The best Linux distribution of them all - an Epilogue

I had written a previous post named - The best Linux distribution of them all - where I tried to explain in the best possible way, how to go about selecting a Linux distribution. The response to that post was overwhelming and so many people added a comment which gave valuable insights about their favourite distribution that it became impossible to publish all the comments without making the page lengthy. So instead of publishing all the comments, I decided to write a separate post giving the gist of what everybody who read the post had to say. Also I wanted to clarify a few things that I had left out in the original post.

First and foremost, the staff writer at madpenguin.org, Mr Christian Einfeldt was kind enough to drop by and share his views about this very volatile topic. In a nutshell, This is what he had to say:

All the newbies out there could get themselves a Live CD with an instruction manual. He gave three choices of books them being :

• "Linux Made Easy" by Rickford Grant, which comes with a free copy of Xandros Open Circulation edition of Linux.
• "Point & Click Linux" by Robin Miller, which comes with a copy of Mepis Linux." and
• "Peter van der Linden's Guide to Linux," which comes with a Linspire Live CD in it.
  

... the reviews of which you can read at madpenguin.org. Thank you Mr Christian Einfeldt for sharing your thoughts on this subject.

A surprising number of people said they used PCLinuxOS or Mepis as their choice Linux distribution and they vouched that these supported all proprietary file formats out of the box.

A number of people voted for Arch Linux and still others for Vector Linux which is based on Slackware.

A few of the comments pointed out to me that Mandriva indeed supported mp3 file support out of the box which was a little known fact.

I had written that Debian was the only linux distribution which supported the maximum architectures. But then this is what one commenter had to say about it - "Both Red Hat and SuSE also have support for non-Intel platforms, like IBM's zSeries mainframes. Debian certainly isn't the only one".

A reason I left out saying anything about liveCDs was because all linux distributions worth their name have released a live CD. More over, all live CDs work out of the box with support for all file formats. Another thing is a liveCD is designed to be booted from the CDROM and is not optimised for installing on the hard disk.

Finally, I have a statement to make. I am in no way affiliated with any linux distribution or any commercial website. And nobody has paid me to give preference to their linux distribution in my post. Further more, what ever I have written is my own opinion.