Gentoo

I used to HATE linux. Really hate it. I was forced to use it for my research and school work, but I always prefered Windows. I still like Windows, flaws and all, but I've gotten a little bored with it. I was a big NT4 user for the longest time (as soon as I could get away from Win95, puke). I still use Windows 2000, seeing no need to migrate to WinXP.

I find the dual boot Win2000 / Linux thing works very well. Don't even mention Mac, I HATE Macs and I always will.

Anyway, I used to use Redhat Linux 8.0 and 9.0. They're not too bad, but still a gigantic piss off. Redhat Fedora is a big improvement, mostly because of the newer kernels. But I finally found salvation in Gentoo.

The greatest thing about Gentoo is emerge. If you need an application or driver set or whatever, you just type emerge -s *possible name of app* to find exactly what you want. Once you've found it, you type emerge *name of app* and voila! All dependencies are installed, the app is installed and everything WORKS! No kidding. I've found the Gentoo distro to be utterly reliable and easy to use.

The downside, yup there's a downside, is that proper installation of Gentoo is a pain. However, they have a step-by-step guide, and really good forums to get you through the setup phase. I recommend a Stage-2 install btw. Setup really sucks, but is totally worth it. After you've done it a couple times it's not as big a deal, but still takes a couple days to do (downloading, compiling and installing packages etc). This mostly happens automatically though, just takes lots of CPU time.

So there you go, get yourself some Gentoo goodness. I use linux about 90% of the time now and Windows 2000 the other 10%. Mostly for CAD stuff and downloading pictures from my digital card reader, since it's an old one and won't work in Gentoo, at least not yet. I have a newer card reader in my lab at school and it works fine with Gentoo (it's a dual reader with both compactflash and smartmedia).