A few months ago, I decided it was time to replace the aging distro on my Linux box. So I fired up VirtualBox and tried out a bunch of them. I was looking for an elegant, high performance distro without any bloat. After trying dozens of distros, I found three that were really interesting: ZenWalk, SimplyMEPIS, and Debian Etch.
Yes, I tried Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu. Of the three, only Ubuntu was stable enough for me to use for long periods of time. While Ubuntu is a very nice distro, I found it to be a tad bloated with apps, as well as being one of the slowest performing distros I tried. I didn't bother to find out why.
ZenWalk, a Slackware-based distro, is the ultimate Linux distro for me. It was the fastest distro I tried, by a long shot, perhaps partly because it defaults to the XFS file system instead of ext3. Its "one app per task" policy virtually eliminates bloat. Its package management is quite minimal compared to other distros, though it works perfectly. It has all of the necessary build tools configured and ready to run, and I've been able to download and build new apps easily. The ZenWalk forums are active and friendly, and after using a Red Hat based distro for years, I had forgotten just how easy it is to configure a Slackware-based system. But its the level of polish that really sold it for me. The entire distro uses one clean XFCE theme, with UI and font consistencies throughout all apps. ZenWalk is the best Linux distro I've ever used, and is the one I installed on my Linux box.
SimplyMEPIS is an Ubuntu-based full desktop distro. Unlike ZenWalk, SimplyMEPIS seems to include every modern popular Linux app you could think of. And being based on Ubuntu, you have access to all of the Ubuntu packages via the Synaptic package manager. It does a great job of integrating the apps with its clean, KDE-based desktop, which I prefer to Ubuntu's Gnome desktop. Somehow, SimplyMEPIS is also a bit faster than Ubuntu. If you were considering Ubuntu (or especially Kubuntu), give SimplyMEPIS a shot instead.
If you like the idea of stable package management, minimal bloat, and good performance, Debian Etch is the distro for you. I downloaded the minimal "net install" version of Debian, which installs a simple command line distro. To compare performance with ZenWalk, I formatted the partitions with the XFS file system, and used apt to download packages that matched ZenWalk's default applications (including the XFCE desktop). All in all, I was able to reasonably mimic the elegance of ZenWalk in Debian Etch, and felt that performance was also close. Compared to Xubuntu, Debian Etch was a far nicer alternative.
The beauty of Linux is that there is probably a distro out there made just for you - you don't have to settle for Red Hat or Ubuntu. Just look at the amazing list of available distros over on DistroWatch. For me SimplyMEPIS and Debian Etch are great alternatives to Ubuntu. But ZenWalk is exactly the distro I was looking for.
Try Linux Mint at http://linuxmint.com:URL . It is also based on Ubuntu and has media support Ubuntu does not. There are Gnome and KDE versions of Bianca in both full and light editions.
