Distro of Choice

I only ever bothered with Ubuntu and SuSE. But I use neither now.

I was pro-Gnome. I tried just about every single window manager under the sun and nothing worked as well as LiteStep. I'd rather have a good, usable WM rather than a WM that, for me, fails at mimicking the shell that I chose it for in the first place (OpenBox, BlackBox, FluxBox, etc).

Of the three major DE's, XFCE is my favorite. It's lightweight, but does just about everything Gnome did.

Gnome is too bulky for me. I'm also probably running something that has far fewer resources that you have, and as such, something that's more lightweight is more usable for me.

I agree with you about litestep though; there really is no comparable alternative :/

I didn't like XFCE because it didn't seem to be done very well. A lot of things felt sort of like old metal toy cars with the wheels loose and moving everywhere.

Well, I think your face looks ugly.

*sniffle*

:p

That's what SHE said.

Haha...wait.

I only started using linux this year. I'm running ubuntu with gnome, and the stuff that works, I like a lot. What I miss are adobes applications, and a program that works well with my ipod. I keep going back to windows for those. It'd also be nice to have miranda and samurize, but I can live without those.
I am running blackbox for windows on my windows install, so eventually I'm going to try out the *box wms for linux, but I want to settle in before I do that. Gnome is ok for now.

Gnome is a nice way to start off. Definitely an 'easier' transition than some of the others.

Miranda runs pretty darn well under WINE. *wink*

For your iPod, go with Banshee.

using debian for a few years now.. the apt-get update feature is damn handy.. using it only as firewall and samba-server tho..

I tried a lot of ipod applications, none of them worked satisfactory, a lot of them not at all. can't remember if i tried banshee, i'll look at it next time i boot linux. I have to use flash, so I've been booting windows the last week or so...
I tried to get photoshop working in wine, but didn't succeed so I kind of gave up. miranda is not as important, but I've looked at the linux thread in the miranda forums, might try it some day.

There really isn't a viable alternative to Photoshop at this point.

If you are just using it for basic things, but aren't comfortable with the GIMP interface, you might want to take a look at Gimpshop...

no, gimp isn't enough... i did try gimpshop, but I either failed miserably at getting it to work, or I'm not familiar enough with the standard gimp interface to notice the difference.

Nice, a linux group.

Let's see, I first started using Linux on my desktop in 1996 dual booting with Windows. It was Slackware Linux with a late 1.x.x series Linux kernel. FVWM95 was the window manager of choice. It was extremely complicated to do anything back then, but I did get everything going. I had Netscape, Pine for email, and my PPP dial-up connection set up...so it worked. BitchX for IRC...

In 1998, I moved to Redhat 5.0 which was the first distribution that touted itself as "easy to use." And compared to everything before it--it really was. I installed "October Gnome" (a pre 1.0 release of Gnome that was released in October 1998 and was considered a "stable" release before 1.0). Most things were the same.

In 2000, I gave up Windows completely and installed Redhat 6.1. I used Enlightenment 0.16 and Mozilla M10 - M18 (as they came out) as my web browser. It was big, clunky, and ugly--but it was still way better than using Netscape 4.7. I ran that same install of Redhat upgraded with every release through near the end of 2001 when I installed Debian SID and moved to GNOME with Sawfish (you can see some of my screenshots from that install in my gallery). Until early 2002, I ran Linux exclusively on my desktop.

With windows xp's improved stability, and me being a college student who no longer had time to dig around the nuances of his system and play in all the nooks and crannies--most notably--someone who had a lot of school work to do and needed a system that would just do what he needed it to do (like running MS Excel for example) I switched to XP. I ran Redhat 8.0 briefly in late 2003...probabbly about 3-4 months. But my Dark Age of Camelot habit ruined that.

And I ran Windows XP from early 2002 until early 2006. I'd been hearing a lot about Ubuntu and Fedora Core. But with Redhat 8.0 having left a bad taste in my mouth, I went for Ubuntu. All of my old friends in the Gnome community were using it so I installed an early alpha of Ubuntu Dapper (figuring correctly that even an unstable pre-release in 2006 was going to be light years ahead of both windows in terms of stability, and functionality in terms of 2001 linux) killing Windows on the spot and I haven't touched Windows XP at home since. My system is now running Ubuntu Edgy and it served as my primary machine until November 2006.

Until my iMac came into my life. 24", Core 2 Duo. It gets about 80% of my attention these days while my linux machine is reserved for running thottbot or wowhead for when I'm playing WoW on my mac (I had been playing it under Wine on my Linux box and it worked great there too), downloading torrents, and being a general fileserver. And since it has all the mp3s on it and its already at my desk, it serves as music player as well.

I fear though, that it will soon be replaced by 2 new machines as its quite the power hog--and with over 200gb of tv shows and music collected over the past 6-7 years, trusting non-redundant hard drives with the data is seeming more and more stupid. I'm going to build a low-power, raid 5 capable file server which can take over the duties and provide great redundancy for my data.

To fill the void of extra machine on my desktop, I'm thinking of a Macbook pro (since my laptop needs replacing too).

The only thing is, I don't want to not have Linux on my desktop anymore. But I can't say that I don't love my mac. And no, I never owned a mac until November 2006.

So there's my linux history--for a while I was known as the resident "Linux guru" around here--so I can probably be of help for those who need it. I still administer several linux servers, etc, etc.

Darksheer: What made you switch to Apple?

back in '98 a couple folk from ye'old days of custo (pre changemusic) introd me to linux and desperatly tried to convince me that slack was the wave of the future. boy were they wrong. Redhat 5.2 was the first distro I actually got to sink my teeth into, and I stuck w/ Redhat up till 9.0 when things soured in our relationship.

Now up untill that point I had been using linux exclusivly for administration and programming, but I diceided to use 9.0 as a desktop which was a dismal failure which lead to experimenting w/ fedora, suse, debian, gentoo and freebsd at which point I settled on gentoo becuase simply put it did what I wanted to the way I wanted to.*power to t3h source*

Gentoo is a great distro but if you're into some hardocre linux stuffs rolling your own kernel and bootstraping just because you can then it may not be for you, and gentoo doesn't always play nice w/ usefull software like mono of which I was, and still am which lead me to look for a mono friendly distro.

Enter Ubuntu. Previous attempts at using a debian distro weren't allways good, but after using gentoo apt was a much better alternative. Ubuntu offered me a great desktop and mono friendlieness.

Enter the mac in the summer this year. all in all I think osx as a unix is and always be better than a regular linux / bsd in both useability and programability.

I use arch too, there's nothing faster and more customisable from my experience. Have to keep coming back to windows for things like CSS, FLStudio and Ipod stuff though which is pretty annoying. Could never get Wine to work well.

Currently using pekwm for my WM after I switched from openbox and ion3. Its got the best of both I reckon, you should give it a try. :)

chimpyw you should use banshee for your ipod needs

I looked at it but I like to keep my desktop pretty lean. preferably something console based but the current options aren't particularly safe. Plus I'm too lazy (inadept) to do all the udev rules for it. :P

@puer--

Several reasons--most notably the desire to run a unix-based system and still have Photoshop. :D

As a web designer / developer--you really can't work without photoshop these days. Not having it was a huge hurdle for me while working on linux desktops.

I have used Ubuntu pretty much exclusively since 2005. I abandoned dual booting in early 2006, and now I am running 100% Linux. I had a short flirtation with Arch but I ended up going back to Ubuntu, because I do enjoy the auto config very much. However, I found pacman to be at least an equal, if not better than apt-get, but perhaps that is because I prefer to stay on the bleeding edge as far as packages go, and some of the lack of that in the Ubuntu repos. I generally get the best of both worlds by testing the latest development version of Ubuntu.
As far as DEs go, I have never liked KDE. Seems pretty bulky to me. I used GNOME for about 6 months, but I got kind of bored with the more Windows-like setup. I switched to XFCE and enjoyed it, but found Openbox to be very interesting. So I abandoned DEs and simply switched to just having a .xsession, logging in with GDM, and running it with a custom startup. I have played with Beryl and such, but it seems like it has a long way to go before it is too pratical. I am currently searching for a WM with maybe a bit more options as far window shapes and such (currently Openbox only does no rounded corners) but still minimal, and still very "bring your own everything else" as in, I bring my own panel.
Sometimes I miss a few applications, namely Miranda IM (without the classic windows look, and without the slow msstyles emulation in Wine), and Foobar2000 (with same stipulations as above). It is not that there aren't alternatives that work fantastic (Miranda to Gaim & Kepote, and Foobar2000 to MPD (which I really love, lots and lots of interface options) but I really like what the community has done with those 2 apps, and I was an avid customizer of those when I used Windows.
I am not upset like many are about the loss of Photoshop (I never really used it, I always used PSP) and I have grown to really enjoy the GIMP. I personally use the Gimpshop variation, and I do like the interface. Out of my entire Linux experience, the only thing I really lement about is graphics drivers, specifically the ATI drivers, and the fact that sometimes they don't keep up with latest kernel version, but whatever, that is ATI's problem with their fglrx driver, but hopefully that will get better with time, it is not like the open source drivers are unusuable in the mean time when they don't update for a couple days.

dual boot. WindowsXP and Wolfix.

In the 90’s I played around with SuSE from time to time but could never get really used to it. Same goes for Mandrake Linux which I tried later.
Then, years later I somehow stumbled over this screenshot and really liked its looks. So that’s what kept me from using Linux back then: both SuSE and Mandrake had KDE preselected as desktop environment and I never liked that childish-glossy look. So GNOME with its simple but elegant looks was the way to go and I really got used to it. The distro of choice was—and is up to today—Debian, cannot remember what led me to this decision back then. I only remember installing Debian because I had to wipe out and reinstall my WinXP anyways. (Thanks to Symantec.)
Since then I gradually used my GNU/Linux desktop more and more and nowadays I boot it maybe one time in three months just to keep it up to date. But I can’t stand the limiting environment for too long and happily return everytime.
I started with Debian Sarge (Stable) learned to love the/a packaging system; I never experienced something this great on Windows. Sarge couldn’t keep me since the software was just too old for me. So I upgraded to Etch (Testing) which I did use for a even less time and finally upgraded to Sid (Unstable) which I enjoy using since. I just love it to get my hands on recent software and hack it from time to time.
My DE choice switched when I had a problem logging into GNOME. Until I resolved this problem I used Xfce since the only alternative for me was KDE, which was none. And so my love for Xfce’s light weight began. And over the time my desk became more beautiful to me as I gathered experience with my system and how it works.

I use windows XP but I have VMWARE player so I run loads of Linux distro's off there.

I have tried Ubuntu, Debian, Freespire, Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux.

I loved Debian, with the gnome enviro. Maybe I should post some SS of my debian desktops.

I used to like Gnome, because it offered an easy transition from windows. However, the longer I stay with linux, the more I'm inclined to use a more customizable WM.

Composite Managed/Ubuntu (dapper because I'm hard-core)/with Openbox WM.

Currently, I'm running Debian Etch but am certainly hoping to get to Gentoo as soon as I have heaps of free time. I love the idea of USE flags! Gentoo is truely something that you can mould from scratch from what I have heard and read.

i am using a debian right now.

like adz_619, i'm using VMware. right now i'm using fedora core 7.it's pretty cool. still pretty green when it comes to using linux. any other suggestions for another distro i should try?

If you're looking for something easy, I'd suggest Ubuntu. If you really wanted to get accustomed to using it though, I'd suggest something that forces you to do a bit more work on your own.

Arch-linux is great I hear :)

thanx puer.......i look into those tonight.

Ubuntu 5.10 is a great place to start. Also you should try SUsE Linux which has many features that dont make installing software a lot of hassle.

I've always been a Slackware person myself, used to play with RedHat way back when.. 6.2 iirc. OpenSuSE is decent too.. not real big on Ubuntu or the variants but it works.

Slackware definitely seems respectable.

I like what Ubuntu is doing (sorta), but it feels a bit bulky at times.

1999 - First look on SuSe x86
2001 - starting to work with Mandrake x86
2002 - after a freezing machine with Redhat and SuSe not being able to handle the SRM - FreeBSD & Debian on Alpha, starting with Debian on x86
2003 - Deleting all Windows installations and switching completely to Debian Sid x86, also AIX on RS6000, OpenBSD on x86
Debian Sid ever since, although now in a mix with experimental, now and then testing other distribution current setup: AIX on RS6000, Gentoo & Debian SID on x86, Gentoo on x86_64

I always disliked KDE, mainly for the used toolkit, so I used Gnome from the start, though I replaced the then standard wm Sawfish with Enlightenment DR16. With Gnome 2 everything was better and I dropped E in favour of Metacity respectively Expocity. Since my notebook has not much power and memory I was in need of a small and very configurable window manager and started to use FVWM. By now I use it everywhere I can, because it does exactly what I want and doesn't get in my way... since I write the config. At the moment I try to get some of the more interesting patches for FVWM to Metisse, because the Facade features of Metisse and the features of it's FVWM base are all I ever wanted.

Mandrake Linux First!
Now i used Curumin 8.x (PT-BR) and Slax Live sometimes...
and Cygwin+XFCE for tranning...

I use linux nearly 1 year so i tried some things. First it was Ubuntu 6.06lts and then xubuntu (i love xfce). Then i give up of ubuntu because i´m on dial up and i cant use apt-get for big things (at that time there was no downloadable packages on dvd for ubuntu). Then i tried Debian 4 and i continue using it. It´s my choice because there is so many packages on dvd-s and i can build my system however i want. In the begining it was xfce again on my pc as default de (desktop environment) but since few days i started to use fluxbox and i love it. I reinstaled my sys with fluxbox ONLY! And i´m happy as ever. Soon i will fully optimize fluxbox with all my apps (curently i´m expanding tango icon set with extra icons and modifiing one theme for fluxbox) so i will post screenshoot :)

I just tried a clean install of Xubuntu. There's something missing as far as "weight" goes, maybe it's just the lack of bulk from leaving Gnome for a short while, XFCE feels light...maybe too light. And the panels! In gnome I can move a panel applet a few pixels across, I just don't have that luxury in Xubuntu it's indexed (aargh!) and that's not good for a theme whore like me. Iunderstand the speed aspect of xfce, I just miss the "feel" of gnome.
Not only that, the graphics seem...thin, and not so polished. To shave off extra bulk, I got rid of GDM (now I can't use a pure openbox environment, oh well). Well guys let me ask you this: Is there a happy medium between the two?

I am currently using DSL, because Ubuntu makes my machine very slow.

I've been using archlinux since 94 and love it.

You a Linux guru?

Typo i meant archlinux since 04, and debian before that.

i always was a big slackware fan. by the by, props to Darksheer that streamed those Q&A's in #customize back in the day.

Did a Debian 4 install the other day and upgraded to Sid.. been loving it ever since. Changed from Slackware mainly because the Gnome support stinks even with great projects like Dropline.

Freespire Linux is really good, you should try it out guys.

I currently use Arch for my desktop and Gentoo on my servers. I started using Linux back in the Slackware 4.0 days, went to Debian, then to Gentoo, back to Slackware and have finally settled on Arch and been using it as my primary distro for about 4 years now.

I'm a Linux noob, but I do like Ubuntu a lot. Perhaps when I feel a little more confident (i.e. can do just about anything on command line), I will try out Arch.

Ubuntu is nice to get accustomed to it, but you'll find that you can take a lot more control over your desk with some of the other distributions.

Yeah, that is what I have heard. That is why I'm learning on Ubuntu before I go on to the more "powerful" distros.