Suggest linux distro other than Ubuntu

[zahc]

I'm about fed up with Ubuntu, so what's the next-best thing? It seems Ubuntu has been going downhill since Hardy. I've had nothing but sound problems, and now I can't even install Lucid Lynx because it gets about 70% of the way through the install and then bizarrely says "Please insert the disk". I have no choice but to reboot mid-install. It does this on BOTH my systems (that were running Hardy fine). I checked the disk integrity and even tried installing from a USB flash drive. When it's impossible to install the latest version, I think it's about time to try a different distro. Any ideas?

[CNYCacher]

Honestly I was about 30 seconds away from pulling the trigger on my Karmic -> Lucid upgrade when i read this.  Are you doing a fresh install or a running-system upgrade?

[lee n. field]

Honestly I was about 30 seconds away from pulling the trigger on my Karmic -> Lucid upgrade when i read this.  Are you doing a fresh install or a running-system upgrade?

I've done both.  Ehh.  Hold off for a bit, IMHO.

Right now, just noticed (on the one I ran the upgrade on) that sound in the browser isn't working.

Alt. Linux -- Debian.

[zahc]

I always do a fresh install. I'm installing to a completely different partition. Luckily, after being forced to reboot during the installation, multiple times, my previous partition remains bootable which is what I'm using now. Of course, I still have impossible-to-fix sound problems and impossible-to-fix ssh problems that I've had for months now. I was hoping upgrading would auto-fix them but ironically I can't even install the upgrade.

Oh, I'm sure you'll be fine with 10.04. 99% of people seem to have no problems. I'm the one that catches all the rare bugs. I get some rare, bizarre bug, then post about it on the forums, then find out that someone else in Malaysia had that problem 4 years ago and nobody figured out how to fix it then either, or that it's so rare nobody cares about fixing it. I have literally resigned myself to a silent computer as long as I want to run Ubuntu. And my HTPC is now worthless because it can't mount the NFS shares on this computer due to the bizarre ssh bug that nobody has any clue how to fix. Now that I can't even install Ubuntu anymore, maybe it's a blessing in disguise. I'm just wondering what distros other people have used and found to be Ubuntu-like, or Ubuntu that works. Mandriva One? Debian Squeeze? Opensuse?

[Jim147]

I used Debian for years. But they are the ones that did the sound change that move me back to XP for most of my systems.

I tried Mepis but only got it to load once and it locked up everyday. I did have okay luck with a German Distro (can't remember the name) but I couldn't keep the keyboard commands straight.

Good luck. If you find one that works like they used to let me know.

jim

[BrokenPaw]

Ubuntu is just Debian with extra foam-rubber taped to the corners so that dilettantes don't hurt themselves.  Plus its die-hard adherents are almost cultlike in the way they chant "ooooobooooontooooooo".

I'm partial to Fedora.  It's got a few sharper edges than Ubuntu, but they're sharper edges that make more intuitive sense to me than the Debian/Ubuntu coddlefest.

[zahc]

I don't even see how the differences between distros can be that relevant. I guess they all keep their own packages and maybe they are newer versions or less buggy or something. But they all run either gnome or kde. I just want a distro that will install on my system, and let me run firefox and mplayer. And ssh. I mean sound and ssh worked in like 1997. I don't understand the regression.

[roo_ster]

At work my default is Centos, a Redhat Enterpise Linux replacement.

Same as RHEL, but yanks the proprietary crap like RH logos.

It has always been a rock, and is designed to be so.  Don't expect all the bleeding edge application versions, as it is built for stability.

Fedora is the "free" version of RHEL and is more bleeding edge.  I dropped fedora when I found Centos.  Fedora is great, I just want as drama-free as possible OS most times.

All RH-derived stuff will require a few web/audio-visual tweaks due to their insistence on GPL/open software.  Not a big deal, just google or look at the support forums.

[Perd Hapley]

Windows. 

[roo_ster]

Windows. 

Get a rope.

[mtnbkr]

We use Centos at work.

There's always Slackware, but I haven't used it in nearly 10 years.

Chris

[RevDisk]

CentOS.  Works well enough for my purposes.

[S. Williamson]

The only two Linux distros I've ever used were Ubuntu and Freespire.  Freespire was supposed to be a direct copy of Windows, and be intuitively the same, but wasn't.  Unstable and confusing... like combining a Mac user's opinion of a Microsoft machine and a Microsoft user's opinion of a Mac, and actually making an OS of it.  Hated it with a passion--thank god it was on a "throwaway" computer that was my experimental machine.  Once I'd had enough I changed it back to Ubuntu and didn't look back.  For what it's worth, I'm using Windows 7 at the moment, but have been thinking about making the full switch to Ubuntu to increase productivity*.  There are still a couple of issues that I'm still concerned about, though, since I'm not even at tinkerer-level when it comes to use; if anything, I'm more of an end user with a tiny bit of common sense.



*Meaning I play a hell of a lot of computer games, and switching to something that doesn't support them would be a massive boost to me getting things done.

[Jim147]

*Meaning I play a hell of a lot of computer games, and switching to something that doesn't support them would be a massive boost to me getting things done.

If I blocked APS I would get a lot more done but life might be a little dull.

jim

[Jim147]

Good luck zach. The problems I'm seeing so far is that centos is a server os that would take a bit of tweaking to make work for an HTPC. and Fedora seems to be a 32 bit which trows a lot of money away on my HTPC system.

I guess that is why I installed Win 7 beta, then the RC and now the full version on this system.

I hope someone comes up with a good 64 bit OS that gets away form the sound issues.

jim

[Jim147]

Doing a little more checking I might give Gentoo a try tomorrow.

jim

[Balog]

Ubuntu is just Debian with extra foam-rubber taped to the corners so that dilettantes don't hurt themselves.  Plus its die-hard adherents are almost cultlike in the way they chant "ooooobooooontooooooo".

I'm partial to Fedora.  It's got a few sharper edges than Ubuntu, but they're sharper edges that make more intuitive sense to me than the Debian/Ubuntu coddlefest.

I'm a soft, timid end user and Linux frightens and confuses me. I find the soft warm glow of Ubuntu comforting, like a glass of milk and a cookie before bed.

 

[tincat2]

gotta give shuttleworth and crew credit for the work they've done to make ubuntu accessible to so many. they picked a good base(debian) to build upon and have made great progress adapting that distro to mainstream use. that said, i use ubuntu on my entertainment/info/communications machine. for serious stuff, it's slackware-you got to get under the hood, but you can have pretty much what you want, how you want it, and quick about it.
most install problems i have encountered had to do with partitioning or the hd itself-use a clean bootable primary of sufficient size for /, and add swap space and a /home and /tmp. i've put two releases of ubuntu and upgraded three times on one hd this way w/o major probs. slack is similar though i scale it down and don't put anything on that i don't use

[Vodka7]

Doing a little more checking I might give Gentoo a try tomorrow.

jim

Ahahaha.  Feel free to PM me with any problems you have.  Memorize the manual, make liberal use of the forum and IRC channels.  Installing Gentoo if you don't know what you're doing is Fun & Informative.

Installing it if you do know what you're doing is tedious.

That said, I LOVE Gentoo.  It's got a major place in my heart--I learned more from two days of installing it than I did in months of running Ubuntu.  I'm not exaggerating either.  It will literally be hours before you see a working command prompt (well, before you see a Gentoo command prompt, you'll be chmodded in through another OS from the start.  Ignore what other people say, the most important thing is to select a distro that is 64bit and recognizes your network card.  I went with Ubuntu, but the diehards will try to convince you to do SysRescue (which is a great tool by itself)), and if you get to a GUI in less than 24 hours you either didn't sleep or you're psychic at figuring out error messages.

Eventually I settled down with Arch, and I've been using it for about a year.  It takes the best ideas from Gentoo (rolling release, as close to vanilla as possible), combines them with the best package manager I've ever seen, seriously smooths out the installation, and still makes you a more informed user.  After installing both Gentoo (once) and Arch (on several PCs), it's kind of shocking for me to try out Ubuntu and see how different the choices it makes are from what I would have.

Chances are if you successfully install Arch or Gentoo, you'll learn enough to get you to the point where you could go back into Ubuntu and fix your problems in minutes.  You just won't want to, because now you've got a better distro.

[mtnbkr]

I'm a soft, timid end user and Linux frightens and confuses me. I find the soft warm glow of Ubuntu comforting, like a glass of milk and a cookie before bed.

I'm not and I still prefer Ubuntu for "normal" installs.

gotta give shuttleworth and crew credit for the work they've done to make ubuntu accessible to so many. they picked a good base(debian) to build upon and have made great progress adapting that distro to mainstream use.

Damn straight.  I started with Linux in 1998.  Back then, nothing worked immediately after install (assuming it would install in the first place).  You had to configure your X Windows config file by hand if you were using anything but a bog standard CRT (LCD? Laptop?  GTFO).  Or the pain of learning your mobo based modem (remember those) was a WinModem and wouldn't work under any distro...  I used external modems connected by a serial cable for years because of that.  Red Hat 5 was the first distro I ever used that installed and worked without much tweaking.  I still stuck with Slackware 7 because by that time I knew how to make it sing and dance for me.

When I first tried Ubuntu, I swear I heard angels singing. 

When I first started, everyone wanted an easier distro to install because, at the time, it was too difficult for all but the geekiest.  Now, it's so easy, folks want it tougher so they can feel l33t.

Chris

[roo_ster]

Good luck zach. The problems I'm seeing so far is that centos is a server os that would take a bit of tweaking to make work for an HTPC. and Fedora seems to be a 32 bit which trows a lot of money away on my HTPC system.

I guess that is why I installed Win 7 beta, then the RC and now the full version on this system.

I hope someone comes up with a good 64 bit OS that gets away form the sound issues.

jim

Centos can be had in several flavors: Workstation, Server, Everything.  It can also be had in 64 or 32 bit.  I install everything and call it good on most boxes.

[S. Williamson]

So which Linux distro would be recommended for someone who is decently familiar with Windows, but has no desire to "tweak?"

[KD5NRH]

Don't expect all the bleeding edge application versions, as it is built for stability.

I'd be happy if they'd catch up with some so-far-from-the-bleeding-edge-that-the-scars-have-long-since-healed stuff, like easy and effective configuration of a WPA'd network on a Broadcom adapter.

[S. Williamson]

 

[zahc]

You had to configure your X Windows config file by hand if you were using anything but a bog standard CRT (LCD? Laptop?  GTFO).

I'd be happy if it went back to that. Used to be, I could put a few lines in my .asoundrc and my sound would work. I could fiddle with my xorg.conf until it worked. Now, you have a situation where my sound just doesn't work, it's lost in the ether, and nobody knows why. Try a reinstall. The latest Ubuntu versions don't even come with an xorg.conf. And now I can't even install Ubuntu because of a fatal bug in the installer.