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Since some will try to make the comparison, in fact CentOS and Scientific Linux do not use RedHat branding. They are also not covered by RedHat service agreements. There is no conflict or issue. Mint similarly also does NOT use Ubuntu branding, trademarks, etc. So what is this about?

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.... Clem responded, "Money isn't a primary concern. Although the original fee was in the hundreds of thousands pounds, it was easily reduced to a single digit figure. The licensing aims at restricting what Mint can and cannot do, mostly in relation to the OEM market, to prevent Mint from competing with Canonical in front of the same commercial partners."

If this is indeed true, then Canonical is demanding the right to tell Mint where they could NOT offer their distribution (such as OEM's) . It is this aspect that would clearly and openly violate the GNU GPL, and is nothing more than a crude shakedown more worthy of our local mob.

Since FreeBSD is one of the top distributions, even appearing on Linux-centric sites as mentionable: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.p...

And there is a distro for just that purpose:
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=stella

Personally I probably wouldn't run something like CentOS/RHEL on my primary desktop or laptop since I like to run all the latest stuff without too much of a wait. But if I had a secondary "work" machine and wanted absolute rock-solid stability and unsurpassed support (ten years), then such an OS would be excellent. Running a machine with for the most part only minor updates being required and no major, potential stability-damaging upgrades for its entire working life does sound somewhat appealing if you just want a machine to work, and that especially suits a desktop in the corner that just always works, is always there, never needs any maintenance...

But yeah, I'd probably still upgrade once every other OS version at least anyway. I would eventually get bored and want to start playing with something new.

Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Sabayon .. link

Man, the future of FOREX is going to make the Linux DE holy wars look like minor doctrinal differences...

I think the parallel with Linux is valid on a lot of point.
Not only have recent history seen an explosion of variants:
(There are many alt-coins just as there are many linux distributions).
But on the long term, probably is will resolve itself in the same way:
A couple of widespread mainstream variants (like Debian, Redhat, Ubuntu, openSUSE) (same in the crypto-coin world: Bitcoin and Litecoin are apparently here to stay, and happy at their position)
A few others for more specialist uses (like Gentoo, Knoppix, SystemRescueCD) (probably in the crypto world some *actually anonymous* coin will emerge).
And then a whole bunch of entries that nobody has ever heard of and are almost not used.

But there's a small difference:
- Low popularity linux distro, end up usually abandonned
- Whereas, low use coins end up being the playground for troll-traders.

It's the obvious "backward" step (and I don't mean that in a negative way, retreating from the dark alleyways [Mark Shuttleworth] has led [Ubuntu] down is a good thing), but most of the people I know who actually liked [Ubuntu] have moved sideways to Mint.

Mod Parent Up.

When I first found Ubuntu, I was evangelizing it like crazy to friends and family.
There it was, the first Linux that I could recommend to one of those "I don't want to understand it, I just want it to work" Windows XP users.
Sometimes people didn't want to abandon their famliar Windows XP environment.
Others were happy that their computer was now pratically immune to malware.

I continued this up until Ubuntu released Unity as the default desktop.
My mother clicked the button to do a distribution upgrade (I always instructed her to install the updates ASAP), and she called to say "everything changed around on me".
From that point, I decided that Ubuntu had finally jumped the shark.
Now that my mom couldn't use it, I could no longer recommend it to anyone.
I evacuated her data to an external drive, reinstalled the previous Ubuntu, restored her data, and instructed her not to install any updates.

I had her continue this holding pattern until I discovered Linux Mint on DistroWatch. It was at the top of the page hit ranking, so I gave it a try.
Here it was again! The new Linux that I could recommend to the "I don't want to understand it, I just want it to work" Windows XP users.
Even better, since Microsoft totally rearranged everything in Vista / Win 7, nobody was afraid to lose their environment.
In fact, they loved the fact that Linux Mint was close to the Windows XP they loved and far from the unfamiliar Vista / Win 7.
That "don't want to change my computer" has only grown with the release of Windows 8.
Nobody that I know wants to use Windows 8, and everybody to whom I show Mint desperately wants to keep it.

Now Linux Mint is on my mother's computer, my brother's computer, my best friend's computer, my best friend's boyfriend's computer, my girlfriend's laptop, my girlfriend's daughter's laptop, my work laptop, and my home laptop.
I'm not sure who else all those people may have sold on Linux Mint, but they love to show it off (especially my girlfriend, to her friends at college).

I'm sure my story is not unique. Parent is right.
Those of us who liked the old Ubuntu have moved to Mint.
And we've taken our friends and family with us.

Has anybody else noticed that over the last decade, almost all of the DragonFlyBSD release stories have been posted by timothy, and the majority of those were submitted anonymously?

It's not a particularly popular distro, coming in at #77 today, in an unscientific poll. I get that it's news for nerds, but I'm starting to suspect a wee bit of bias.

"Elite GCHQ teams targeted employees of mobile communications companies and billing companies to gain access to their company networks. The spies used fake copies of LinkedIn profiles as one of their tools. .. The victims didn't notice that what they were looking at wasn't the original site but a fake profile with one invisible added feature: a small piece of malware that turned their computers into tools for Britain's GCHQ intelligence service." ref

Does any of this malware work on Linux?

thats already happened, look at http://distrowatch.com/ (right hand column) and ubuntu has not been in the #1 spot for a long time, Mint is #1 and Debian is #2, i guess Mint is okay or they would be falling out of the #1 spot too, i prefer old school distros so i stick with Debian or Slackware (depending on my mood and which one of the two likes the hardware i install it on better)

Wasn't the Apple of your i either? Reminds you that an iPEAR might ApPear. On a BBS?

appropriate captcha: disowns

Ise disowns dis remark.

Depending on your workflow, sharing audio sessions with other people can be as simple as exporting relevant tracks making sure they are easily resynced together (for example exporting the whole audio interval for each track), or as difficult as "You gotta have same audio program and plugins and same versions". If your sharing problem involves sw programs or versions, your problem is worse than sharing, it's archiving.

There is no guarantee that today's most used audio will be viable tomorrow, so I suggest to keep plain audio and midi of your stuff always and pick the sw that you prefer.

There are multimedia distros with live DVD: avlinux, dream studio, artistx, ubuntu studio...

Check out their offerings, it's not like you can't download a fully functional copy. Audacity is great for simple retouches, you want a DAW or a sequencer with audio editing functions for anything more complex.

If you think RHEL and Fedora are the only distros in the universe, then this will blow your mind. I happened to be talking something *gasp* debian-based that happens to have a life span of many years. Also, if you're OK with less-that-optimal performance, good for you. We aren't.

Debian 4.0 to 5.0: 4/8/2007, 2/15/2009. About two years.
Debian 5.0 to 6.0: 2/15/2009, 2/6/2011. About two years.
Debian 6.0 to 7.0: 2/6/2011, 5/4/2013. About two years.

In other words, your complaint is either outdated or just completely false.

Even going back a bit further, pre-4.0, I see:
Debian 3.0 to 3.1: 7/19/2002, 6/6/2005. About three years.
Debian 3.1 to 4.0: 6/6/2005, 4/8/2007. About two years.

Going back even further, releases were even more frequent, done once or even more than once a year with a few exceptions. So really, where the hell do you get five years? Are you combining the cycles of two versions or something? Maybe 3.0 and 3.1? If so, how is that fair? No matter what, it's still far less time than people had to wait on Windows XP from release (10/25/2001) for a worthy successor (translation: Windows 7... 10/22/2009, eight years).

Debian release history data obtained here: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=debian
[Although, as someone already said, the same data can probably be found elsewhere, including Wikipedia.]

Download and install Ubuntu or one of these distros ..

The endless Gnome 3 vs 2 discussions are all very well (I ditched Fedora because of it), but in the end let the voters decide:

Out of interest, why ditch a distro because you don't like some of the defaults? Switching desktop environment is pretty trivial, there are plenty of others packaged for Fedora.

And looking at the latest Distrowatch page hit rankings (which is what that article was using):
  http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity,
it now is 5th.

Dunno about anyone else, but I use certain pieces of software because they happen to do a good job for what I'm using them for, not because they are popular. I don't really see any merit in ranking distros by popularity. Also, Fedora is primarilly a bleeding-edge testing distro, so I wouldn't necessarilly expect it to be as popular as something more stable.

The endless Gnome 3 vs 2 discussions are all very well (I ditched Fedora because of it), but in the end let the voters decide:

Apparently in 2010 Fedora was the 2nd most used distro (from http://www.pcworld.com/article/2021273/another-year-another-totally-different-top-10-linux-distros.html).

In 2011 it was 3rd. In 2012 it was 4th.

And looking at the latest Distrowatch page hit rankings (which is what that article was using):
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity,
it now is 5th.

Fortunately, there are even more choices.

Hybryde Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution for the desktop.

Its most unusual feature is an option to switch rapidly between multiple desktop environments and window manager without logging out - the list includes Enlightenment 17, GNOME 3 (GNOME Shell and GNOME 3 "Fallback" mode), KDE, LXDE, Openbox, Unity, Xfce and FVWM.

This is achieved via a highly customisable Hy-menu, which also allows launching applications and configuring the system. All open applications are carried to any of the available desktops. The system offers an interesting way to work fluidly in a multi-desktop environment.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=hybryde

Hell, half the time I don't know if they have a new release, or if a new rapper busted out on the scene...

Crunchbang rocks!

Actually Extremadura did not need the crisis for this specific endeavour. Maybe only to complete the migration. Extremadura has had its own distro since the early 2000s (called Linex). It was one of the first state sponsored distros out there. I don't know what the state of the migration was before this latest push, but it is certainly not a new initiative. They do seem to have created a new distro though. I'll have to see how it differs from Linex.

The crisis certainly did provide an additional motivation to complete the migration, for sure. But Extremadura was already a pretty poor place even before which had prompted its original plans.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=linex

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7908

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuLinEx

Actually Extremadura did not need the crisis for this. It has had its own distro since about 2001 (called Linex). It was one of the first state sponsored distros out there. I don't know what the state of the migration was, but it is not a new initiative. They do seem to have created a new distro though. I'll have to see how it differs from Linex. It's probably more about completing the migration that had started some time back and would have been delayed by some leftover compatibility issues.

The crisis certainly did provide an additional motivation for sure. But Extremadura was already a pretty poor place even before which had prompted its original plans.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=linex

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7908

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuLinEx

Ja, vrij bier! http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=At2o2WWiku0

Free operating systems at http://www.distrowatch.com/

Because malware doesn't exist for Linux, right? And phishing is impossible as well?

If the live CD is set up to not mount your harddisk, and if it has a guest account without root privilege, then only malware that does privilege escalation (becoming root) after exploiting a bug can do damage.
Now I'm not a real security expert at all, but I think if the live CD is paranoid enough to not have any harddisk kernel modules, have SELinux on in "setenforce 1" mode, and if the live CD is burned to a DVD-R instead of DVD-RW then I think you'd be quite safe.
Seeing as Linux is used for a lot of different tasks, I believe (but I'm not certain) that there are several distros especially *for* this purpose; hardened Linux distros for computer forensics, penetration testing etc.
A quick look at distrowatch.com shows (N.B. I haven't tested any of these, my family are not computer criminals AFAIK):

• http://distrowatch.com/search.php select distribution category:
• "security" -- 16 distros
• "privacy" -- 5 distros; these sound useful esp. LPS
• "forensics" -- 8 distros
• "live medium" -- 210 distros, many are i18-ized

Now if your guests are not only hardened computer criminals but also very old, consider the extreme user-friendlyness of the Italian project "ELDY":

http://www.eldy.eu/
I haven't tried it yet, but I respect their philosophy: "when you were a baby, they taught you how to walk and cycle. Now that you're grown up and they are getting senile and feeble in the head, you can teach them computer use. Do your best to try, anyway". (I paraphrase ..slightly.. )

I recommend that (at least to start with) you stick with major distros. distrowatch has a reasonable list http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

there are many hundreds of distros, mostly with little to distinguish them and some maintained by very small teams. if you use a distro that has small non-fulltime development team, then how long is it going to take for them to push a security update in to the repositories? what if one of their developers is on holiday, or has exams, or whatever. with the bigger distros they will have a security team to do this.

Download Xange. They'll swear it's Vista. Look at this.

Ok. Fine. But what about any of the 21 Educational distros on distro watch?

I understand letting people have their choice. But could you imagine the shit linux could do if it wasn't so damn fragmented.

Imagine ALL off the developers around the world working on an X server replacement. Or drivers for hardware or even a damn distro that "Just Worked." Debian wasn't friendly enough. Ubuntu. Ubuntu went off the Deepend with user inteface. Now you have Mint. And Gnome went to Gnome 3. So now Mint users have both MATE (Fork of Gnome2) and Cinnamon (Fork(?) of Gnome3).

Linux has so much constant bickering of petty shit (in my opinion as a user and outsider to the 'community') it's stupid. Sorry. The BSD license isn't "free" as in speech enough. GPLv2. Wait. Still bad. GPLv3. How about a "I don't give a fuck what you do with this code but if it kills you it's not my fault" license? Wouldn't that be the most free? You could literally do anything you wanted with it.

Huh! Distrowatch

Ubunto is for beginners-Neanderthals.

If the DoD can do this:

DoD Linux OS: Lightweight Portable Security

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=lps
http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm
http://www.spi.dod.mil/docs/lpsmanual.pdf

OS Type: Linux | Based on: Thinstation | Origin: USA | Architecture: i386
Desktop: IceWM | Category: Live Medium, Privacy, Security | Status: Active

"Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) is a Linux-based live CD with a goal of allowing users to work on a computer without the risk of exposing their credentials and private data to malware, key loggers and other Internet-era ills. It includes a minimal set of applications and utilities, such as the Firefox web browser or an encryption wizard for encrypting and decrypting personal files. The live CD is a product produced by the United States of America's Department of Defence and is part of that organization's Software Protection Initiative."

They could do without anything Microsoft.

Any x86 machine must also include the ability to turn secure boot off as well, according to ms win8 certification guidelines.

Yeah.... but they don't have to make it easy. Here's one tale of the new future.

...I wouldn't waste the money on a system that will be outdated by the time they're 13 and wanting to play more "hardcore" games.

Why not buy a cheap computer with lots of harddrive space and stick Qimo LInux on there? Or any Linux distro really and just download every game in the repos. Hell, you could buy a Raspberry Pi.

Then buy an HDMI cable to hook it to your TV screen and maybe a couple of controllers and a keyboard. These alone will be usable with their future computers.

Why is it a news story whenever a major Linux disto is released? There are mailing lists for this type of thing.

Dunno why this dude got modded down, but since apparently the /. modthink is now that announcements of every release or release candidate of $DISTRO is entirely appropriate, I think I shall begin coding a bot to submit stories every time Arch releases a new version of a package. (FYI, Arch is a rolling release. There are two versions: up-to-date and out-of-date.)

Ok, ok, that would be evil, but once a month when they release a new install media image will be fair, yes?

(Or maybe people who want to watch distros could go to distrowatch, hmm?)

Linux Mint is a distribution of Linux that is based off of Ubuntu. Like Ubuntu, it uses Debian packages.

When Ubuntu made the decision to make a new desktop environment ("Unity") and the GNOME project made the decision to make a new desktop environment ("GNOME Shell"), Linux Mint in turn made the decision to support those of us who loved GNOME 2. We have two options: MATE and Cinnamon. Both are well-supported by Linux Mint (and in fact primary development on both is by Linux Mint guys).

MATE is simply a fork of GNOME 2. For reasons that are not clear to me, GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 cannot co-exist on the same system... something about library conflicts. (Doesn't Linux have library versioning that should make it possible to avoid these conflicts? Eh, moving on.) The MATE project did a mass rename on everything in GNOME ("libgnome" -> "libmate", etc.) so MATE can co-exist on the same system with GNOME 3. So, those of us who loved the smooth polish that came from man-decades of development in GNOME can still use it.

But MATE isn't the future. From what I have heard, the library underpinnings of GNOME 3 really have improved over GNOME 2, and the new technology is a step up. Who wants to be locked into a frozen clone of GNOME 2 forever? Thus, Cinnamon. Cinnamon is a project to build on top of GNOME 3 and provide a user experience similar to GNOME 2. New plugins, new themes, etc. all go together to make a very usable desktop; but GNOME 3 apps will work seamlessly with it.

Many disgruntled Ubuntu users have abandoned Ubuntu for Linux Mint. Mint is now the top Linux distribution on distrowatch.com; I'm not sure it was even in the top ten before the whole Unity/GNOME Shell fiasco, but now it's number one.

A comment I have seen multiple times on Slashdot from different people: the Linux Mint guys are focused on making their users happy, rather than making something new. Where the GNOME Shell guys promise a "consistent and recognisable visual identity", and Mark Shuttleworth (the head Ubuntu guy) said "This is not a democracy. [...] we are not voting on design decisions.", the Linux Mint guys promise that you will "Love your Linux, Feel at Home, Get things Done!"

Linux Mint has always focused on making a beautiful system that is out-of-the-box usable. Now they are one of the top choices for people who have rejected Unity and GNOME Shell.

For me, the most important part of the announcement is that they have the password keeper working right now. I'm using Linux Mint on a laptop at work, and I can't connect to Windows shares; I'm hoping the new updates will sort that out for me.

Since this is based on Debian packages, I can probably just update in place without needing to do a full re-install.

P.S. One of my biggest complaints about GNOME 3 is that I can no longer take sit a Windows user down and just say "it works pretty much like what you are used to". You may like GNOME Shell and you may think it is better, but you cannot argue that it is very different, and it would take a bit of training before a guest could use it. Linux Mint, on the other hand, works a lot like pre-Windows 8 versions of Windows; with a little customization and theming I'll bet you could fool people into thinking it was actually Windows XP.

Likewise with Unity, it is pretty different from Windows. But it's very similar to the Mac, so maybe users familiar with the Mac can use it?

Bodhi Linux uses E WM

I tried Bodhi Linux a few versions back and while the experience was somewhat pleasing, I found several bugs and gave up. I may try a newer version in the future.

"Bodhi Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution for the desktop featuring the elegant and lightweight Enlightenment window manager. The project, which integrates and pre-configures the very latest builds of Enlightenment directly from the project's development repository, offers modularity, high level of customisation, and choice of themes. The default Bodhi system is light -- the only pre-installed applications are Midori, LXTerminal, PCManFM, Leafpad and Synaptic -- but more software is available via Bodhi Software Center, a web-based software installation tool."

http://distrowatch.com/bodhi
http://www.bodhilinux.com/
http://forums.bodhilinux.com/
http://wiki.bodhilinux.com/
http://www.bodhilinux.com/gallerydotw.php
http://www.chrishaney.com/?linux&distro=bodhi
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bodhilinux/files/

Linux Mint is way more legitimate in every way... UBUNTU IS NOT RELEVANT

It may have changed — my last install of Mint was Helena — but is Mint not based on Ubuntu?

For Mint, I'd have thought Ubuntu was very relevant indeed.

Huh, a fork that's "Ubuntu -Unity +Gnome 2"? What a crazy and brand new idea. I bet that would overtake Ubuntu at the top of the distrowatch rankings quite fast too.

It never ceases to amuse me, the glazed look on peoples faces when they ask me how I deal with Windows viruses and I explain I don't use Windows ..

Distrowatch

It's not the browser but the underlying Operating System that is at fault.

distrowatch

This has been done before:

linuX-gamers

Just tried to install the latest version of Ubuntu linux. Black screen. Nothing. Zero. Dead.

But that's because I know nothing about linux, right?

No, it's because Ubuntu sucks...

I just don't how to fix it and I don't care. So linux is off my machine. Forever.

I know you don't care, but others might want to know how to fix that problem, so here goes:
The problem isn't with Linux, it's with Ubuntu. You fix the problem by NOT using Ubuntu.
There are plenty of other distros that might work better for you.

IMHO one of the major Linux problems at the moment is in fact Ubuntu.
A lot of people have heard that Ubuntu is "the best Linux distro evar!!!1!" and everything "just works" (tm), so if someone want to try Linux, they're probably going to try Ubuntu.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu has gone downhill for a long time and even if it was "the best" some time ago, it sure as hell ain't anymore and stuff does seem to break at an alarming high rate.
But if something fails in what was supposed to be "the best Linux distro evar!!!", people are going to assume it's going to fail just as badly, if not worse, in every other Linux distro. With no reason to try another distro, they're just going to give up on Linux.

If we want Linux to have a better market share, we need to stop telling people that Ubuntu (or any other distro for that matter) is "the best Linux distro evar!!!1!" and instead encourage people to try different Linux distros and see what's best for them.

I don't think it's the learning curve. I think it's that there's TOO MUCH choice. I've made the argument many times over various other similar posts, but there isn't a lot of help for people unfamiliar with cars to lead them to the right choices. If I ask one person, they'll say "Volvo is the best" and someone else will say "Renault is better" and yet another person will say "No! It's a Mazda 323." or any other three brands that you want to pick. Same goes for chassis (hatchback vs sedan).

Mangled that for you (hope you don't mind).

I do agree it's a problem though; have you tried looking at distrowatch.com, they do reviews of various and sundry distro's.

I see no problem with some corporation being associated with the project. If there are reasonable rules, and if the project has a reasonably open governance, corporate help is welcome.

To an extent it's fine, but the corporation usually ends up steering the project to some extent. For instance is Ubuntu more community-driven or Cononical driven?

Since it is open source, we can always fork it. And normally the fear of forks will stop the corporation from acting too badly - doing evil to open source software does not pay.

In the case of Canonical, we have an additional assurance: it is a private company, which does not have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits. It was founded by Mark Shuttleworth, who is a nice guy and was a Debian Developer.

Yes, I met him in person during DebConf10. Very friendly guy; I saw his talk on the Unity interface. I think the Debian developers have sort of an interesting like(--)standoffish relationship with Mark Shuttleworth. My impression was that he's well respected in the Debian community at the same time that many wish his efforts were in Debian rather than Ubuntu. [Nobody actually voiced this though.]

In the case of Ubuntu, the "evil" was selecting Unity as default. However, Xfce, LXDE, KDE and others are still available, and they are working on GNOBuntu (with the full Gnome, including the Gnome Shell). Despite the hate you see on Slashdot, Ubuntu is still the number 1 distribution - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(operating_system)#Installed_base.

And, personally, I use Unity and like it just fine.

Well, Canonical also pulled the funding of Kubuntu back in February.
      http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/02/07/0143224/canonical-pulls-kubuntu-personnel-funding

On http://distrowatch.com/ Ubuntu is #2 behind Linux Mint. Mint has two versions, one based on Ubuntu and one based on Debian -- and I believe it's the one based on Ubuntu that is most popular, which comes with either MATE, Cinnamon (Gnome2-like interface), KDE, or Xfde. Since Mint 13 is most popular, it's clear that many others don't like the Unity interface. :-P [So in effect I agree with you, just in a slightly different way.]

Okay. Once, when distro hopping to find a system that would install onto a very old PC, I stumbled onto PCLinuxOS. Where others had failed to even install (Ubuntu, Vector, RedHat) this distro installed sweetly, loaded quickly and, much to my amazement, found all the crusty hardware on the POS MOBO that I was reviving in a case mod. (The reason is that the MOBO was installed into the case mod in a customized way. Easier to upgrade the OS than swap the MOBO.) Anyway, I still run this distro on the case mod (an old Russian radio used as a music server). PCLinux has since gone through a decline and rebirth (its repositories tanked a few years back). In recent years it has seen a very substantive revival.

It is now enjoying a solid base with good community support. And is now # 10 on Distrowatch. I recently read a review (sorry, cannot find it) wherein the reviewer expressed mild surprise that this distro was as good as it was. It is good for a Windows user IMHO because it tends to use Windows-like conventions for the GUI. Also the GUI is surprisingly powerful for managing all kinds of settings. Nice for a user who is not comfortable with a terminal program. I confess that it is not pretty to look at out of the box, but it does everything I want it to do on my funky music server.

I'm not a fan of Unity/GNOME3 myself, but when you took a look on the statistics on distrowatch.com you could see, that for top 5 distros Unity/GNOME3 is main DE. So basically yes, it revolves around it ;)

They aren't. http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mint

You're not the only one asking that question.

People have been noticing the lack of security and bug fixes for a while.

More directly towards your question, this thread raised what some people called a sh*tstorm when Caitlyn Martin wrote about rebasing off another distro because a slackware.com contributor wrote about the problems being due to an old server and finances.

Realistically, who wouldn't be worried after a year of semi-somnolence, long outages (in a distro that people use as a server because of its' bsd-like reputation... oh the irony), and a reply like that?

Ultimately, the original question - the lack of any activity for months at a time - hasn't been properly addressed. It's worse than the Mandriva situation - Mandriva continues to have timely bug fixes and security updates - on an almost daily basis - and their web site is always pretty responsive.

If there were only a few linux distros out there, maybe slack could make a come-back - but there are ~1,000 distros, many with much larger user bases, much more activity, that are far better supported. Unfortunately, in view of that, it's irresponsible to recommend slackware to anyone looking for a Linux distro, either for their own use, business, or as a base to build a spin-off, unless they're ready to assume the burden of maintaining and improving it going forward.

Linpus Linux is a commercial, Fedora-based distribution developed by Linpus Technologies, a Linux company with headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan and a development office in Shanghai, China. The product's main features are support for both traditional and simplified Chinese. Given that, it seems strange that they should sell it in Thailand, which is not a Chinese speaking country. Of course, if the sole purpose is to wipe out the drive, they could have announced that it's being installed w/ Tiny Core Linux or something like that, so that there's not much software to either install nor replace.

Anyone who says they don't know which version to recommend is a troll.

That's my official stand.

If you're using Linux, and you wanted to introduce a friend to Linux, then it's only natural you'd recommend the distro you run. Since you'll be supporting it. Or a user-friendly Linux in the same "family", and is well known.

For desktops, there's: Ubuntu, RH, SuSE, and Mint at or near the top. All offering slight differences, and most from different "families".

Then of course there is DistroWatch.

Any Linux user worth his/her salt knows these things.

The BS that "there are over 100 distros, what do I recommend?", whining is disingenuous. There are over 100 different makers of golf clubs, which do I recommend. There are over a 100 different restaurants in my area which one do I recommend? Etc. As PJ would say, puh-lease!

My wife is a total PC illiterate, and yet she has no problem using a Linux desktop. Then of course you have all those millions using Linux in smartphones and what not. Linux, in my opinion is way more user-friendly than Windows. On several list I belong to which are geek oriented (mostly old people searching genealogy), I am constantly reminded of how useful Linux is, by calls fro help from Windows users. Those of us on the list using Macs and Linux offer help to get them to a point where they can get close to the same functionality out of Windows, that is just a no-brainer in Linux or Macs. Ever tried printing to a file, and having a usable (ie can open in an OTS app) in Out-of-the-Box Windows? I can't be done. You get [filename].prn. PRN? WTF? Where's the PDF print? Oh you have to buy something to get that.

Besides, the market isn't in Desktops anymore. That is so 20th Century. The future is portables, which has, umm..., no real Windows footprint. It's all Apple and Linux baby. So KDE and Gnome better get their shit together, and get ports done. Like yesterday.

Some oddball internal thing written for consulting clients.... of some kind. She claimed that there'd be a public alpha of the thing in 2010 (called Yarok Bereshit, no kidding...). Either based on Salix or Slackware, although they [five people in total apparently with two developers total] did a bit of custom code. As of this spring it was still planned to produce a 'public release alpha at the end of this month.' Funny that someone who claims that any business without a website is doomed turns out to be developing a distro that either doesn't have a website or is so badly advertised that Google plain can't find it. End of the day, I have to agree with the shampoo AC below: who cares?

Ptheh. Money's overrated. Just slide a pizza under the door from time to time, and I'll do anything you want.

These days though - what use is network-computer style thin-clients ?

http://userful.com/ == I love these guys. They're here in my home town too. :-)

This was my baby: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=openlab

Cool. I spent C$80 just to ship Linux books I didn't need any more to people like you (Gareth, you out there?). My favourite gig was in Sudan ("The Greater Nile Business Venture" (TGNBV)). I enjoyed it so much, I didn't want to leave.

True, that's why I kept doing it for 6 years. These days though - what use is network-computer style thin-clients ?
They were a great idea back then, but not now.

This was my baby: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=openlab