Over the past week or two i have tried:
Fedora
Mandriva
Zenwalk
Mint Fluxbox (i beleive its 10)
Vector Linux
Some of them i installed more than once looking for the most stable linux flavor to run on the crappy hardware in this computer im using. Vector linux won hands down. Fedora and Mandriva werent even in the running, they have burdened a beautiful OS with needless layers of windows like cruft and i think the best use for their install disks (for me anyway) would be as coasters or frisbees.
Zenwalk came in second, the crappy video hardware (intel i915, we should form a support group, seriously) im using ran very fast on the version of xorg server packaged with it, it just didnt run very long
The Zenwalk package management software leaves alot to be desired as well imo. You cant install anythnig without being nagged about a hoard of dependencies. While i had Zenwalk installed i ended up installing most of the additional software i wanted from source and once ended up totally screwing the install by trying to update software with alot of x depenencies.
I still had to jump through alot of hoops to get things going on Vector, compiling libs and video drivers etc, the point being tho, that the Vector setup overall made it easier than any other distro, to scale those barriers.
So my apologies for the tone of my first posts, put it down to native idiocy and not being used to having to adjust to low end hardware. Before i came to vector i had a gentoo install that was about 4 years old that i had kept up to date and running on great hardware, so the intel linux video experience was a bit of a shock
I would especially like to apologize to rm -r, i was an ass, sorry.
I think im going to stick with vector through the next release, it impresses me as a forthright sort of distro with few quirks (the gentoo ebuild system is a little byzantine) thats as configurable as i need it to be, and has pretty good package management.
Anyway thats my intro
Thanks to the Vector team as well, impressive job !
Looking forward to the next release, hopefully ill be running it on better video hardware
