Which Flavour of Linux?!

Hi Everybody

I'm currently running a 64bit PC. I've installed (and come to depise) Windows XP 64 Bit.

Fortunatley, its now completely fouled up beyond all recognition. When I try and start it, it tells me that a dll is missing (I can't remember exactly which, but thats because I don't care)

Now I could fix this, but instead I've decided I want Linux back on my partition instead. My question is, which distro should I go for?

Ultimately, I'm fairly new to Linux, having not used it extensively since university, so I want something thats easyish to use as a desktop OS, but will still let me use Linux as it was meant to be used (command based). Ease of installation isn't an issue, as I'm fairly competent in that (as you become when you can't remember root password )

I'll probably be using it mostly for software/web page development, office apps and surfing the internet.

The CPU is an AMD Athlon 3000+ 64 bit, and I'd like something that will make the most of the 64 Bit architecture. I've used Redhat and Debian in the past, and want to try something else.

Anything you can recommend?

If you'll allow me to wander off topic for just a moment...

1) Were you running Windows XP 64-bit Edition, or were you running Windows XP Professional x64?

2) What problems were you having, other than the missing DLL?

I just ask because I'm running XP Pro x64 and I've never had a problem with it. 64-bit Edition, on the other hand, is supposed to be buggy as hell, at least from what I've heard.

Anyways, back to Linux distros. I've always run Fedora on my Linux machine. There's a new release every 6 months, so it ususally contains newer technologies, applications, and such before many other distros. I've never had a manor problem with it that I couldn't sort out on my own, and I personally find that it does exactly what you mentioned -- makes things easy for you while still allowing you to use Linux as it was "meant" to be used.

This is just my opinion, of course. Ubuntu seems to be the popular Linux distro at the moment, although I don't really like it.

Perhaps you'd be better off grabbing a few live CD's of various distributions and trying them out before choosing one to install.

I'de have to agree about the fedora project. I tried Ubuntu 7.04 back when it was shiny new, but I'm just not a gnome person and I was too dang lazy to switch it over to kde. I tried suse 10.1 and 10.2, but I vowed never to do that again when they sold out on those microsoft lawsuits. I think by far, fedora 8 (current version) is my most favorite, it is easy to manage stuff with yum and rpm and if you have an admin job with redhat servers, it just makes things that much more familiar. And just about everything you can learn at the redhat trainings also applies to fedora, so if your work pays for those trainings it is a big bonus.

I tried the XP Pro x64 when it was brand spanking new, I got it free with the MS academic alliance at my college. I didn't like it and wound up going back to regular XP Pro because all my software I tried to install wasn't 64 bit OS compatible and most of it gave error messages saying it can't be installed on servers and what not, even though it was just a workstation and not on a domain or anything you know.

Fedora looks very good for 64 capability, as does pclinux... but sabayon must be up for consideration too.. I use it for testing 64bit hardware, with a few reservations I always have about the time it takes to install anything on gentoo based distros. http://www.sabayonlinux.org/

(I also got shouted at here for having a real dl/ beta evaluation version of xp64 edition.. didn't appreciate being accused of warez while trying to get driver help with something downloaded from MS themselves.. It was rubbish anyway, not worth the effort)

I do definitely enjoy sabayon.. the main problem i had with it was by default itd try to set my resolution to like 1950x1450 or something ridiculous like that which my monitor is nowhere near capable of handling -_- and then of course i'd try modifying options & compiling the software updates with these options, and that would fail because all of gentoo hates my pc :]

anyways, i haven't use a 64 bit distro since i believe fc4 when there was still no point in using a 64 bit distro. anyone know if theres any real point in doing so today?

personally i'm running suse 10.3 atm
i can't help it.. it's pretty x_x hahah

As always, I recommend either Ubuntu or Suse. They both seem to have pretty reliable 64 support.

generic response: try them all.

That's funny, these are two of the distros that I always advise against using, Suse because Novell is a sellout and Ubuntu because it sucks - this all aside from the fact that Fedora, CentOS and Gentoo together can meet almost any situation (although I do keep a copy of tomsrbt around).

eh.. novell is a sellout, but they're still getting sued by M$ ^_^ serves them right imo. and just bc they're a sellout & are trying to find more ways to get their product to business users it doesn't mean they shouldn't be a viable option imo. and ubuntu w/the whole 'sudo'...you can disable sudo and have a more secure, well working distro based on debian and it runs well. but i forgot what i was talking about now so i'm just going to post this >.< hope it makes sense

Topic Closed! jk