What's the best distribution?

[gbburkhardt at aaahawk.com (Glenn Burkhardt)]

Ah, yes.  The perennial question.

I stayed out the last time someone posted this question to the list, but I 
can't hold back anymore.

I like Mandrake.

But I didn't have any basis for comparison, which is why I bowed out before.  
And I just ran across several reviews...

But before I quote them, there are two items I do have personal experience 
with.

- Mandrake has supermount for removable media.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but 
the other distro's haven't adopted it.  It's a little thing, but makes my 
computer more friendly.

- Red Hat has had a habit of releasing code before it's ready for prime time. 
I use Linux commerically, and just don't have time for it.  There was the 
fiasco with the 2.96 gcc compiler.  And as soon as Gnome could compile, it 
was installed as the default desktop.  But the Gnome folks had decided to 
re-write anything that wasn't GPL'd, and they made mistakes and omissions. I 
found that they had re-written xdm, but forgot to install all the standard 
entrys in .Xauthority, so I couldn't run X applications remotely.  That's 
when I switched to Mandrake.

- Mandrake has included more window managers, filesystems, and applications 
(e.g., xemacs) than other distro's.

I found these notes on www.extremetech.com, who, in the end, rate Mandrake a 
9 (10 is highest), RedHat an 8, and SUSE a 7.

"Mandrake, Red Hat, and SuSE each have complete Control Centers. I personally 
find that Mandrake does the best job of simplifying and streamlining the way 
that their tools are used during installation. Mandrake's daily 
administration tools are organized in categories, (such as networks, 
printers, etc.). SuSE organizes their tools very well for day-to-day 
administration, categorizing and organizing each set of features together. 
SuSE keeps the same organization and displays an almost identical Control 
Center to configure the system during installation. While this is great for 
consistency, I believe it puts too much burden on an inexperienced software 
installer."

"SuSE also needs work with the overall GNOME setup. SuSE is easy to install, 
includes a great disk resizing wizard, is easy to set up, has a lot of useful 
software, and very good documentation. But it's just not as good as the 
others."

I stand ready to be flamed.