walkah: what's your desktop distro?

14 Apr 2005

what's your desktop distro?

i've recently gotten my grubby little hands on an x86 laptop (my brother's old laptop prior to his joining the cult of the mac) - a dell inspiron 2650. so - since i naturally have no intention of letting it retain it's current operating system ... i'm wondering which linux distribution proper geeks run on their laptops these days?

i'm currently thinking either ubuntu hoary (for that comfy old debian feel) or gentoo (which i kinda liked before). anything way better?

posted 4:18pm:

walkah's blog

tags:

linux

don't know if i'm really a 'proper geek', but...

by Steven Mansour (not verified)

April 14, 2005 - 5:15pm

politics aside, I've always been partial to Suse Linux. The installer seems like the most mature one to me (granted, I haven't seen *every* distro), and YAST (Yet Another Setup Tool) makes package and RPM management easy.

Of course, if you wanna be real cool you could always setup FreeBSD on it... ;)

oh yeah, suse

by walkah

April 14, 2005 - 6:32pm

i've never even tried SuSe. i suppose i could give it a try ... though i've always had this beef with RPM based distros ... not sure really ... but there are a lot of "alternate" RPM repositories, and they never really all work together the way they should. i usually just end up installing apt4rpm, then wondering why i'm not just running debian.

i will say, i guess most of the novell folks run SuSe - which might make it easier to follow their latest and greatest developments.... another ISO to download ;)

I'd recommend Suse

by Danger Stevens (not verified)

April 14, 2005 - 5:54pm

I'd definitely recommend installing Suse 9.2 simply because that'll give you the greatest hardware support combined with the best new software. For a main system or a development platform I'd never choose Suse first, but to get a laptop running well, quickly, and with stability I think it's a good choice.

oooh-buntu!

by adrian (not verified)

April 14, 2005 - 7:14pm

If I were to set up a desktop right now, it would be either debian sid or the latest ubuntu.

And, as Mae West once said .... when confronted with two evils, take the one you haven't tried before.

Btw: Ubuntu (the word) is popping up all over these days, across the pond in South Africa.

Before the distro hit, I had never heard it.. now it's in radio ads and on billboards on the side of highways. Weird stuff.

Ubuntu

by Paul (not verified)

April 15, 2005 - 2:36am

I've got Ubuntu on an older Latitude X200 playing relatively nicely. I never did get full power management working (sleep, hibernate, etc) but I never really tried all that hard. It's much easier to just use the Powerbook...

I suppose I'm partial to

by coward (not verified)

April 15, 2005 - 7:09am

I suppose I'm partial to debian, but ubuntu is cool.
With very little tweaking everything works on those two. Sid is running happily on my laptop.

Kubuntu

by Anonymous (not verified)

April 20, 2005 - 12:23pm

The grace and useability of ubuntu, combined with the grace and useability of kde 3.4> Yes, kde3.4 is great! ;)

Underground Desktop

by Anonymous (not verified)

May 4, 2005 - 4:38am

Underground Desktop is debian based and fast. It has kde 3.4 and uses anaconda to install. It's quite easy to use, and optimized for i686 and better. See www.ludos.org

Gentoo baby

by cman (not verified)

May 12, 2005 - 11:48am

Might be a little late to the party, but gotta vote for Gentoo. I've wanted to try other distro's but I keep coming back to Gentoo for my needs. I must admit that it forced me to learn a lot of areas in Linux I probably wouldn't have ventured into if I had stuck with RedHat, Mandrake, or Debian...

Debian and Mandriva are my Friends

by DebianDave (not verified)

November 21, 2007 - 11:54am

I've been running Mandriva on a Dell Latitude 100L for a couple of years.

http://www.laptopical.com/dell-100l-30951.html

I also run an LC2000 from LinuxCertified that runs Debian.
The beauty of the LC2000 is that it was ready out of the box, and was optimized for the Debian configuration I ordered.