Linux users!

Who's out there?

I started out on Ubuntu a little over 4 years ago (8.04 Hardy Heron) and have been hooked ever since. I have familiarity with a few of the "popular" distros, but I have a server running Debian Wheezy and all of my laptops run Linux Mint (except my netbook, which runs Ubuntu). I am proud to say I no longer have Windows installed on any of my laptops. My main laptop does have an XP VM, but that's just for my University studies where some programs are Windows-only.

I also have a special fondness for Arch. It's like a stepping stone between the 'beginner' OS's and things like Gentoo and LFS.

So what do you guys like? Mint/Ubuntu/Debian? Fedora/Red Hat/Centos? Mandriva? OpenSUSE? Nerd out here.

Also, perhaps share some of your favorite Linux programs? I'm always looking for more stuff to play with.

 

Running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on the laptop. It dualboots Win7 but I prefer to work with the linux side for most things on there.
Photoshop and Soundforge are only on the desktop so both options on the laptop have the same OpenOffice.org/GIMP lineup/Audacity lineup for whatever I would do along those lines.

 

I've messed around with Linux for over a decade. It used to be much harder to install, almost impossible to dual boot. These days, nothing to it.

At home I'm playing with Backtrack Linux ( an Ubuntu distro ) to learn a bit more about networking and packet sniffing. I dual boot with Win 7.

I've played with Mint for a while. I have a Fedora 14 box at work ( which I am using right now ) along with a Windows box. I have to support both Unix/Linux and Windows.

 

Why does my computer have a Flux Box in it? Is that like a Flux Capacitor? Does it mean I can time travel?

 

I have now CentOS 6.3 at the University PC, that replaced a Fedora 12 distro stickin with the Red-Hat circle of yum-based distros... I have a virtual machine on the laptop with Mint 11, not sure if upgrading to version 12 (or 13) being forced to try the gnome 3 interface...

 

I use Linux Mint and have Ubuntu in a virtual machine. I used to use Mythbuntu for my TV watching and recording needs, but went to Mac OS X.

My favorite distro is BackTrack... BackTrack Linux - Penetration Testing Distribution I need to see if I can install that on the Mac and have it work right. It is picky about the type of wireless card you have.

 

I have a small linux server running Ubuntu server 12.04 and various linux VMs on my main pc. I tried running linux as my main desktop OS, but found gaming difficult. I now run xp as my base and do everything but gaming in my VM.

I just recently got into really digging into linux. I'm enjoying it and thinking about giving the main OS as linux, another try. WoW apparently runs excellent under Wine and steam is pushing out more games on the linux platform.

 

I use win7 (after winXP) on my gaming rig for obvious reasons but ever since my laptop pissed me off with Vista one too many times a few years ago I've been trying out various linux distros on it. I started out using Ubuntu, which was basically Easy Mode, but then when they switched over to Unity that pissed me off as much as Vista so I went straight Debian. After getting annoyed at Debian always seeming to fall short of my expectations in one way or another, and being tired of my own continuing ignorance of how to fix things under the hood, I switched over to Arch Linux. Surprisingly I actually like Arch, especially since with XFCE it goes from cold to desktop in a little over 12 seconds and runs scary fast, but I still can't seem to "get" linux under the hood well enough to make it work completely so it's been in a slow state of falling to pieces for some time.

 

I've played with Linux off and on since 2001, starting with Red Hat 7.1 and going through more distros than I can probably even remember in the first four or five years. Lets see, Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, Gentoo, Debian, Fedora, Arch, Mint, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Slackware for sure, not sure about any others. For years I was a KDE fanboy, but I never took to the 4.x releases. Now I use Opensuse with LXDE and it works pretty well for me.

 

Seamaiden's desktop clock computer (built by me) runs Ubuntu 12.04, mainly cause it is a fan-less mini-ITX Atom mobo with an SSD and no optical drive. I wasn't about to spend the $$$ to buy Win7 and I wasn't sure the system could handle it. Ubuntu is actually perfect for her needs, which are mainly email and internet browsing.
My Raspberry Pi, in this thread, runs linux Debian, which I found to be a huge uphill battle in getting it working. It maybe partly the Pi's pathetic 256MB memory, but mainly it was using the command line to get it to do basic things like recognize other computers on our network.

 

I'm installing linux mint to replace ubuntu this week... maybe. Ubuntu is getting heavy. Not quite as slick and stable as it used to be.

 

The problem with things like LFS and Arch is that you learn just enough to break everything or get it half-way working but not enough of the underlying Why's to truly understand what you're doing or how to do it right.

 

My first impression of Windows 8 after trying it briefly at work on some of the laptops there was simple enough.
"No way in hell am I paying for this"
and this came to mind not long after that
"I had some hesitation over that Unity desktop in Ubuntu but this mess gives me a whole new appreciation for it. "

Still on Ubuntu 12.04 here. If only Windows was as easy to use or had as powerful a CLI to offer.

 

I run Ubuntu on my personal laptop. I'm not even close to a power user but prefer the look and ease of use over Windows. I also enjoy that with a little research I can usually fix most issues on my own.

 

Installing chrome OS tonight instead... not sure how this will work yet

 

.. chromeOS failed on me. I need to put more effort into that... Ended up downloading about a dozen or so linux distributions... mostly lightweights. Lubuntu seemed to be a champ. It's hard to really tell when doing live USBs as the comptuter I was testing them on really wasn't being too freindly. Might give the final candiate a few runs in a VM on an easier to work with computer prior to installing it to the hard drive of the machine it's destined to.

puppy linux
lulbuntu
slitaz
dsm
peppermint 2
xubuntu
macpup
crunchbang