Hi, I'm looking at finally getting rid of XP and switching permanantly to linux. I've played with BSD and other BSD flavors for a year or two now, and I'm quite proficient with them.
I'm building a completly new system, AMD Athlon 64, 512MB RAM, RAID etc, etc, just as good as I can get with the money I have!
Personally, I don't think any BSD flavor would really be any good as an all round desktop, so which distro would people recommend for programming, image editing, and general stuff really. If I could make it look really nice like blackbox and fluxbox WMs, that would be even better.
From what I've seen, Fedora seems really good... but slow. Gentoo looks nice, and I like the fact that you can dedicate it's use when you build it. Redhat seems ok, but like fedora, slow. Debian seems to seem a good all-rounder.
Anyway, I thought it best to ask a big community like LQ.

Thanks in advance,

Matt

hi there

i would recommend slackware
but this is not for noobs,so if u a little experinced with linux u can try this

for noobs i think they can start with mandrake and fedora core

regards

Hi Matt

I would also recommend Slackware. Its true that there are easier distros out there for brand new users but if you've been playing around with BSD a bit I think you'll be happiest with Slack. Its not really that different from BSD as far as configuration goes, plus its very fast and stable and will definitely do all the things you want in a desktop system.

[EDIT]
If you haven't already, don't forget to check out who one the 2004 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award for Best Distro
[/EDIT]

I messed around with Slackware on an old (PII) box a couple of months ago, and was very impressed by it. However, I am still leaning towards Fedora (despite the fact I can't seem to get KDE to work on the version installed on my test setup), because I can't seem to find an amd64 bit version of Slackware, and I really do want to be able to squeeze as much power as possible out of this machine (I'm starting university in autumn, this machine has to last me 4 years! ).

Does Debian have an amd64 port? I couldn't see it on the website.

A friend suggested gentoo, stating it combines bleeding edge technology and speed... Can anyone running it on an athlon 64 verify this for me?

forget fedora if you want to play games, and are attached to your hair.

Linspire and Xandros are probably other ones to mention for newbies. And Ubuntu.

HTH,

Samsara

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I too recommend slack. I've tried Red Hat, Suse, LFS, Mandrake, FreeBSD. Slack fast and stable.

hi,

i'm not completely sure of the various distros' 64-bit support, but i know suse and mandrake offer 64-bit versions (and suse has recently been fully gpl'd and is available for download, free!)

i've not tried slack, but have found on my machine that debian and ubuntu were by far the snappiest performers; mandrake isn't bad at all and suse seems a bit slower. fc3 was very slow..

i was quite taken with ubuntu (although not enough to migrate from mandrake, which i still like a lot...)..

There is an unofficial AMD64 port of Slack, Slamd64, in progress by one of the alt.os.linux.slackware regulars, available here:

ftp://ftp.scarlet.be/pub/slamd64

(It's still in the Alpha stages, but apparently quite useable according to reports from others - I don't have an AMD64 system myself, so I can't test it):

I would still recommend Slackware, especially if you're coming from a BSD background, rather than other distributions covered with GUIs to the hilt, and avoid being stuck in RPM "dependency hell."

hi,

he he, yes indeed. it can be a real nightmare. debian's apt-get is great, a real antidote. but mandrake's urpmi is really quite good - far better imho than the other rpm-based distros i've tried... in fact, urpmi is very nearly as good as apt, from my experience.

i must have a look at slack though - i've been messing with linux for a couple of years; it's about time i expanded my 'comfort zone'!!

slackware is a great distro. not the easiest, but definately not bad to learn on...plus once you learn slack, you can pretty much handle any other distro that comes along.
suse is pretty sweet too, and they have apt4rpm which is basically apt-get that handles dependency hell quite well.
i use both.

I haven't used slack, but I would be interested to know how it stacks up against gentoo linux

nevermind...http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...04/01/4/134440

I lot of people thing that i686 optmized gentoo is great. But, the difference between a i486 and i686 package can not be noticed, exept perhaps with benchmarking. You might get a percent or two and sometimes actually it will run slower believe it or not.

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