What is your favorite Linux distribution for use on the desktop?

Sabayon : Always works right out of the box and with the mix of Gentoo Portage, I can build all of the apps that I like to use.

Vector linux surprised the hell out of me by booting up very smoothly, putting all things in the right places, asking me to do some minor configuration of my WPA2 WLAN connection and then . . . (gasp) it just worked! That, by itself, is a miracle in these days.

How/why do so many companies get the "just-make-sure-it-works" thing SO wrong? Do they really have such an inflated sense of self-worth to think they're worth all that effin' around?

Slackware for me, thanks. :)

I agree with Stijn - Simply Mepis is a great distro - I feel it is underestimated.

Gentoo for me.

Sure, it takes a little longer to get going but once you've done it a few times it's pretty straight forward.

I like Gentoo because I am in control of what gets on to the hard disk and I choose when and what to upgrade.

I recently ditched Ubuntu on my netbook (any guesses why?) for Gentoo and the difference in performance is night and day.

I have used Simply Mepis for 7 years on my production machines. This distro is solid, stable, reliable and a joy to use. Mepis forum consists of linux veterans that give solid, to the point, prompt and very helpful advise that seldom fails to solve individual problems as they arise. This is a gem of a distro that needs wider exposure and use. I have tried others, but few compare with Mepis.

Lubuntu -> yes it is an Ubuntu derivative, however it is not yet in the official ports tree.

I've been using it since 2003, and it has served me well. Compilation is a non-issue, as a properly configured system can compile without any impact on desktop responsiveness. The only time I've ever noticed a slow down whilst compiling was when I started playing a video game, having completely forgotten my system was engaged in an update, and was seeing obnoxiously low frame rates.

For someone like me, with multiple Gentoo hosts and distcc, a laptop can be setup as a Gentoo Binary Distribution.

Flame me if you want, but I use Mint with the Macbuntu theme installed. I used a hackintosh for years as my primary desktop until it became unstable and unupdatable. I liked the stability of Ubuntu and I'm very accustomed to the OS/X interface. Macbuntu works great for me. Best of both worlds.

Have tried so many distros, puppy, lighthouse puppy, ubuntu, mint, arch, tinycore etc. PCLinuxOs is the one for me that regularly works with more hardware and more reliably than any other. For older machines Puppy is perfect and Mint can be very good if PCLinuxOs cannot handle some aspect of your machine or setup.
PCLinuxOs was the OS that got me away from Windows 5 years ago and it is the one I always seem to come back to whjen I want things to just work.

I'm not a coder, just a user, but Gentoo is my daily workplace, having tried the rest. For efficient and maximum use of computer resource, Gentoo has proved to be the best option, and the walk-through install documentation makes it easy, even for a user like me, to get a system set up well, and without pain. Add to that the slotting framework, easy and detailed install with portage (i get to see what it has as options BEFORE i hit enter), and highly configurable environment to suit a specific intent. With the overlay system, there's options for everyone, from scientific apps to audio/midi/video creation.

Gentoo might take a little longer to set up, and in what is a modern 5-minute mentality, that might seem like ages but isn't, but the end result is a really efficient system, tailored to a particular need, like no other distro i've tried.

I'm doing my work in a single computer, lovingly tweaked to it's maximum Gentoo efficiency and performance. As a reformed window and mac user, it would have taken (and did) 5 plus 1 boxes to achieve close to the same result.

Kudos to the teams of people building other linux distros, but most of all to the team at Gentoo, as this distro has more than scratched my particular itch, and has enabled me to work all day every day without problems, or limitations based on inefficient use of my current hardware.

Thanks.

There's a few of us on this poll, but I hope more of you will give it a try. It's simple, minimalist, has a great community!

Mepis

Why not? Slackware is great!

Gentoo user here ;)

Gentoo does take some initial fiddling to get things working - I go around with a pre-built tree on my laptop that I can fly onto bare metal - but once it's done I don't ever have to mess with repositories, I've got fairly late-model packages and kernels available to me (the newness of which I can mix and match via Portage). I set up servers more often than desktops but I just did a new desktop and got sound, X, KDE 4.6.3, nspluginwrapper (so that I can use the 32-bit Flash plugin on a compiled 64-bit Firefox), vendor-supplied nVidia driver, and Java working without too much trouble. It did, however, take a fair amount of time but it's not as though I don't go home for the day or to lunch/bathroom/meetings so I'm not just sitting staring at the screen. I also could have chosen to have it take less time by using the binary packages for LibreOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird.

On a Gentoo machine a full-featured and functional build system is implicit so if development is your thing, Gentoo especially likes you. If your work is such that you develop in C or C++ or routinely emerge packages or compile kernels a lot, hooks for ccache and distcc are easy to set up.

One thing that I keep noticing about how I work with Gentoo versus what other people go through with other distros is that if you find yourself dealing very intensely with a small number of packages (let's say it's CUPS, PostgreSQL, Apache) then in Gentoo the developer-user loop doesn't include the distribution very much. There will be a small identifiable group of people who manage a given package for Gentoo and for the most part, their interest is in delivering what comes from upstream without a whole lot of "ooh, let's make this package better the way!"

In a Gentoo instance, there is usually going to be one newest marked-stable version of any given package. You can deliberately lag back one or more versions or jump ahead to versions that aren't marked stable (many times, very very new versions work just fine - they just won't have been tested to the package maintainers' satisfaction yet - whereas some new versions are "hard masked" and are therefore expected to set your cat on fire if you try them). A variant on what I just described are packages that are "slotted," i.e., you can have more than one version available at a time. Kernel packages are like that.

Lastly, I often point out to people that Gentoo is versionless; there's no hunting for unswamped torrents in the middle of the night on version release day. There's no waiting for version X of package Y to appear once version Z of your distribution is released.

All in all, RedBuntuDoraDrivaCentSuSEHat are easier to install and get up and running especially on desktops/laptops than Gentoo, but the environment I wind up with is so clean and usable that I feel like it more than comes out in the wash.

I have openSUSE since 2006. It's really stable and flexible. I have Puppy since 2008 - it's amusant. Now I try sabayon and it seems bo be good too. But SUSE is my first love!

Nuff said