather in the course of their everyday movements...

I hadn't thought of that before. But it is true that the location of a phone can be readily determined to quite high accuracy. And it is true that Google likes to collect data for no obvious purpose (something that, incidentally, violates at least the spirit and quite possibly the letter of UK law).

I'm not saying that those 2 distros are the worst because they are not, but these are the two distros that I've never had for more than 1 day. Over 5 years I've been using linux, I've tried them 3-4 times and each time I was bored after a few hours. The distros in question are: Mandriva and Suse.

Worst I ever tried was Ultumix (now JuLinux). A pretty bad remaster with a HORRIBLE website. I almost felt sorry for the guy maintaining it, except that he kept causing flame wars in every distro he based his remaster off of. The whole episode was a train wreck and I couldn't stop watching it. He's since gone a bit quiet, but JuLinux appears to be another substandard remaster.

But at least open source lets a guy try to create his own thing, even if the execution doesn't work out. For that, I applaud him.

I would have to nominate Ubuntu, I just don't find it that good a distro. Technically it might not be the worst but going for an orangery-brown interface and all the things they implement to lock down features to try and "protect" users I just find annoying. I do not even belief Ubuntu is the most user-friendly distro what it's trying to be and I do not believe it's really a good choice for beginners to start with anyway... I also have in the past had to deal with issues where Ubuntu lacked drivers for hardware (more so high-end graphics cards) and had not installed relevant files to allow me to manually install the correct drivers myself meaning the entire OS had to be removed.

These days I just generally avoid Ubuntu altogether.

My nomination goes to "OpenLX Edge Desktop Edition", whatever version it was in mid/late 2006.

However, to be fair: at the time I tried it, I was very new to Linux, and OLX was one of maybe a half-dozen or more distros I had downloaded (or got someone to download for me as I only had dial-up) over a several week period, to see what Linux was about, and what I thought of it..

Even though I didn't give it nearly a fair chance by any definition, I didn't think much of it. Others I had downloaded and tried around that time were Ubuntu, Slackware, Trustix Hardened Linux, Gentoo (LiveCD of some sort), Debian, and Knoppix. All these others I at least spent a little bit of time fiddling with, but OLX was booted for about 5 minutes, then shut down and gone.

Ubuntu was too bloated. Trustix was ridiculous. Debian, I really liked the coffee graphics, but it didn't hook me. Gentoo I couldn't seem to get it to do anything. Knoppix was interesting and seemed at the time to be advanced and interesting, but I found it pesky to install, and after installation it acted weird, as though it didn't install according to the way I told it to. And OLX just left absolutely nothing memorable, except "I didn't like it".

I think I tried Slackware (11.0) last of those mentioned, and something about it got me interested, then hooked... Maybe it was the two days it took me to figure out how to get X and the KDE desktop running -- but whatever, I was fascinated, and that was that! Slackware is good.

You don't find Patrick's continuing omission to include package management a negative point, GG?

Hmm.. But 'package management' is not omitted. The included package manager (pkgtool) and associated standalone commands like `installpkg` and friends, do a fine job of installing, removing, upgrading of packages.

As for other tools, scripts and means of building, upgrading or managing packages, there's no shortage with Slackware, and that's part of what makes Slack what it is -- many ways of doing something, and a little work on one's own part to make things a little more automated if that's what you like, or to make your own solution to something.

As for dependency management or "automatic updater" software, I don't miss that or want it. Installing dependencies if/when I need them, gives me something to do. I'm generally not so pressed for time, or in the middle of something so critical, that I can't manage to build a few things if I need them.

I guess I can thank the "automatic" stuff for one thing: moving me to Linux. It was some Windows "automatic" thing that trashed my PC some years ago for the last time, and I switched to Linux at that time.

Any distro that doesn't do automatic dependency resolution is my least favorite. I like easy AND simple...not just simple.

Caos
All I wanted was a desktop. This was one 'disaster' distro for me...