Which Distro would you recommend?

First of all let me say that I may be a little green to the *nix scene but I learn quick and learning curves aren't that much of a problem.

That said my experience (from most to least) with *nix is: Ubuntu/Mint, Suse, Debian, Gentoo, Sabayon.

Here is the situation: I am trying to pick a distro for my gf who hates Vista and I would prefer to move her away from M$ anyways (she already uses OO and galeon)
I had her on Ubuntu for a few months but found a lot of strange intermittent problems that I was never able to clear up.

Super tux would crash, Firefox closes on its own, partitions on the hard drive intermittently would not mount certain dvd's couldn't "read the source", not to mention the other little irritants like no thumb nails when she tries to upload her pictures.

Anyways I tried bumping her up to Hardy which seems to have "fixed" some problems and yet totally busted others. For example now her video is stuck at 640x480 regardless of what I do. New drivers wont compile as the kernels dont match. Envy (yes the new one) doesn't fix anything and in fact causes the computer to boot into low graphics mode.

Her needs aren't that intense and generally I am always around to do anything complicated. I have her booting Mint right now as it was close to Ubuntu (being based off it). Haven't encountered a dvd source problem so far (I tried all the usual culprits) and there are thumbnails for her picture uploads (not in the manner which she likes as it still displays lists but to the right there is a thumb nail as you click on the files) but Java now is not playing nicely. Going to the java test site indicates that it is infact installed correctly but anywhere that I got which uses java as an uploader for example tells me that its not there.

Other minor irritants with Mint have been related to SDL and not the OS per say but things I have not encountered on my computers or Ubuntu on her's

All that said, should Mint be more problems of the same what distro would you recommend for her?

Keeping in mind I act as the sys admin so she doesn't need to know how to install things etc. Stability is the main thing. I want something that I care dare her to break from regular usage (which she had absolutely no problems doing in Ubuntu)

So what should I put her on? She needs multimedia, websurfing, and OO and stupid little games like supertux etc

PCLOS?
Dream Linux?
Sabayon?
Gentoo?

Any comments are most welcome. I would prefer debian based as that is what I know the best but tell me what you think and why.

fedora 9 in a couple weeks. although my coworker likes PC Linux

Personally, I'd try MEPIS. I have it on my 600 mhz PIII and it's been wonderful - easy to use, easy to install, and pretty quick. I have Sabayon on my Core 2 Duo laptop and while it is packed full of features (such as beryl/compiz), it's a bit a slow and you encounter bugs sometimes so I'd stay away from it. Other than the occasional bugs (mostly with beryl), it seems to work fine.

Give her the KDE3.5 desktop, she won't care what's underneath as she (probably) won't have to use it.

I suggest KDE becuase it looks very similar to XP, and there is an XP theme for it too.

All the distributions you listed would be fine for her needs, go with the one that gives you the least grief.

PCLOS2008 is pretty good I use both with Ubuntu 8.04 and also Slax is ok too

I am trying to determine which would give me the least amount of grief. I thought it was Ubuntu.
She has been on Ubuntu and Gnome for about 3 months now and like I said she was running into all kinds of strange bugs

Stratus_ss said:

I am trying to determine which would give me the least amount of grief. I thought it was Ubuntu.
She has been on Ubuntu and Gnome for about 3 months now and like I said she was running into all kinds of strange bugs

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For someone who is not interested in the *nix 'tech-factor', PCLinuxOS would be the perfect distro. Sabayon and Gentoo would be the most head-achy for her needs. Never used Dreamlinux.

Well, what kind of hardware is it running on, and how long do you have to set it up? If you're going to set it all up, and your friend won't be doing any software installs themselves, I'd say go with Gentoo for the sake of minimal bloat. If she is possibly going to be installing some programs on her own, I'd say go with SuSE. YaST2 is the king of easy-to-use intuitive system management, and SuSE is one of the best full-system (as in install everything you need for office system, home desktop, whatever, all-on-one-DVD) distro I've used. And before anybody goes off on RPM being horrible, if you still think that, you either haven't used an RPM-based distro in years, or the last version of SuSE you used was 6 or 7.

PCLinuxOS is nice, easily configurable, I've recently installed Arch, nice so far.

Well, what kind of hardware is it running on, and how long do you have to set it up?

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Its on a laptop with a Core Duo 1.86ghz with 2 gigs of ram and an Nvidia 7150 256meg video card, 160 gig hard drive. On board everything else as is usual with laptops.

Ideally about a day to set it up as she uses it for work and her night class. Neither of which have specific software requirements other then wireless internet to be working

I would add another vote for PCLOS, I liked it when I used it for a while in my laptop. It detected everything out of the box and was easy to use.

What about having her use Debian Etch? I just installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my second work machine. Didn't really like it and immediately went back to Debian.

I'd suggest you have her try out a few on live CD or something first, just to see what works best on her computer and what she likes. I personally use Mint, which works perfectly for my needs, but if that's not working for you I'm sure there's a good alternative.

Zoris said:

I'd suggest you have her try out a few on live CD or something first, just to see what works best on her computer and what she likes. I personally use Mint, which works perfectly for my needs, but if that's not working for you I'm sure there's a good alternative.

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The problem is that live cds don't give an accurate interpretation of the problems she will encounter. She needs wireless which isnt available in the live cds because its broadcom.

Well Mint is on there now so she will use it until she runs into some bugs (if it has any)

Stratus_ss said:

I had her on Ubuntu for a few months but found a lot of strange intermittent problems that I was never able to clear up.

Super tux would crash, Firefox closes on its own, partitions on the hard drive intermittently would not mount certain dvd's couldn't "read the source", not to mention the other little irritants like no thumb nails when she tries to upload her pictures.

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I actually had similar problems with my HDD was on it's way out of this world.... How old is the disk? My experience is that said problems will propagate on any version or distro of linux, given enough time on a dying drive.

I would give knoppix a go. It's comes as a live-cd but it's easy to do a harddrive install. It also works on lots of hardware and comes with a ton of built in stuff. I carry a live-cd with me to school everyday and use it on different computers.

Ubuntu 8.04 works okay on a p4 1.6ghz w/256mb. It's sluggish when the discs are being accessed. Will MEPIS, PCLinux, or Mandriva be faster? Or all they all the same (performance wise). This build is for htpc and/or light surfing.

kraftmayo said:

I actually had similar problems with my HDD was on it's way out of this world.... How old is the disk? My experience is that said problems will propagate on any version or distro of linux, given enough time on a dying drive.

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The computer was bought new (laptop) in October, if its the disk that would be disappointing. Never really thought of that.

Ubuntu 8.04 works okay on a p4 1.6ghz w/256mb. It's sluggish when the discs are being accessed. Will MEPIS, PCLinux, or Mandriva be faster? Or all they all the same (performance wise). This build is for htpc and/or light surfing.

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Hardy was a no go for her due to video driver issues. The nvidia drivers absolutely refused to reinstall because of a difference in the kernels (or so said the drivers) and Envy could not find drivers for it(which was stupid because the "legacy" version of Envy in Feisty and Gutsy found drivers)

Its a 7150 Nvidia card but as I said the new version of Envy doesn't find the drivers and the nvidia drivers from their sight wont compile. I left that partition in tact with Hardy installed and will come back to it some time down the road when they get the video driver situation straightened around

Is it easy to install multiple linux distros? With just ubuntu installed, i want to install a few others. Anything i need to know? I dont' want to mess up a working ubuntu.

You might want to do the same thing: try a bunch of distros concurrently, then determine which one gives you the least grief, then delete the other distro installations