Originally posted by: Nothinman
I've made similar posts, and I think Nothinman just quoted them. I never included the stupid "worthless post" comment though.
And I wouldn't exactly call them worthless, the hardware support of most Linux distros is about the same since they all use the same kernel. Some add a few out of tree drivers, but they don't add to many because the farther from Linus' tree they diverge the more it increases their workload. So the choice of distro is pretty much just personal preference.
Except when some things just don't want to work right out of the box.Red Hat, SUSE, nd Madriva aught to be good, too (didn't try them), but when it comes to Just Working?, Debian is still
it.
I figured they'd mostly be the same (and
mostly, I think they are), but my recent experiences with SMGL, Puppy, Beatrix, DSL, and Vector have shown me wrong. Something about my hardware is not kosher with these distros. Puppy, SMGL, and Beatrix would not get a bootloader working. DSL, Vector, and Beatrix had issues with video settings (DSL would crash X at the wrong move, Vector had corrupted video), as SMGL does now (but I'm working on it--it's just the normal low refresh rate thing).
I spent the better part of a week on this, going through everything I could find about GRUB. Nada. I mean, I learned a lot, and I made progress, but in the end, I gave up some space and went for a netinstall of Debian just for booting. Every Debian-based distro I tried installed GRUB and configured video/monitor properly, and even got sound working (proprietary USB audio).
As far as what to try...
Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, MEPIS, Knoppix, Kanotix, and others, offer live CDs. Those other than Ubuntu typically let you install from the session's settings, as well (that is, you can set things up while running, and transfer them to the HDD install). See how well it works. Just waste a few CDRs.
For easy to use desktops, SUSE, Ubuntu (also try Kubuntu and Xubuntu
), and PCLinuxOS are where its at.
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