Made a boo-boo, now need a good Linux distro

in term of stability centos scientific linux would be my number 1 distro and second linux mint

what you want is ease of use stability i suggest you to go for xubuntu LTS or linuxmint 15

xfce/cinnamon what ever your hardware if good with all are stable and rock solid


the only problem with centos/scientific linux is it need too much tweaking specially in repository base and software database is very limited but if you can go through all pain it worth it.

 

I'm posting this from my Debian Testing box with KDE in it. So far this is the best KDE experience I have had. Peak memory usage barely touches 1 GB with all the eyecandy of various kwin effects and tons of plasma widgets in the background.

 

Linux-firmware-nonfree might have helped. Debian doesn't come with non-free firmwares; you have to install them manually for better hardware support.

 

Are they listed as another repo source?

 

Its in the repos but the correct name seems to be firmware-linux-nonfree.

 

Right. It's in the non-free repo.

 

To those uninitiated, Debian has three types of repos, namely main, contrib and non-free. Debian comes with only the main repo enabled. You have to manually edit /etc/apt/sources.list to add contrib and non-free in order to to avail the benefits of those. For me, however, main does the job.

 

Interesting. I find the default KDE implementation on Debian kind of "poor", missing icons, network manager reporting no connection etc. BUT, it's good if you don't install "[ ] Debian Desktop Environment" (on system install). KDE will work as expected if you do:

Code:

sudo apt-get kde-full

The best out-of-the-box KDE I've seen is on openSUSE.
Kubuntu seems to lack some basic features (not related to KDE).
On Arch it seems to work good too.

 

I did a network install, Installing things as per my requirement: kde-baseapps and other things afterwards.

kde-full is bloated with all those "K"wares which you'll never need.

I remember trying OpenSUSE-KDE a year or so ago; It was heavy. PClinuxOS was quite responsive.

 

For the every day user for the OP's MUM I'd say Ubuntu LTS or Mint for ease of use and just web browsing. I'd choose Ubuntu because you get easily configurable at a click of a button automatic security updates just like Microsoft so that may be a big advantage over Mint.

But with either you can't go wrong.

 

I've been playing with almost every distro in Virtualbox for about the past month in anticipation of moving away from Windows. My recommendation would be to go with Manjaro Xfce. The forums are a big help and the Arch wiki is simply amazing. If you are a noob like me, having good information is a must. This post and this article were especially helpful to me and I'm sure there a ton more I've yet to discover.

One issue I keep running into with all the other distros is that some application or other I want is missing from their repositories. Installing from source has been very hit or miss and I don't know enough yet to edit the configuration files for dependencies that are no longer available due to having been updated (or if this is even possible). Enter the Arch User Repository. With Manjaro, you access the AUR from the terminal with yaourt. Anything I've needed has been available there.

This is what has me spending the majority of my learning time in Manjaro and why it will most likely be what I end up ultimately installing on my real machine. You mentioned it in your original post and I really think you should give it a try.

 

Arch Linux!. Wow props to you.

 

With all due respect, you'll have Arch users foaming at the mouth.

 

I just meant Arch afair was geared towards intermediate & advanced users. The Hofo I complimented stated they were new to Linux.

 

Btw, I've settled with Mint XFCE. It works fine. She won't be able to go to newer versions in the future but it probably doesn't matter much.

 

Manjaro is actually an easy to use Arch distro, IMO.

 

I tried manjaro a couple of days ago and it really is great, it felt good to use it, but it's far from being like Arch.

For newbies I'd recommend Mint. For Newbies that are a little more confident, either Debian (my love <3) or Manjaro. For intermediate users I recommend Arch. Experts will try Gentoo one day or another.