what is the best distro for HP laptop?

William Weaver williamdweaver-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Fri Dec 14 16:50:55 UTC 2012


I definately have to agree with Colin, and this is definately a topic that
is a hotbed for the which flavor tastes the best flamewar.

I want to offer the solution that was given to me when I asked "where do I
start." Take a distro tour.

Start at a site like distrowatch.com. If you are a complete linux noob, or
even if you're not, start cracking down the list of most popular distros.
Most of these will alow live CD/USB's to be made. Also Linux Live USB
Creator, found at http://www.linuxliveusb.com is pretty good for quickly
getting live USB installs quickly. With a USB key, a bag of cheetos, and a
free weekend you can easily get a quick taste of what using and
administering your potentially new system will be like. Set up a couple of
base administration tasks. I suggest a few things like install Chromium,
get Samba set up, add a service at startup, set a USB peripheral to mount
at boot, get a network printer installed and get wifi working with onboard
wifi/ usb wifi. Other people hopefully will chime in with more basic admin
tasks that they think will give you a good taste of what administering the
distro will be like.

I'd also like to point out that what GUI or WM it uses is not important to
me on the distro. Instead when I do my distro tour I try each GUI/WM
seperately to figure out what I like, then when I find the distro I like if
it doesn't use that GUI I will bolt it on.

This is the part that is entirely opinion. I'm not interested in a flame
war, just saying what my results of the tour was. Seriously if you just
want to flame I will not respond.

By the end of about 10 different distros/varients I realized I liked Arch
Linux. I felt like I was light weight and comfortably close to source
without doing Linux From Scratch or Slackware. I also love the pacman
package manager. That being said though I wasn't really feeling any of the
GUI/WM's I had tried until I tried the Enlightenment Window Manager. It was
comfortable in it's default form, and "easily" which is a relative
term, customizable for my wants as I'm kind of a minimalist person. I
learned that from playing with Bhodi linux. So where did I end up, my work
station environment is Arch running E17.

But because of the distro tour I run CentOS on my server, because from a
purely administrative standpoint, I like RedHat. I like that I can use the
same thing as alot of major companies, including the one I work for. Then
on my media center I'm running OpenElec after having switched off of Xbian
and RaspBMC, because I realized I am personally not a Debian guy.

Linux has alot of options, the best choice is the most well informed one,
and only you know what you like. With some many of these choices being free
as in beer, why not give each a taste. It only costs your time.

Will Weaver


On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 11:21 AM, Colin McGregor <colin.mc151-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 9:58 AM, bob295 <icanprogram-sKcZck+fQKg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > A colleague of mine has acquired a used HP laptop (HP Pavilion dv9000 AMD
> > Turion 64 x2 Mobile Tech TL-52 x2 1600 MHz).
> >
> > Any suggestions on what Linux distro would be best for this machine?
>
> If you were to ask 20 people "What the best flavour of ice cream?",
> you could get 20 legitimate, but different answers.
>
> I run Debian on my laptop, which for some is arguably not the "best",
> but I have been running Debian on my desktop, so I am familiar with
> where things are, how things are organized etc.. So, is your colleague
> familiar with a major distribution currently? That is where I would
> start, any MAJOR Linux distribution should be okay on a laptop, and
> the ease of transition from desktop to laptop could well be worth any
> minor defects the disto. has in dealing with laptops. If there is a
> show stopper with the desktop distro., then I would be looking at
> distributions from the same conceptual family, so if they know Debian,
> I would look at say Ubuntu, or if they know Red Hat then a look at
> Fedora/CentOS would be worth while.
>
> If they don't currently know a Linux distribution, then you are
> starting at square one, and a range of arguments can be made for
> different distributions. I would suggest your colleague stick with one
> of the major distributions (more likely to include support / updates
> for oddball laptop hardware), but comments on my part beyond that are
> likely to trigger an unwanted flame war...
>
>
> Colin McGregor
>
> > Thanks in advance for your help.
> >
> > bob
> > --
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