Which Linux OS to use?

[pc1962]

Hi,
Just wondering if any of you gurus out there could suggest which version of Linux in your opinion is the most efficient with regard to system requirements and also has the most up to date device drivers.

I've been looking at Suse, linspire and redhat. Suse seems to be looking for quite a high spec in comparison to XP home [800MHz compared to 300Mhz], Linspire ive heard is the easiest to make the transition from windows and Redhat seems to be the most configurable.

As you can probably tell I'm haveing a hard time making my mind up and any guidance would be really appreciated.

This will be installed on a 1.6 pentium M, 256Mb DDR,40Gb HDD Fujitsu laptop and I would like to be able to run the OS without listening to the HD grind away while waiting for my apps to load. I realise that the memory may be a bit lacking, but I hope to upgrade in the future. Reason I'm thinking of making the windows to Linux transition----Have you seen the spec required for Vista----pweeeeeeeewww 2Gb memory----now thats bloatware!!!!!!!!

Thank in Advance
pc

 

[bennettp23]

I used redhat for a good while, its got good support and some commercial backing. Back in Uni they used redhat too, worked well.

 

[proactive]

Its pretty stable and runs well, but you might want to not install things like a mail server and more advanced server feaures.

The reason I recommed fedora is its officially the test releases from Red Hat and has a pretty good GUI. also it comes in several flavours and I believe there is one option for a laptop if I remember right.

 

[darude]

I'd recomend SUSE. 9.3 was a very good release but I believe 10 is out or due to come out very soon, the reviews look good. It comes with just about everything you could think of.

YAST (suse system manager) also found every bit of hardware on my Laptop (toshiba S2800) apart from my modem and installed the drivers for me. Only had to do the official drivers from Nvidia. I couldn't get Redhat or Fedora to boot on my laptop so I have never tried them.

Good look.

Regards,

Darren

[Moderator - No advertising]

 

[smokeyJoe]

You need a distribution with a good installer Suse, Mandriva, Ubuntu, etc but has the option of giving you a low-power graphical environment such as fluxbox, you might also consider trying BSD.

 

[LesleyB]

I have SuSE on a workstation Debian on an old Dell laptop and two OpenBSD boxes at home. I have had experience of installing and using Red Hat Mandriva and Ubuntu.

I think SuSE gives the most professional install and usage of all the ones I have tried but I haven't reviewed RedHat for a while. I have been using SuSE since 7.3 and have just received SuSE 10 through the post.

I hear where you are coming from re laptops and the hdd grind.
I don't know how much Linux knowledge you have, but one thing you have a lot of choice over is your entire GUI. Instead of just the basic themes Windows offers, you can choose between desktop environments, (similar to Windows) and window managers on Linux.

You can use KDE or Gnome to provide a Desktop environment or you can use a less resource hungry window manager like fluxbox, enlightenment or icewm. These are available to work with almost all distros.

A window manager uses less resources than a Desktop environment so there is less swapping in and out to disk.

 

[justdan]

i used fedora core 3 (fedora replaced red hat as the free Linux os, red hat is now paid for)

i would suggest for a beginer one of the major disro's

Mandiva (formaly mandrake)
Fredora (formally redhat)
Suse (formal Suse) ;0)

my flavour of choise is fedora but i like the gui

there is some known bugs with version 4 od fedora and alot more software on version 3.

also i would suggest that you check out a program called senaptic its briant for anstalling software on most major distro's

Dan