I have a presentation on Thursday of the comparisons between linux mac and windows and I was planning on giving out 2 linux distros at the end to reinforce the topic however I have no idea what Linux distros to give out since i don't really have a hard pressed personal favorite. I've been messing with live cds with virtualbox all day and haven't been able to make a decision,
So far i have between Fedora 11,
Fedora 11 KDE,
openSuse,
Slax,
Knoppix and Linux Mint any suggestions?
I've realied Fedora 11 and Linux Mint is cool but Slax seems faster and Fedora 11 KDE seems both familar and cool yet openSuse knoppix and ubuntu are more traditional any opinions
Were you looking to give out two distros to illustrate the difference in out of the box between, say Fedora and Slackware, or is this to illustrate that a number of different distros will work well for desktop purposes?
If you want to show a barebones linux installation, I’d suggest either Slackware of Gentoo. Gentoo has the benefit of a fantastic handbook on their website to get you running… it’s one of those documents I double check against whenever any distribution gives me trouble 
That being said, I’m not sure that Linux can be described without Ubuntu anymore. I know this will ruffle feathers and make people say “the kernel’s the important part, the complete operating system is just gravy”, but Ubuntu has not only put a face on Linux in the mainstream, but it’s also taken some of the geeky mailing-list elitism out of the larger Linux community and made it much more accessible to those who wish to give it a chance. Hell, I swore I’d never install Ubuntu just because it decided and installed too much for me, but right now these forums are running on Ubuntu Server!
Have you looked at Sabayon? Comes with oodles of stuff, and to me, is by far the prettiest Linux OS I’ve seen
sbook said:
Were you looking to give out two distros to illustrate the difference in out of the box between, say Fedora and Slackware, or is this to illustrate that a number of different distros will work well for desktop purposes?
Its more to reinforce that thier are other usable OSes out their than Windows and OSX and that their not as technical as everyone makes them seem
sbook said:
If you want to show a barebones linux installation, I'd suggest either Slackware of Gentoo. Gentoo has the benefit of a fantastic handbook on their website to get you running.. it's one of those documents I double check against whenever any distribution gives me trouble :)
lol isn't Gentoo a bit hardcore I think if i was to give half of my class the installation CD they wouldn't know what to do aside from turning on the computer and inserting the CD =p I should probably state that this class is not part of my major so they don't know most "Technical stuff" as they call it lol
sbook said:
That being said, I'm not sure that Linux can be described without Ubuntu anymore. I know this will ruffle feathers and make people say "the kernel's the important part, the complete operating system is just gravy", but Ubuntu has not only put a face on Linux in the mainstream, but it's also taken some of the geeky mailing-list elitism out of the larger Linux community and made it much more accessible to those who wish to give it a chance. Hell, I swore I'd never install Ubuntu just because it decided and installed too much for me, but right now these forums are running on Ubuntu Server!
I was really thinkig of Ubuntu at first but then I realized that its the first distro everyone turns to (though i didn't use it until after i messed around with a lot of other distros). I figured at most at least a quarter of the people know about ubuntu already which is why i want to attempt to give them something new
sbook said:
Have you looked at Sabayon? Comes with oodles of stuff, and to me, is by far the prettiest Linux OS I've seen
I'll look into sabyon right now thx!!
thx for the reply sbook
[EDIT]
After looking at sabyon I've realized that it's apperance would probably be very appealing to a normal person.
So I was thinking make it between Linux Mint 7, Slax, Sabayon KDE and Fedora 11 gnome
I've also come to the realization that linux Mist 7 GUI is unique and however the actual distro does seem a bit buggy and laggy at times
The only thing though is for some reason Sabayon seems somewhat slow and even more noticable in full screen apps. Also After coming out of full screen stretched to a point were the top and bottom bars as well as a couple of icons were missing
I'd reccommend you to show them Windows7. I find it the best OS so far. I've spent like weeks trying to get Ubuntu and Kubuntu work on my new laptop, but all I got was huge headache since I couldn't get the graphics drivers to work properly. AND I COULDNT USE JMONKEY or any kind of OPENGL apps. So I installed Windows7 instead. It looks great, is fast AND IT INSTALLS PRETTY MUCH ALL THE DRIVERS AUTOMATICALLY SO I DONT HAVE TO WORRIE ABOUT DRIVERS. I don't know about the security though. I don't have any anti-virus or spybot or anything like that installed.
But by some miracle I managed to get the graphic drivers work on my P4 desktop computer. And I still have Kubuntu on it and it's running different stuff like Apache2, postgresql, php5. And I have to say I'm quite pleased with it. What I like about linux is that when I need to install something, I just type sudo apt-get install apache2 to the command line and it will be installed really fast. But what I dont like is that there is no graphical utility for apache so when I want to stop it I have to write /etc/init.d/apache2 stop or smthing like that.
To compare Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Ubuntu uses Gnome for its GUI and Kubuntu uses KDE. I find Gnome more mature, but KDE looks better and it's made for windows users since it looks a lot like windows.
Slightly off-topic, but if you’re looking to manage server functionality in Linux, look no further than Webmin… it does it all