What's the best distro?

[Calum]

I love asking this question!

anyway, i used fedora for years before recently turning to Mandriva 2008 only to find it is even more buggy and unpredictable than Fedora (which was: not much, but enough).

Now. I plan to replace good old harvey the desktop machine because he's past it, to be frank, and that's an opportunity to update my O/S too. there must be dozens by now i've not tried. My needs are:

it has to have a really good online package updating framework, like apt or urpmi.
it should be as resource lenient as possible, but i suppose it should have gnome and kde, mainly for the libraries, but most importantly it should have XFce or an easily installable XFce environment via the package management framework i mentioned above.
As few "quirks" as possible, and not one of those distros that tries to be windows, at the expense of functionality and/or stability.

So, not just "what's best", but more importantly, please tell me why. what's your favourite distro, and please tell me a bit about it.

thanks in advance.

[Master of Reality]

debian - for the package management system, solid if your cool with a wee bit older packages (still pretty recent in testing build) and awesome package system. Rarely i've had bugs in dist-upgrading but it has great package system.

I use Kubuntu on my desktop because it has newer packages and pretty themes and such. Also there is an xfce version of ubuntu that makes it easy to have the stuff you would want with xfce (thunar, etc). Not quite as many packages in the repos as debian i think. and sometimes theres bugs (at least if you install the betas as i do)

[Calum]

thanks, i think i will go with that recommendation, do you know i got banned from linuxquestions.org for asking this? actually i got banned because i didn't agree with moderator trickykid that people were mature enough to discuss their best distro choices in a meaningful way. (to clarify: he thinks this question should never be asked because it only gets immature responses, i do not agree at all).

children.

[Void Main]

It's only an immature response if they answer "Windows". :)

[Ice9]

Actually if it's not too late you might consider Sidux, it's based on Debian unstable (100% compatible because pure Debian sources are used, no ubuntu/kubuntu modified versions) and it's amazingly stable.
I've been running it for a while now and it's tightly managed by a very active community, plus you would have the very latest packages out there.

dist-upgrades are managed by a quite advanced script (smxi) which basically secures everything when problems arise in "unstable" land.

[Master of Reality]

I think i have a thing against RPMs (or maybe YUM? ).


But also, i just started using KDE 4.1 Beta and i am quite enjoying it. Still a lot of things that need to be updated. And supposedly it should be more memory efficient than kde3 because of qt4??