My choices for Linux are mainly
1.) Mint
2.) Ubuntu
3.) Fedora
I have tried many different ones. Years ago I used Linspire for a short while, but when a friend told me to try Linux Mint version 6 Felicia I WAS HOOKED to MINT!
I started off first with mandrake many many years ago around 1998. Then friend gave me Red Hat 6 around 1999 which was a pain to get running mainly driver madness issues trying to get everything to work and when I finally got it to work with 800 x 600 vs 640 x 480 it was finally usable. Then Lindows came out where Walmart and others were selling low cost Celeron systems with Lindows and I almost bought one, but didnt. Instead I found out that I could get Linspire a later generation of Lindows for free and so I tried that out and it installed so much easier than Red Hat ever was to install but was still lacking driver support for ink jet printers and more. It was pretty much useful to those who wanted to web surf and check e-mail but wasnt a gamer. Then I was introduced to Linux Mint 6 by my canadian friend when I was complaining about there not being a good Windows-Like Linux distro. he said you havent checked out MINT? I was like no why... he said download Mint 6 and burn to a CD-R and tell me how you like it. I tried it out and loved it. Yet again a easy installation, good performance, and plenty of supported drivers and software. Installed WINE and even had windows based software running. Then a college project had me having to use Fedora and I used Fedora Core 5 because I needed to have a Red Hat based build and Fedora was as close as you can get without spending money. Then tried Ubuntu because Mint is based on Ubuntu, but I felt this draw to sticking with Mint vs using Ubuntu. In Mint everything for me is better, so I stuck with it. I still occasionally download a newer version of Fedora and Ubuntu to check on their changes. Fedora came a long way since Fedora Core 5. I was amazed that on a laptop with a wireless adapter it found the wireless adapter installed the correct drivers and all I needed to do was give the information to it to connect to a secured wifi. And this was running a Live Version of Fedora Version 17 on a 4GB USB Stick. But even with Fedora far better than it was years ago, I still feel that Mint is the distro for me.
A long time ago I bought a USB stick for $3.95 that was a 1GB stick that had CentOS 6 on it. I figured it was worth it as for if I didnt like it I would just format the 1GB stick and use it as a 1GB stick vs live CentOS 6 thumb drive. Well I ended up not really having a need for CentOS 6 and so I formatted the 1GB stick and was surprised at how slow the write process is to the USB stick. It was a cheap 1GB stick that I guess had a fast read rate, but slow write rate. So I guess I got my $3.95 worth of performance in a slow 1GB stick when writing data to it.
I really wish that Linux had a DirectX vs stuck with OpenGL as for thats what I feel is holding back most gamers from Linux use.
