Looking for best Linux distro

[Vista06]

Hi!

I've recently tried Ubuntu, and Kubuntu, but they both are trying too hard to be like Windows. IMO, Windows is the only OS that needs to look like Windows.

Anyway, what is the best distro if I'm trying to learn more about Linux, and want the "full Linux experience"? (I.E, I want it to look more like Linux than it does Windows)

Thanks, Vista

[Stephen Bryant]

Asking for the best GNU+Linux distro is like asking who's the best candidate for president... :p

Anyway, if want something very "linux-y", I'd recommend Fedora. I haven't used it since FC4, but back then it was it's own thing, not trying to clone Windows. However, the windowmanager has more to do with that than the distro. KDE and Gnome are the two biggest, and they're both similar to Windows. Personally, I use e17, which is the latest version of Enlightenment. It's quite unlike Windows. Another good choice would be Blackbox or IceWM.

If you're going to try out different window managers, I'd recommend SUSE for doing it, simply because there are tons of repositories for it, and the installation process is really simple. You should be able to find just about any WM you want without having to compile it. You WILL have to compile e17 though if you want to use it, as it's not finished, and is only available for CVS.

[unclekyky]

If you want something more "linux" (which doesn't really make sense because linux is whatever you want it to be), then you might try Gentoo. The reason I suggest this is because it gets you use to using the command line. Even though Gentoo's package manager (called portage) is based on BSD (I think), it is a much more in depth experience than, say, Ubuntu.

You also might want to check out Slackware. I believe it is the oldest (still active) distro out there.

If all else fails, you can try Debian. Ubuntu is the "dummy" version of Debian (at least, thats how I view it).

But as Stephen said, the similarity you see of Ubuntu with Windows is because of the desktop manager. If you don't want to be reminded of Windows, try something more less known that GNOME (or KDE). A few examples are (you can easily install most of these with aptitude on Ubuntu) fvwm, xcfe, or even more lightweight, such as ratpoison. There are a ton more, but KDE to Ratpoison pretty much cover the spectrum.

[CDX]

While both FEODORA CORE (FC), SUSE and their derivatives are quite nice they do use the RPM packet-system for their repositories, a system that in my view is quite cumbersome and it is easy to end up in the so called "dependencies hell" when uninstalling software.

Both FC and SUSE have the benefit of being popular in the corporate world, due to the heavy promo from Novell and IBM. FC is the community maintained version of RedHat but the difference is so big that it's really two seperate distros by now.
http://www.novell.com/linux/
http://fedoraproject.org/

Slackware is the most BSD like Linux flavour but then again you might benefit more from just running OpenBSD or NetBSD who are real UNIX systems. If I remember correctly you have to keep track of dependencies your self, but it was a very very long time since I ran Slack (back in 1997). There are a few differences when it comes to Net and Open BSD, but I'm not the right person to talk about it since I have ran neither.
http://www.slackware.org/
http://www.openbsd.org/
http://www.netbsd.org/

Ubuntu is one of my favorites because it has very good hardware support and that is important, especially if you are on a quest to make all your friends run linux. And while it does look like Windows it is nothing like windows. You dont like KDE or Gnome? install Fluxbox or Enlightenment and use that as your window manager. Besides there are Fluxbuntu and Elbuntu if you want it installed out of the box.
http://fluxbuntu.org/
http://e17blog.tuxfamily.org/elbuntu.php/


Then there is Debian the most stable Linux dist out there. It is conservative and rock solid if you run the stable release, but if you want the bleeding edge you should run the testing release. Their experimental release are for people involved in the development of Debian and has a very high probability to break your box. Debian has more and better maintained repositories than Ubuntu. This is due to their much much larger user base and developer base.

Both Debian and Ubuntu uses the deb packeting system which solves the problem of "dependency hell" and thus I'm biased too prefer Debian based distros.
http://www.debian.org/


But you are a young programmer so I would like to recommend Gentoo, because this is the distro where you compile everything from source. It is a Debian spin off, so you can use deb repositories but the Gentoo way is to compile everything from source. You will learn a lot about programming, how linux and GNU works and how your computer works with Gentoo.
http://www.gentoo.org/

Then there is the hardcore young programmer who rolls his own GNU + Linux distro, and this way teaches you alot more about how the GNU+Linux operating system works.
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/


There are a whole lot more flavours to look into and there are some real big differences that is beyond the scope of this post.

There are som very specialized distros made for only one purpouse, like IPcop linux which is a Firewall and Router distro. Then there is 0phtcrack that only does one thing, crack Windows passwords with Rainbow tables. Clusterzilla does cluster computing, then there are pure 64bit dists.... etc etc...

My recomendation is to check out www.distrowatch.org and read up on the distro you want to use.
Download and try them out if thy have a live CD.

Cheers!

Chris

EDIT: Oh and I forgot, you can run whatever window manager you want on any linux distro. You just have to install it yourself, and that is not that much of a hassle. I like Fluxbox and I run the Protech ONE distro since I'm into pentests and IT/IS security.