Recommended Linux Distros?

What technical level are you at? If you want something that "just works" with minimal configuration or manual effort, Ubuntu and Mint are great distributions. Fedora is also a great distribution.

I'm an Arch girl, myself. I really like it.

 

Check out DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. . That website will list the top Linux distributions and will give you information you need in order to start learning about them

 

Quick caveat I wanted to throw out there is to stay away from any completely free software distros (free as in freedom, not as in beer; they are all free as in beer). I don't know if free BSD variants suffer from this problem, but the free software distros inspired by the principles of Richard Stallman are more or less completely unusuable. So, stay away from things like gNewSense.

I've already tried, and they suck, because their whole philosophy is preventing you from installing non-free software. Some of them also have web plugins like LibreJS which blocks all non free Javascript from running. LibreJS pretty much breaks all the internet, including EC (as I found out on Parabola GNU/Linux).

 

I've been a Slackware user for about 14 years. Love how easy it is to go and tweak the config files. But it is more of a power user distro than one designed for the average person.

 

It all depends on what you want to get out of it, what your skill level is. I used to be an Arch user, it is a pretty solid distro for the most part, I like the fact its a rolling release so no reinstalling/upgrading every six months or so. If you really want learn how the internals of a Linux box works without going homicidal, I recommend Gentoo.

@ Pret Allez *BSDs aren't developed by free software extremists, so they allow you to install non-free software with ease. But I don't think it applies here anyway because they aren't Linux based.

 

Depends on what you're looking for, Arch is good from what I've heard but when I'm not using Ubuntu I use Kali.

 

I guess this depends on your definition of "going homicidal" - waiting hours for an X server and all of it's dependencies to compile (and then having no one be able to figure out what went wrong because you used some obscure compiler flag because you thought it was cool) would make me at least throw things against the wall.

But if that's your thing, go for it

 

I was referring to LFS, it's like nothing I have experienced before. I tried it out once, after a few hours of manually configuring and compiling things I just had enough. I don't know how people actually get through an entire installation of LFS, they must really like pain. Gentoo is like a walk in the park for me, maybe it's because I have used for almost two years now. I can usually find the root of a broken package quite easily and quickly.

 

I'm a Fedora/RedHat fan myself.

I don't like to use Debian and its derivatives such as Ubuntu. I got into a rather heated argument with some Debian bigots about 15 years ago and have stayed away since then.

Interesting we have a slackware user here. I started on slackware back in 93/94 time frame. I switched to Red Hat about 10 years ago, it was what we used where I was working.

 

I've tried red hat, and used it a few times, including when I ran an IRLP node, but I never really cared for the structure of /etc. I'd always have to keep hunting when I needed to tweak something. I never have a problem locating the right config file in Slackware. RH is great if you can do everything you need with their config tools, but once you need to step outside them for anything.... My favorite distro was Caldera, though. That was a nice distro. Too bad SCO had to go crazy shortly after acquiring them.

 

↑↑↑ what he said.

...or Ubuntu, you can never go wrong with that.

 

debian.

but still - windows 8 isn't bad

 

I very rarely use the red hat config tools, in fact I can't remember the last time . I usually just edit the files directly.

 

Fedora and Kali are great distros to use.

 

I should switch over to Linux. It sounds more fun than windows. Unfortunately the only experience I've had with Linux was on the Pi and that was very dumbed down and slow so I barely used it. I'm not particularly into hardware, so everything that could be done on there, I could do on my main PC, faster, so I did it on my main PC.
I tangented

 

If you like Windows and want to try a Linux distro you can always have both. I run Ubuntu alongside Windows 7 using a dualboot system. Ubuntu (in my experience) is way faster.

 

I want to do that, my only worry being screwing up my pc. I have used Ubuntu before on someone else's computer and I think I'd like to have something much more flexible than that, something with a lot more command lines (I adore command lines )

 

Spoiler

To be honest Ubuntu isn't to difficult to set-up. There's a lot of online how-to guides and I've done it twice with out any problems. The only time I've ever screwed up a PC was when I messed with the partitions during a Kali installation.
And command lines are just....beautiful.

 

Raspberry Pi isn't exactly a fast piece of hardware. So of course Linux isn't going to run terribly fast on it.

Ubuntu (and flavors), Fedora, and Mint all provide nice introductory experiences to Linux.

Ryujin, I noticed you said you were interested in math. Sage Mathematics is a wonderful piece of software.