Anyway we have are major bases: Debian, Slackware, and Red Hat.
Why wasn't SUSE in the list of bases? because as you can see in this graphic, SUSE (and openSUSE) is actually based off Slackware (interesting huh?).
Now according to that graphic, there's plenty of original bases, but besides the three I mentioned above, none of them has as large number of branches. The only one that has the most of the smaller bases is the Enoch base which essentially could be called the Gentoo base.
Anyway, time to get to my point of all this. I've tried at least one or more distributions from these 3 major bases plus the Gentoo base. Oh yeah, there's the Arch Linux base that probably follows after Gentoo... (sorry for my stream of consciousness type of writing).
I could list all the distributions I've tried, but that would take a while and I'd have to fish my spindle of distributionss out, which I really don't want to do. Anyway, onward!
Originally when I was curious about Linux, a friend of mine stared me with Knoppix 4.x (can't remember which version of 4 it was). And it was okay, I got it to run on the Half-top which was a laptop that was missing the main screen (it had a VGA port, so I just hooked it up to the kinda crappy LCD TV I had. It was okay, and I kinda used it to watch some videos on it, but it just didn't fit my bill quite right (after all, Knoppix is live).
I dropped it for a while and then eventually looked for a out-of-the-box distribution, since all my parents had was dial-up and that doesn't go too well with Linux. I found Sabayon 4.x and downloaded it bit by bit from the local library's free internet. At the time I had Lie-chan and Ziggy, and Ziggy was where Linux was going (Lie-chan had XP installed at that time). Sabayon was okay.... Until I couldn't access my DVD drive to watch something. I wasn't happy about that and started looking again (at the library of course). I found Linux Mint 8 and it worked great. I even upgraded to LM9 and then to LMDE. Sometime between Sabayon and LM8 my parents finally got real internet, so I was able to download LM8 at home instead of awkwardly trying to do it at the library....
I forgot to mention that between Knoppix and Sabayon, I borrowed Fedora 8 and Fedora 9 (the big books with the "free" disk) from the library and made a copy of the live CDs and the DL-DVDs. I tried the live CD's on Lie-chan, and installed Fedora 9 on her, but it didn't give me the "out of the box" experience I was looking for, so I set it aside.
LMDE is when I stared to have the Kernel Mode Set problem... Well, sometime during my usage of it, since I was upgrading when I was supposed to... But it was getting very tough to getting it to boot even with the nomodeset option at boot. I'd have to hold the power switch in to shut it off, boot it back up and hope it didn't KMS again (I turned it into a verb back then lol). Oh, Ziggy did have a reset button, but it was such a sliver of a button that it was pretty much worthless to try to use - a paperclip or a fingernail (assuming your fingernail was long enough) would suffice to hit the reset switch - so I decided to remove it instead.
One day, the KMS problem was so bad that I couldn't even boot into LMDE. So I had to find something else that was not of a Debian base, since that's what I assumed was causing the issue. After a tad bit of research, I learned that Fedora was just as bad with the KMS and decided to skip that. That's when I "learned" about openSUSE. Since it was not based off of Debian or Red Hat, it shouldn't give me the KMS problem right?
After installing it, the monitors were in mirrored mode and I couldn't "extend" my desktop like I wanted. After a bit more research, I learned that Xorg's radeon hd driver package were crap and that the radeon driver that was more up to date was in the "bundled" drivers package. I couldn't find exactly how I was supposed to switch to it, so I opened up the package manager and removed the radeon hd driver, rebooted, and held my breath. Hey it worked! I was happy. And with the lizard I stayed for a long, long while.
Okay, so I said I tried a lot of distributions right? And now you're wondering where the rest of them play out.
So when I got the netbook (which I dubbed Triela because I couldn't really think of anything), that's when I really tested the heck out of a lot of these Linux distributions.
Attempting Debian on it left me with no X at all... just a freaking command line...
Vine Linux (can't remember the base, but was from Japan) worked for a bit.... and then for some reason, it broke itself... Yep. Stayed away from that one after that...
Oh, by the way, these are in order of when I remember them.
Momonga was very slow to load initrd, I gave up the three times trying to wait for it... (this was the 32-bit version) I tried it on Lie-chan and got to the installer and quit since I didn't want to install it. Weird... Momonga is based off of Fedora by the way.
Chakra (Arch base?) was still in alpha so there was very little to it.
Salix (I don't remember what base) was okay I think... but I think it also automatically broke itself like Vine.
Swift Linux (based off of Puppy I believe) wasn't all that great.
WattOS didn't play nice (I think I didn't get an X session)
FreeBSD (Unix) had some sort of weird install, so I quit before anything was written... I think I tried it twice...
Blah, I can't really remember right now... My phone can't pick up a signal for some reason... Either I have to do a factory data reset or the cell tower needs to be reset... I don't want to factory data reset my phone... at least not right now when I'm relatively tired.
I also tried some other small distributions on the Half-top: Puppy Linux. CentOS and a few others, but they were pretty much nothing I liked or didn't work or whatever...
So basically what it came down to for my use was:
- openSUSE for standard usage
- Ubuntu for GRUB-2 and testing
It seems it's just easiest to stick with the large distributions just because of the larger support "ring". I tend to easily find the answers I'm looking for for either openSUSE or Ubuntu, and in most cases, I can translate an Ubuntu answer to a openSUSE answer with some fiddling around.
Yep. Blah time. I think I'm done for the night.
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