I use Gentoo for my main desktop. It is involved, and it's the first distro I used after I tried Red Hat a few years ago.
I've never understood why gentoo draws so many negative attitudes. I use Linux in part because computers are a hobby for me, and I enjoy messing around with them and trying new things, so I don't mind that Gentoo is more involved than other distros like Ubuntu, and that the install takes a couple of days. I like doing that stuff, and I first installed gentoo from stage 1 precisely because it seemed like it would be a challenge. Now that I've installed it and grown accustomed to it's ways, it's a bit hard to give it up completely.
I think it's an impressive distro, and gives you great flexibility and control with USE flags, and installing applications with portage, while time consuming, is usually ridiculously easy. Whenever I was a newbie (like I'm not a newbie now
), I managed to mess some stuff up, and in that process I discovered that Gentoo has an impressive community, quite a bit of documentation, and I've received a lot of help, and given it out occasionally, on their forums. If anyone has more documentation than gentoo, please point it out, because I didn't understand how useful good documentation is until I started using linux for a while.
So compiling does take some time, but during the install, I started the bootstrap at night, and went to sleep, did a few steps the next morning, went to work, came back and did a few more steps, went to bed again, and by the next day it was finished. If you don't like that idea, install from stage 3, and you'll be done in very little time. Once you get it going, you just install the big stuff at night, or set the niceness level if you really want to compile while you're working on it, and then you'll never really notice it in the background.
As for other distros, I've also installed Ubuntu on my sister's laptop, and I set it up to dual boot, but once her Windows XP crashed on her, she never bothered to ask me to put it back on, and has been using linux ever since. I didn't even find out that Windows XP crashed until over a month after the fact. Of course, she only let me put Ubuntu on her laptop because I pestered her for ages before she even received it, telling her she should let me try it out, leveraging the inevitability of her needing my tech support sooner or later, but now she's quite happy with it, and I don't get tech support calls near as often.
I'm using Ubuntu for my little web server, and it seems to be a great distro as well. I really don't understand why people have such fiery debates about distros and desktop environments, either. I've tried KDE and Gnome, and I think both of them are pretty slick. I generally prefer the look of gnome, and a couple of the GTK apps are essential, like the Gimp, Firefox and Inkscape, but I prefer the programs and the ability to customize KDE, so I use it instead.
Gentoo, Ubuntu, Knoppix, KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, XFCE, and fluxbox. I've tried them all, and liked them all. Now that I'm looking at it, you should take my critiques with a grain of salt, since I'm a little too much like Don Giovanni, only instead of women, I love linux. For him, every woman had something beautiful about them, the big ones were
majestic, while the little ones were
simply delightful, for me, most linux distros and programs are the same way, there's usually something beautiful about all of them.
but there's a decent mix of gurus and n00bs in this forum/LUG/mailing list, so whats the pick of the gurus and what do the n00bs like?
Stage 2 install.
and debian. I like the stability slack offers but I like the .deb package manager espechialy synaptic. But slackware is my main choice.