Whats the best Linux OS?

There are many good distributions out there (and yes, Ubuntu is not one of them). I can't comment on a lot of them, but I can tell you this:

Red Hat is a good distro, but not if you want to learn "linux". Using Red Hat will teach you Red Hat, but not much about linux itself.

Debian is not bad, but I personally despise their package management system. It is not as clean is a linux distro should be, but still usable.

I personally use Slackware. I have a six core phenom, 8GB ram, and an nVidia 660, which is an OK graphics card. And I can play many Windows games with great stability and performance, as well as other Windows programs. Tomb Raider 2013, and The Sims 3 both work very well under Slackware.. It is rock solid, and is an old and very stable and very pure distribution. It doesn't get in your way, and is great for beginner and pro alike. I even use it for lamp and web servers, and it works very well. It will support your graphics card very well.

There are two main desktop managers. KDE is an old one, but the current version is bloated and is becoming more windows-ish with a lot of performance robbing bells and whistles. Xfce is also an old one, but is of the get-the-job-done mentality, without the bells and whistles and bloat. I find it similar to Windows XP, in that it isn't bloated like windows 7/8 is.

And NO REGISTRY! What is wrong with Microsoft that after 20 years they just can't figure out how to make the registry reliable and stable? More Windows installs go down the toilet because of registry corruption than anything else. Linux has no registry. Just doesn't need one. No DLL hell either. Linux just works. And is rock stable, never crashes, never needs to be wiped and reinstalled, never needs the registry cleaned, etc. No viruses. No malware. And free.

Why should I pay money for a buggy virus and spyware infected bloated unstable piece of cr*p Windows, when I can get LInux for free that doesn't have all the problems Windows has?

Linux supports a very wide range of hardware, it supports things Windows never will. I have some old bluetooth dongles and an old webcam. They do not work with Windows. They work just fine with Linux.

And although I have 8GB of ram, I use the 32 bit version, because unlike Windows, PAE under linux actually works. 32 bit Windows won't use 4GB, but 32 bit Linux will use 8GB with no problem.

I could go on and on, but you get there idea. These days I just don't have any need for Windows.

The "best Linux Distro" is a very personal choice.

Most Linux users, me included, distro hop going from one distro to another, learning what suits them best, trying the foibles, the hardware support, the support structure. This kind of migration is not for everybody, but you will never know what you want until you have tried several.

I started with openSuSe, Fedora, Mandriva (now Rosa), and now use Ubuntu on 3 of my desktops, Mint on my laptop, and always carry Puppy Linux on my USB sticks.

I do not have any Windows machines, but have loaded XP onto a virtual machine, for the rare times I need to use a Windows application.

Try as many as you want to, and think of it as an adventure. You will learn more about Linux and after some days/weeks/months/years eventually settle on something that suits you ...

Don't wipe unless you already have extensive experience with linux and know exactly what you're getting into. Otherwise dual boot.

You may want to check out Mint or PCLinuxOS

@ Captin X11 is not 80 years old, try closer to 20. And most stuff in linux is thrown to the Direct Rendering Interface anyways. Wayland will be nice when it's ready, but it's not quite there yet.

you surely have a lot of wants >.>

doesnt mean you can get what you want :/

just so you know linux is a kernel, not an operating system. GNU is the operating system which uses the linux kernel. so its often referred to as gnu/linux (tho people call it linux).

anyway.

ubuntu has probably the best hardware support of most linux distros. its also a very easy one to use.

mint is another one in which is easy to use, but its based on ubuntu.

no gnu/linux os can run windows software. the onyl way you can is using a virtual machine which you boot windows on, or you use an emulator such as WINE. (just dont expect miracles. WINE doesnt run windows software 100% perfect, and there are tons of software and games which wont work at all or work very poorly).

and booting a virtual machine is not only going to take more resources, since you have to dedicate cores/ram to it, but it will also run windows worse then it would natively (not just because you are using resources running linux at the same time)(, but just because most VMs dont support all kinds of hardware acceleration, and doing things like playing games on them usually dont work that great.

any gnu/linux os will be vastly more secure then windows or mac osx. not that its completely worry free, but automated malicious software is something you have to not worry about, since to do anything you must log in as a super user. So any changes would have to be first run by you to have to give it super user authority.

Not that there arnt scripts or commands which you can run yourself that can cause damage to your os.

to be fair, as a first timer, you may want to start with something simple to use, like linux mint xfce edition, or linux lite. thats what i recommend, they have more multimedia and driver support by default. but you could also try xubuntu, the appearance for these systems can be changed completely, you can make it look like whatever you want. xubuntu is simpler and cleaner, but you will need to at least install "xubuntu-restricted-extras".

mint xfce: http://www.linuxmint.com/oldreleases.php

linux lite: https://www.linuxliteos.com/

xubuntu: http://xubuntu.org/getxubuntu/

choose an LTS version, which means long term support, for more stability. at the moment that is the ubuntu 12.04 base (version 13 for mint).

I would wait for the Wayland display server to come out as right now linux graphics are being runned by the X.org which was created like 80 years or so ago and was made for terminals, not flash videos, 1080p, etc.

If you are willing to get your hands on the terminal I would go with archlinux because its rolling release, and gives you what you want and nothing more

You sound angry...

The Best Linux for one may not be the best Linux for you.

Best to install and run and see which one you like best...

I would say Debian...

No Linux runs Windows software... although you can run Windows in a Linux environment.

And unless your Graphic cards have Linux OS drivers then it wont run at its full capacity.

So unless you want to GAME... download a Linux OS that has your GPU drivers.

Try

Fedora

OpenSuse

They are opensource and will be easily available online.

Hi Ivan.

It's hard to provide a good answer to your question because you haven't explained "not Ubuntu". I'm not arguing with your decision there (I don't use Ubuntu either); but Ubuntu is almost universally recognized as one of the best Linux distributions for people like yourself who are beginners to the OS (and many seasoned Linux gurus prefer it as well), so your reasons for rejecting it will almost certainly be important for determining what counts as "the best Linux OS" in the terms that matter to you. For example, if you're rejecting Ubuntu because of some kind of philosophical objection (to its parent company Canonical, perhaps), then there are a whole bunch of other excellent beginner distros (like Linux Mint) that we should rule out because they're basically Ubuntu plus extras (they're built on Ubuntu). At the other extreme, if you're rejecting Ubuntu because you've seen it and you dislike its user interface, then it might be good to recommend distros like Kubuntu and Xubuntu that marry all the advantages of Ubuntu to different user interfaces.

Without knowing your reasons for rejecting Ubuntu, all we can do is point out the pros and cons of various popular distros and leave it up to you do choose the one that sounds best to you. There's certainly no single "best Linux OS" for everyone, just as there's no "best car in the world": if you're on a tight budget and fuel economy is the most important thing to you, then a large powerful car is a terrible choice. If you have a large family that you need to drive around, then a fast little sports car is a terrible choice. It's the same with an OS: your own needs and preferences determine which one's best.

The things you need to consider are reliability, ease of installation, ease of use once installed, length of support (some distros like Fedora are supported for such short periods that you've barely got your system configured how you want it and it's already time to upgrade the whole thing), quality of documentation, compatibility with other software, and so on and so on. What are your long term goals? If you just want to use it as a desktop OS and play games on it, then almost any of them will do fine: they all run WINE so they're all about the same at running Windows games (a few make it slightly easier to get WINE set up properly, especially on 64-bit systems; but it sounds like you're happy to settle for 32-bits in which case WINE generally works pretty effortlessly) and if you don't mind upgrading or re-installing your OS every few months, there isn't much else to consider except perhaps reliability.

Debian and the Red Hat clones are the most reliable, although the LTS ("Long Term Support") versions of Ubuntu and its derivatives are pretty good too (at working the way they're meant to, without bugs and crashes). At the other extreme, "rolling release" distros like Gentoo and Arch are always up-to-date (you install them once and then you can just keep them up-to-date forever) and they're loads of fun in terms of customizing things and setting them up exactly how you want them...but they're also much more prone to bugs than the stable distros and will sometimes even suffer from major bugs that require you to fix them before its even possible to get on with your regular daily activities. Personally I like to invest my time configuring a system at the initial install stage, and then just trust it to work reliably and stay updated with security patches, so I think stable distros like Debian are a better choice; but if you have time on your hands to fiddle with your OS, the likes of Gentoo are certainly more fun.

Some preferences you just can't have until you've tried things: you don't know if you prefer a Debian-style apt-based system (including e.g. Ubuntu) or a Red-Hat-style rpm-based system (like Fedora) until you've built a few deb or rpm packages and discovered your preferences there. If you're a control freak or UNIX purist you may prefer the likes of Slackware to other distros, even though it involves far more work to configure and maintain it, just for the satisfying sense of knowing what's under the hood (a bit like an old car: no fancy computer-controlled fuel injection = a car you can actually understand and fix with regular old-fashioned tools). Your preferences *will* change with experience, so for now, there's no point in wasting lots of time picking the distro you imagine will be "the one" for you: just jump in and install one of them and learn to use it. Normally I recommend Ubuntu or Mint for beginners, but depending on your reasons for rejecting Ubuntu, another friendly distro like OpenSUSE or Mageia might be a better one for you to try.