mcgrew's Journal: What's your favorite Linux distro, and why?

Has Shuttleworth graduated from snorting coke to smoking crack?? I upgraded my kubuntu install, and Amazon wants my location! WTF??? What's more, it comes up on every reboot even though I dismissed the retarded thing. This is entirely against the very soul of open source! I am outraged. So no more Ubuntu for me until Shuttleworth puts the crack pipe down... I guess Unity should have clued us that he'd gone batshit crazy.

I used Mandriva (after Mandrake) and was happy with it. I switched when everyone said it was dead, I'll probably switch back. But first, since the Linux machine is now even less useable than the Windows (UGH!) box I'm typing this on, I might as well try out some others first... plus, Mandriva is now a DVD install and the computer's old DVD drive has all but bit the dust.

I've heard good things about Mint and will certainly give XMBC a shout, since the Linux box is mostly used for watching movies, youtube, and TV, and listening to the radio and Oggs on.

The box not only needs a new DVD drive but more memory, too, so I'm looking for something not too awfully bloated, although it ran videos fine until I stupidly upgraded. Also, what are the best Linux tools for video editing and format translation?

Suggestions?

+1 for Mint

[GameboyRMH]

Mint with MATE desktop is my favorite, but I know KDE is your favorite. It's like Ubuntu before they started with the stupid Apple mimicry somewhere around Lucid.

Ubuntu has long ago jumped the shark, it's really too bad that its good reputation was thoroughly pissed away.

The Best Things in Ubuntu

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Are from Debian. The apt/deb system, rational conflict and dependency management, guidance for config files and the like.

The Ubuntu advantage was the installer and great meta-packaging. There was detail paid to a desktop with commercial-grade "finish" - all achievable via Debian, but requiring a little more time-investment and alternate repository investigations.

I'll go with Mint, myself on this. Like an Ubuntu branch, with different choices and investments than those you are reviling. Much like Mandrake

Re:

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Because you are a KdF guy, here's a link:
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2271 [linuxmint.com]

Re:

[ancientt]

Ditto. I switched to Mint after Ubuntu started down the Unity path and was relieved to find something that still just worked. One of my criteria for picking a desktop distro is that it supports my dual head config by default and Mint did. I recommend Cinnamon personally since I like my taskbar minimal and out of the way most of the time and still like the Menu-SubMenu-Submenu type of interface. It's easy to pick and choose and to get full media support with little effort. I'm fully capable of advanced shell

Re:

[damn_registrars]

I'll offer up my current $.02 by saying I've been running Kubuntu 10.10 since it was new. It is, of course, 2+ years old and now the packages are no longer available for it. I had to freeze my updates while I was working on a large project that is almost wrapped up now which I could not afford to have interrupted by software failures. I have the Kubuntu 12.10 DVD ready to go once I'm officially done with this project so I will probably try that with the shopping bit removed as you suggested.

FWIW I'm an

Maybe I'm old fashioned

[rk]

But I still use Slackware. A lot of distros seem to be targeted at people who don't like Windows. I prefer instead a distro targeted at people who like Unix.

Re:

[mcgrew]

I switched to Linux because I was fed up with Windows, but I do like Unix.

Kubuntu 12.10 sans unity-lens-shopping

[damn_registrars]

I just thought I'd share that I just installed Kubuntu 12.10 on my laptop this morning (amd64 release) and it did not install unity-lens-shopping by default; I even did 'sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping' to make sure. Looks mostly like the Kubuntu 10.10 that I was running before, even though I formatted my HD along the way. I don't know if maybe some releases don't do the shopping bit out-of-the-box or not?

So far, I'm pretty happy with it, thoughI'm just getting through restoring files from acr

Re:

[mcgrew]

I reinstalled 10.04 just to have an almost workable machine, but apparently they changed Flash, because it's not working. I suspect I just need more memory (it only has 750 meg). But that Amazon.com BS was kind of the last straw as far as Ubuntu goes, for me anyway.

From all the comments (and I thank everyone who responded!) I think I'll give Mint a try. Maybe even before I buy some memory.