Best Types of Linux

[teddy710]

I'm going to install Linux using a USB. Can people help me out and give me suggestions as to which one to get and why? Thanks

[I am an SSD]

Just now, teddy710 said:

I'm going to install Linux using a USB. Can people help me out and give me suggestions as to which one to get and why? Thanks

 

 

I posted a similar question a while back. Everyone seems to love Linux mint. 

 

Other than that, ther is Ubuntu MATE as well, which I am personally running. Its intuitive, and helps you set up everything with ease. 

 

If your system is a little older, go for  xubuntu.

 

[exercutor5]

UBUNTU, erm cos that's the only one I've tried so far lel

[steezemageeze]

If you're new to Linux, I suggest Ubuntu, Kubuntu, or Linux Mint. I run Kubuntu on my laptop and Mint on my desktop.

 

https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

 

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

 

http://www.kubuntu.org/getkubuntu/

 

I'd personally recommend the 15.10 versions of Ubuntu and Kubuntu, 16.04 hasn't really proven itself to me yet. 

[steezemageeze]

As @I am an SSD said, Ubuntu MATE is also a very good choice, I've heard a lot of good things about it but haven't tried it personally, and I second Xubuntu for older hardware. It's actually the only distro that'll run on my old Dell from 1999.

 

 

3 minutes ago, exercutor5 said:

UBUNTU, erm cos that's the only one I've tried so far lel

That's not very helpful to the OP...

 

 

[I am an SSD]

2 minutes ago, steezemageeze said:

 

http://www.kubuntu.org/getkubuntu/

 

I'd personally recommend the 15.10 versions of Ubuntu and Kubuntu, 16.04 hasn't really proven itself to me yet. 

how is kubuntu? I have never tried it out

[steezemageeze]

Just now, I am an SSD said:

how is kubuntu? I have never tried it out

It's one of my favorite distros. It just feels all around super polished and clean. My only gripe is that Qt applications are harder to theme, same with Kwin, but that's irrelevant I guess. I'm using 16.04 now, and it's solid as a rock so far.

[teddy710]

19 minutes ago, steezemageeze said:

As @I am an SSD said, Ubuntu MATE is also a very good choice, I've heard a lot of good things about it but haven't tried it personally, and I second Xubuntu for older hardware. It's actually the only distro that'll run on my old Dell from 1999.

 

 

That's not very helpful to the OP...

 

 

Lol yeah I'm probably gonna go with that because it's a PC from 2000

[Unhelpful]

7 minutes ago, teddy710 said:

Lol yeah I'm probably gonna go with that because it's a PC from 2000

Are you looking for ease of use or looking to learn? Or a bit of both?

[teddy710]

13 minutes ago, JoeyDM said:

Are you looking for ease of use or looking to learn? Or a bit of both?

Ease of use isn't an issue since I'm sure that there's enough guides and stuff for each

[Unhelpful]

10 minutes ago, teddy710 said:

Ease of use isn't an issue since I'm sure that there's enough guides and stuff for each

Tell that to Arch users  it's hard to use (well, hard to learn), but with the best documentation for anything in the world.

 

For older hardware? I'd say go Xubuntu, Lubuntu, or PuppyLinux.

 

Or if it's REALLY old hardware, damn small linux.

 

I've also heard that VectorLinux is good, but I've never touched it myself.

[I am an SSD]

1 hour ago, teddy710 said:

Lol yeah I'm probably gonna go with that because it's a PC from 2000

Xubuntu then ..works great on older hardware

[steezemageeze]

Could've sworn I posted this earlier but I must've forgotten to hit submit. Damn.

 

Yeah if it's older hardware Xu/Lubuntu are both good, and if that doesn't work, go with Puppy. I take back my recommendation of Ku/Ubuntu because neither of them run well

 

I don't have much experience with Puppy, I think I tried one version of it on that Dell machine, but it didn't have support for WPA2 so I couldn't use it. Not sure though so don't quote me on that.

 

Also, you can try all of these distros in a Virtual Machine on your main computer (I'm assuming this PC from 2000 isn't your main?) to get a feel for them before you install them.

[teddy710]

30 minutes ago, steezemageeze said:

Could've sworn I posted this earlier but I must've forgotten to hit submit. Damn.

 

Yeah if it's older hardware Xu/Lubuntu are both good, and if that doesn't work, go with Puppy. I take back my recommendation of Ku/Ubuntu because neither of them run well

 

I don't have much experience with Puppy, I think I tried one version of it on that Dell machine, but it didn't have support for WPA2 so I couldn't use it. Not sure though so don't quote me on that.

 

Also, you can try all of these distros in a Virtual Machine on your main computer (I'm assuming this PC from 2000 isn't your main?) to get a feel for them before you install them.

No it's not my main lol and do you have a reliable link for Xubuntu?

[steezemageeze]

2 minutes ago, teddy710 said:

No it's not my main lol and do you have a reliable link for Xubuntu?

Here you go :)

 

Note: Xubuntu (well, XFCE really)  is gonna look really ugly at first, but with a little elbow grease you can make it look really good. It's not my cup of tea, but I've seen some amazing stuff out of it

[FullTank1337]

Any Debian-based distro should serve you well (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc.) I reccomend either LXDE or XFCE for the desktop environment. I'm running Lubuntu, and it idles below 200MB of RAM. It's fast and pretty stable and reliable (unlike Unity)

[FullTank1337]

48 minutes ago, teddy710 said:

No it's not my main lol and do you have a reliable link for Xubuntu?

Here's the torrent downloader for the latest LTS (still very new and not very stable, but it'll get awesome in time), it goes way faster than the direct download on Xubuntu's site.

 

64 bit -http://torrent.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/xenial/release/desktop/xubuntu-16.04-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent

32 bit - 

http://torrent.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/xenial/release/desktop/xubuntu-16.04-desktop-i386.iso.torrent

 

Also, here's Lubuntu, because it's better. 

 

64 bit - 

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/xenial/release/lubuntu-16.04-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent 

32 bit - 

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/xenial/release/lubuntu-16.04-desktop-i386.iso.torrent

 

 

P.S. you really should max out your ram if your using a PC from 2000. Just in case X/Lubuntu is too slow for you, here's Damn Small Linux. Terrible for a main driver, but incredibly powerful for how fast and lightweight it is, perfect for dinosaur computers (currently powering my Pentium 1). it's only a 50MB .iso so the direct download will go very fast even on a slow connection or with high traffic.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/forums/index.php?topic=59

 

 

[teddy710]

1 hour ago, FullTank1337 said:

Here's the torrent downloader for the latest LTS (still very new and not very stable, but it'll get awesome in time), it goes way faster than the direct download on Xubuntu's site.

 

64 bit -http://torrent.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/xenial/release/desktop/xubuntu-16.04-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent

32 bit - 

http://torrent.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/xenial/release/desktop/xubuntu-16.04-desktop-i386.iso.torrent

 

Also, here's Lubuntu, because it's better. 

 

64 bit - 

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/xenial/release/lubuntu-16.04-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent 

32 bit - 

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/xenial/release/lubuntu-16.04-desktop-i386.iso.torrent

 

 

P.S. you really should max out your ram if your using a PC from 2000. Just in case X/Lubuntu is too slow for you, here's Damn Small Linux. Terrible for a main driver, but incredibly powerful for how fast and lightweight it is, perfect for dinosaur computers (currently powering my Pentium 1). it's only a 50MB .iso so the direct download will go very fast even on a slow connection or with high traffic.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/forums/index.php?topic=59

 

 

I have windows 10, what app or whatever is best to download it off of?

[FullTank1337]

1 hour ago, teddy710 said:

I have windows 10, what app or whatever is best to download it off of?

Plain ol' BitTorrent should work well enough. Once you have L/Xubuntu installed, Transmission comes with it, so you won't need a new torrent client. 

 

BitTorrent for 64-bit Windows: 

http://www.bittorrent.com/downloads/complete/track/stable/os/win

[Azgoth 2]

On a PC from 2000, you have pretty limited options.  If you can post the specs, that'll be helpful.

 

Lubuntu is a good place to start.  It runs very well on old hardware, but 2000 hardware may be a stretch if it was mid-grade 2000 hardware.  I've installed it on a bunch of Dell Lattitude D500 and D600 series laptops (some 505s, 600s, 610s, etc), which are from about 2003-ish, and it runs well but is noticeably slow to open most programs.  Even very lightweight ones like Midori.

 

If full Lubuntu is too much for the computer--which it may or may not be--your only other option that would be very user-friendly is Puppy Linux.  Puppy Linux is one of the most feature-full lightweight distros, and I believe it loads  entirely into RAM, so it runs very, very well on most computers, even very old ones.

 

If you're more tech-savvy or have some Linux experience or are willing to dive head-first into some less user-friendly stuff, there's SliTaz, which runs on extremely old machines (older than Puppy Linux).  SliTaz is not the most user-friendly and not quite the most polished--but it is a surprisingly polished and well-built system given its very small dev team--but it will run super nicely, it has a package manager that I absolutely love, and it will load its root file system into RAM for maximal snappiness (and only uses about 200MB of RAM at a time for that!).  It's also a rolling distribution, so it's easy to keep it up-to-date.

 

For some even less user-friendly stuff, there's the Ubuntu Mini iso you can get somewhere on the Ubuntu site.  It installs just the base Ubuntu system--no desktop/graphics, no extra programs aside from things you absolutely need to run your system--but lets you pick extra packages, either manually or through pre-made selections, at install.  You can select the Minimal Lubuntu install from the list, which will install Lubuntu sans a lot of its components--it's still usable, and because there's less stuff installed and thus less stuff running in the background, it will run noticeably better than full Lubuntu.  But, you will need to install a bunch of packages by hand in a command line to get it to do most things.  You can also manually select packages during installation if you really know exactly what you need.

 

Of course, if you're going to do that, go ahead and give Arch a look.  It's a very, very involved installation process, but you get very little installed and thus a very light, sleek system.  Unlike Ubuntu, Arch is designed from the ground up to do this, rather than providing it as an extra option like Ubuntu does.  That said, aside from the process of installing the OS, Arch and Ubuntu Mini are surprisingly similar in that both install just the base system (unless you pick a different option with Ubuntu at install) and require you to pick, by hand, everything else you want to install.

 

As a last-ditch resort, if for some reason absolutely nothing works, you have two nuclear options.  One is Tiny Core, which makes even SliTaz look massive and bloated--the entire .iso file is a mind-boggling 15MB--but comes with like four things pre-installed.  It's meant for embedded systems and computers that are also actual dinosaurs.  Your other, equally nuclear option is Kolibri OS, which is not Linux, but is a very cool project and is an OS written entirely in assembler.  So it's a super small .iso file with jaw-droppingly low system requirements--you can get a 1.44MB version (!!!) to load onto a floppy disk--and it is the single fastest operating system I have ever seen in my entire life.

 

So long story short: Try Lubuntu.  If that doesn't work, try Puppy Linux.  If that doesn't work, try Ubuntu Mini and select the minimal Lubuntu install.  If that doesn't work, try SliTaz.  If SliTaz doesn't do it, then it's probably not worth the effort unless you want to go way off the deep end (SliTaz is already arguably in the deep end).

[FullTank1337]

3 hours ago, Azgoth 2 said:

So long story short: Try Lubuntu.  If that doesn't work, try Puppy Linux.  If that doesn't work, try Ubuntu Mini and select the minimal Lubuntu install.  If that doesn't work, try SliTaz.  If SliTaz doesn't do it, then it's probably not worth the effort unless you want to go way off the deep end (SliTaz is already arguably in the deep end).

I agree with basically all of this (haven't used Arch or SliTaz) but I recommend you try the OS's in this order: 

X/Lubuntu -> Puppy -> minimal core install of any Debian distro -> Damn Small Linux -> Core Linux

 

FYI though the current version of the Linux kernal requires the PAE flag introduced by the Pentium II. If you have an original Pentium or i486, you're pretty much stuck with Damn Small Linux unless you do some bass-ackwards 1337 hax0ring. Maybe not a bad call though, since it idles at 16MB of RAM with a GUI or 8MB of RAM in command-line mode. (128MB of ram if you boot to a RAM-disk)

[Terryv]

I don't think that the question "what Linux distro is best" has an answer.

 

You could very easily find Linux nerds on a forum somewhere arguing over this constantly.

 

I think it's more of, what's best for you. I tried dozen distro's and probably all of the desktop environments before I settled. My reasons for choosing what I did are mine and mine alone and will not be relevant for anyone else.

 

My usual recommendation for anyone new to Linux is to start with Ubuntu but experiment with the different desktop environments. Ubuntu appears to be the easiest to learn but the layout (desktop environment) is always a personal choice. After getting your feet wet, then move on to something else and see if it fits you better.

[Hamako]

If Lubuntu is too ugly, try LXLE.

[Ethann_AKA_CPU1]

I would use Antergos it's based off of Arch, but it's MUCH easier to install compared to Arch.

 

https://antergos.com/

 

 

Installer

 

GNOME Desktop

[Azgoth 2]

16 hours ago, FullTank1337 said:

I agree with basically all of this (haven't used Arch or SliTaz) but I recommend you try the OS's in this order: 

X/Lubuntu -> Puppy -> minimal core install of any Debian distro -> Damn Small Linux -> Core Linux

 

FYI though the current version of the Linux kernal requires the PAE flag introduced by the Pentium II. If you have an original Pentium or i486, you're pretty much stuck with Damn Small Linux unless you do some bass-ackwards 1337 hax0ring. Maybe not a bad call though, since it idles at 16MB of RAM with a GUI or 8MB of RAM in command-line mode. (128MB of ram if you boot to a RAM-disk)

Damn Small Linux is one, yeah, but hasn't development on that distro been pretty much nil for a few years now?  I know it was officially dropped a while back and then picked back up, but I feel like (and I could be totally wrong here) it's still got pretty minimal development.

 

As for the PAE thing, yeah, pretty much all distros require it now.  BUT you can append forcepae to the kernel boot parameters (I know at least Lubuntu lets you do this from the splash screen of a live CD/USB after selecting your language), which often works, but sometimes might cause problems.