Which Linux to use?

#1 Noooooooooooooooooo. NEVER, EVER ASK THIS QUESTION!

#2 Pick one of the following: Suse, Mandriva, Debian for ease of installation and use.

#3 Fedora Core is very easy to use and Setup. Comes with all the new Developer tools, but so far I know not how to use them. I too am a Linux Newbie.

#4 Lol @ FruitBatInShades

#5 Ok thanks, we will test a couple of those. What about the second question: Is a game tested on one Linux flavour likely to work also on other Linux flavours? Anyone have experience of this?

#6 Works awesome on my Debian system. I use Kdevelop and Eclipse I like them both, but mainly Eclipse. I like Debian because apt-get is the best package manager in my opinion, and Debian is VERY stable.

#7 Debian Is one of the easiest to install, especially if you are able to do livecd.

#8 Mandriva LE is quite nice if you want common hardware like 5.1 soundblaster live cards to work out of the box and nice things like NTFS partition access automagically done. It really saves the noob the problems of have to put up with crap sounds and only FAT32 acess etc.

Apt-get isn't the only cool software manager out there, yum, urpmi and so on and so on are all pretty good.

The simple fact is that they are all great when compared to windows.

P.S. I would really like to see Debian stable not be so out of date.

#9 @Joakim: Actually building binarys for Linux so that it works across multiple Linux Distributions is a pain in the holy butt. But if you are just starting making your game you shouldn't be worrying about this stuff at all. The basic idea to distribute, compile in an old distro and provide libopenal.so libogg.so libvorbis.so and libstdc++.so

#10 I use SuSe, because it's easy to use. Fedore Core or redhat is easier to set up a server on. I never could figure out how to hardware accelerate my ATi card on linux (i could for my nvidia), If you're not very good @ linux you should check if all or atleast the needed drivers are in the distribution, so the setup installs them for you.

@FruitBatInShades
lol yea, asking what distribution to use is dangerous these days. Before you know it you have a 30 page thread.

#11 I'm a fan of Ubuntu, which is Debian-based. It has the most painless installation of any Linux distro I've used yet (including Mepis which is also easy to get up and running most of the time).

#12 I'm on Ubuntu nowadays because I finally decided I need something stable yet polished. It has worked for me. =) Far from the only distro that lives up to those criteria though, the only thing it would have an edge on is having the latest for free while also being an end-user distro. I loved Gentoo, but I just kept breaking stuff. Lots of fun, but have to be productive now and then too. =)

#13 I am using Fedora core 3. There are some serious issues with CD writing, auto mounting of scsi drive devices, and sound for torque always gives me an error. I still have not figured out the sound issues. I am going to try core 4 in a bit to see if it fixes some of those issues. I have torque under Mandrake 9 or 10 and it works perfectly there on another machine. Alas, mandrake is pricing me out of their market.

#14 Gentoo all the way :)
If you want to learn all there is to learn about linux, this is it baby.

First you download the kernel source, compile it.
Now you have a command prompt.
Download the source to X11.org compile it, go to bed, wake up, go to work. It may be done when you get home.
Configure the config files by hand.
Download your favorite desktop. Compile all night.... configure by hand..
etc

:)

#15 Mandriva Free and PowerPack 2007 is OK for Torque as well. Nice distribution, easy to use, maintain and install. Check also the follow forum to fix some issues common to any Linux flavour:

www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=52962

#16 I use CentOS 4.4 with the Nvidia modules and the engine runs great. I compile it with gcc3.4 and I'm using 32bit kernel.

#17 Ubuntu
easy installation ( click click )
good really good community (forums wikis etc)
excellent development environment ( integrated and normalized [ qt gtk gl mesa sdl etc etc] )
all the Debian back ports packages ( alot of programs and packages )
just only one disk

OR SUSE but there are touched by the evil :P

#18 I agree with Jonathan Andres Garay Mendoza, I'm using Ubuntu now on a multi Boot system with Windows. easy access to files is a time saver.

#19 Mandriva One 2008

Ubuntu - Kubuntu are having issues for me since 7.04 in a way thats inacceptable (not correctly supporting the hardware even thought its an Intel reference notebook).

Mandriva was a painless "install and run -> including full 3D acceleration and Compiz Fusion" experience

I've been suggestion ubuntu in the past as well but the 07er releases definite cured that on my end ...