Recommended Linux Distribution for Current Mandriva 2011.0 User

[Brad Fonseca]

Hello,

I'm hoping the folks on this list might be able to help me with a 
suggestion. I'm looking to move to a new Linux distribution.

I have been using the Mandriva distribution for a number years since it 
was called Mandrake and it was in version 8.0. Recently, I have been 
happily using Mandriva 2011.0 ("Hydrogen"). I just discovered that the 
home user version of Mandriva (Mandriva Powerpack 20xx) is no longer 
being supported or updated (my update manager is no longer receiving 
updates) as it has reached its end of life. In addition, Mandriva has 
taken the decision to focus on their corporate products and are no 
longer producing a home version.

I have determined that there are a couple forks that have started since 
the Open Mandriva (http://www.openmandriva.org), which just got started 
earlier this year, and Mageia (http://www.mageia.org), which started in 
September 2010 and has had two major releases.

Now that you have the background, I have a few questions that I'm hoping 
to have answered:

1. What is this group's opinion of either Open Mandriva or Mageia? Would 
it make sense to move to one of these distributions seeing as they are 
forks of a distribution I am very familiar with?

2. If I wanted to try a new distribution what is the recommendation of 
this group? I would like a distribution that will be the least 
troublesome (e.g. stable) and will support the most peripherals. I use 
Chrome as my browser so I don't expect too much issue there. I'm a hobby 
coder so having access to a decent set of IDEs would be nice, especially 
ones supporting Python. I currently use Dr. Python as I like the 
interface and I'm really just trying to practise things I'm learning in 
Python currently. Having an IDE that would support other programming 
languages would be nice too. I'm used to using a "Package Manager" to 
both update my system and add new applications so I would prefer to use 
a distribution that provides this feature

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated. I know the discussion 
can get quite heated when it comes to favoured distributions. I hoping 
that the suggestions put forward will take into account my few 
requirements.

Thanks,

Brad
-- 
Brad Fonseca
Tel: 416-876-2191
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists