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What Penguin in the drivers seat?

A policeman spotted a guy driving a truck with a live penguin sitting in the passenger seat. The policeman said, "Take that penguin to the zoo, now."

Next day the policeman sees the man with the penguin again.

The policeman stops the guy and says, I told you yesterday to take the penguin to the Zoo, what on earth are you doing with the penguin in your truck again?"

The guy says, "What is there to do? Yesterday I took him to the zoo and today I'm taking him to the movies."

So I'm about to install a Linux distribution (possibly in a vmware image or off a 16GB USB stick) to play with. Only question is, which one will VI for my attention? I've had a few recommendations over the years, but now I need the latest and greatest, state of the art, bleeding edge choice with a nice and easy GUI. Do I say ungawa to ubuntu? Tip my beanie to the Red Hat? Suss out Suse? Or place my microscope over the real small distros?

Comments anyone?

Comments

  1. I've become a bit disillusioned with Ubuntu, though Linux Mint represents perhaps a more promising vision of what ubuntu could do. Haven't tried the latest fedora but the latest Opensuse with KDE 4.1 is quite scrumptious, just a pity my GRUB is knackered and I can't get it to boot. No time to fix it either

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  2. What has disillusioned you regarding Ubuntu?

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  3. I've been using Ubuntu full-time for 5 months now and love it. First time on Linux.

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  4. When the GRUB goes it's a nightmare to recover! For me is is anyway.
    Try www.supergrubdisk.org.

    When it last happened to me it was caused by Vista crashing which happened to be the hdd grub was on. I could unplug the Vista hdd and boot ubuntu from the other hdd but in the end I had to reinstall Vista. Nice if you have >1 hdd otherwise you'd be completely screwed (as far as I know).

    That's my only gripe about ubuntu then - the grub needs to be more foolproof and MSvistaproof.
    Still, it is FREE and I still think it's mind-bogglingly a-ma-zing. I've also given up on trying to optimise the perfect linux flavour, as its a case of diminishing returns, and am just sticking with one.

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  5. I just found that Hardy Heron was a little underbaked, the theme was also starting to get to me and the state of gnome at the moment is a little woeful though that's hardly Canonical's fault.

    And a lot if things like for example GRUB configuration utilities (ie SUM) not being included show that it still needs work to become more friendly.

    Still haven't had much opportunity to play with Opensuse though I am impressed, maybe I'll discover plenty of things I don't like there either.

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  6. Try Kubuntu, Xubuntu or whatever other flavour there is.

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  7. Well that'll solve the DE issue anyway!

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  8. Perhaps this shouldn't become a Linux help (or pick on the distro apostate) thread but Fergus, Ubuntu does have SUM, just not out of the box

    >sudo apt-get install startupmanager

    I've been *buntu-ing for two years now (after having used Mandrake and SuSE at various times) and am very happy with it, if open office worked more happily with MSOffice I'd probably be all linux all the time.

    (KDE 4.1 is teh pretty but perhaps not ready for teh prime time just yet...)

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  9. Make sure you have installed the COMPIZ advanced desktop effects in Ubuntu.

    Regardless of any other features anything that has a ability to represent your desktops as faces on a polyhedron, zoom in zoom out, spin them like basketball, and keep all the media cranking at the same time gets my vote for the next five years.

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