I use SuSE 9.2 pro, I do not have any problems with it at the moment

What do you use? Why do you use it? What would you recommend in your chosen distributive? Why would you not recommend another? Driver compatibilities?

Thank you!

Debian from the edge installed via Mepis 3.3

Linux has been a project of mine for a number of years now and I've always primarily been interested in it's evolving capabilities to replace windows, mac and the like on the PC desktop. Part of that from my perspective is how well it works from a "serious" gamer's point of view.

That said I've tried just about every distro labeled as "easy to install" and featuring lots of guified admin tools targeted at the newer users. Mandrake was my favorite for years, primarily for it's inclusion of the best bleeding edge software and i586 optimization (who really games on a 386 any more??!)

Planning to one day throw together a 64 bit gaming machine I needed a 64 bit distro. Debian has always been known as being "stable" and has an incredibly vast range of softwares available for it... and last but not least a 64 bit version is also available, for free. Time to learn debian (even a 32 bit version)!

Mepis is a single "live" cd optimized for upper end hardware with a relatively painless harddrive installation and some great support communities. It became my choice distro to build on and has remained so for over a year now.

Driver support is fairly good although still missing some support found in other distros: My wife runs Ubuntu (with some mepis packages) solely due to the fact that it picks up her USB camera flawlessly where Mepis would not, for instance. One of my kids runs Mepis as well and it has also been our print/file/multimedia server distro for nearly a year as well (closing in on 3 months of uptime at the moment.)

As a gaming distro, provided the right hardware is found, I haven't seen anything faster including my dual boot win2K SP3 install which I haven't even touched in over two months. Off a fresh install + the current nvidia drivers (included on the live cd) I can hit glxgears well over 7000fps, nearly 2000 higher than my last Mandrake install (as well as Fedora Core and even other debian based distros such as Knoppix, Ubuntu and Progeny) at the same resolution and desktop settings. Why? I haven't a clue.

Sweet stuff though.

Gentoo all the way, customize everything, update anything without rebooting, from gcc to xfree, automatically calculated deps. Also fast like the blazes.

Used to use Slackware which is also good but a bit back on updated packeges.

MAN not having Debian on that pole is like a big "faux pas"
<- Debian Sarge

I used gentoo, I have tried basicly every distrobution out there and gentoo just suits my tastes. The fact that I install everything from scratch was a big plus, with most distro's you are thrown in with a bunch of packages that I personaly would never use. Customability, right now I am on gentoo, with enlightenment 0.17 installed (from the cvs via portage) with basicly every application that I use on a daily basis nothing else. Also I like that it runs like a top, starts up for me everyday without problems slow downs, random errors that I can't seem to figure out what is causing it. Also when all hell breaks loose I can fix it within half an hour, and if I can't figure it out forum.gentoo.org is the best place to find support for anything. If something goes wrong there is something the there telling you how to fix it.

The downsides of gentoo linux is that everything takes abit longer to install since your compiling from the source code with optimisations or use flags that you wish to have, which is a big plus and a big minus at the same time. If you don't know what your doing you could run into alot of problems down the road.

My little linux story, I have been messing with linux since the age of 15, being a gamer it was hard for me to make the switch, I wanted to use it but I really didn't. I saw all of the benefits of using an open source operating system but I still loved the Microsoft API for it's game support along with Direct X, D3D, and all those other various things that went with the microsoft operating system. But there were some things that really pissed me off, like how I would have to format my system once every 3 months just to keep it up to a useible speed, the completely dumbed down way of doing things, how if something went wrong with the operating system (EG. Ever had Internet explorer randomly for no appairent reason stop working?) you basicly had to format the hard drive to get everything working again. Spyware, virus's, and other malware is primarly targeted at windows users so I very rarely run into a virus that will give me any problems (big plus!). Security is wonderful on linux IPCHAINS (Although replaced in the new kernels but still the ipchains file still works) although not the easiest thing in the world does give you great control of what gets into your computer and what doesn't. Although I wish we would see alot more out of the wine and cedega projects for quickly supporting new software and games, but I do understand what they are trying to do it's like recreating the wheel. I also don't like the way microsoft handles their buisness practices and how they ae planning to restrict the user even more. So I don't have any version of windows installed on my computer anymore. But with my new gaming rig comming up in the future I will probably have to bite the bullet to play my favorite games and modifications.

Peace
Kozuka

Mandriva. Works great!

Debian, because I can.

Redhat, I have it on disk so... I have that so.. dunno.. Im not a linux user.

Linux is a kernel, for one. Distributions only provide updated packages or glue apps to pull together the initial installation.

A better question would be:

What Window Manager and/or Desktop do you use?
KDE
Gnome
Enlightenment
WM2
XFCE
...
(more http://xwinman.org/ )

I have yet to see a device driver not work across any particular kernel version, ie. what Linux really is. The distro is just a box with wrapping paper and a url to grab updates, which they got from the original author in source form.

I currently use 2.6.11-13smp, which I built from source. The original install was Mandrake 2005le (alumni from 7.2 days) but the only things really left is their Perl admin stuff (very nice). On top of that, I run KDE 3.2 with all the candy turned on.

As for performance and why graphics cards run better on a Windows install is purely business. Vendors like Microsoft buddy up with the device peeps in the market to make their shite smell better...and it _usually_ does. I get better fps in Quake3 running Linux 2.6 than I did with my _very_ trusty W2K (odd?). That is, of course using nVidia's closed source drivers...which probably have undisclosed M$ code in there somewhere.

GENTOO POWAAAA

But why you didn't put a gentoo section, I can't vote

ubuntu because most things just work straight away without much effort, more so than any other distro i've ever used

use Crux (http://crux.nu) for about an year now, why? its not as bloated as other distros i think.. well, i think about changing to freebsd but i am not yet sure about that.
@nugjar: using pekwm on xfree86 4.6, 2.6.17.13-my_own

Gentoo is a very interesting Distribution and you learn a lot about your Computer.

Slackware 11 linux 2.6.18, Fluxbox 1.0rc

Ubuntu is a ancient African word for, "I really like Debian, but am to lazy to configure it."