Slackware mostly, for a variety of reasons.Its straight forward and to the point, its complete, its well supported, and its the most popular.Checking websites is a very good way to see whats going on.Having checked mandrake,redhat,debian, and slackware what do you see when you go to their websites?The differences are pretty startling actually.Most are marketing fluff and hype, then there's slackware, very direct and to the point.Every piece of software in it is available online and you dont have to go searching all over to find it.It doesnt have to sell itself like the others, the software does the job just fine.Not that the others are bad really, underneath they are all essentially the same, but slackware moves from release to release in a very orderly predictable fashion with a minimum of bugs and problems.Sure there's bugs, 40 million plus lines of code and your gonna have bugs, Ive found some myself.It also doesnt rely on GUI setup tools to get things configured, many think thats a bad thing, well, when one of those GUI setup applets doesnt work, you end up here or somewhere else talking to a guy like me, learn slackware and linux in general and that becomes a non issue.Personally I'd much rather the developers spend time improving the things that matter rather than making my life easier by taking the need to think away from me.I converted to linux cause wanted more freedom and control, not less.I wasnt looking for a windows replacement, I was looking for an OS that just plain works with minimum of problems, I dont need eye candy, I need results.Ive tried redhat,mandrake,Suse, and sun's new desktop OS among others.They all work, but most do not come with everything I need, Suse personal for example does not come with GCC, thats something you have to install from elsewhere, to a guy like me thats a serious mistake, sure its easy to fix, but try explaining that to a newbie that doesnt even know what GCC is........Ive done that here on this forum numerous times.I would much rather have to go back and uninstall stuff I dont want than have to track down stuff I need especially with linux due to all the dependency issues, that is the number one problem newbies have with linux.
The RPM system keeps a journal and checks for dependencies, but its far from foolproof, and when it screws up it causes massive problems for the uninitiated, slackware's solution, dont do dependency checking.Sometimes, "less is more", and the keep it simple stupid principle really does work.I could go on and on and on, bottom line, once you know and understand linux, they are all the same really, but its much easier in my experience to get slackware the way I want it vs the others, so I use it, and when I have a problem, it has the biggest user support base by almost double any of the others.