On Wednesday, March 24, 2004 11:32 am, Leo J Mauler wrote:

> I know nearly everyone here is a Debian or a SuSE devotee, but if you had
> to use a distro other than those two, what would your third choice be?
 
It was my impression that Debian had only recently gained popularity in the 
list, and I didn't see much about SuSE before 9.0 came out.  I know a LOT of 
people here have moved to Gentoo in the last year or so.

I know we have a lot of closet RedHat users here; RH being perhaps the most 
popular distribution overall, with the largest install base.

Among purists, Slackware has always been popular, so I expect that among the 
true coders here who have been running Linux as long as I have, it's been 
pretty popular.

Mandrake is very popular as well, offering an alternative to RH while keeping 
most of the advantages.  With their 9.2 release it became too unstable for 
me, and too difficult to find current packages for (unless you're a member of 
the "club").

My impression of Debian is that inspite of the legendary apt-get system, it's 
always broken.  The "stable" release has program versions so old that they 
don't work, the "unstable" version is just that.  A knowledgeable user can 
get Debian to work, but that's part of the fun, the challenge.

For you, Leo, my recommendation would be to build a Linux From Scratch 
installation.  That way there are no conspiracies, there is no-one to blame 
but yourself for anything that's not the way you want it to be.  You get 
exactly what you decide to get.