The Most Elegant Linux Distribution

i've tried out a few distributions of Linux and i'm just curious what you guys think is the most elegant distribution?so far i think Linux Mint is probably the best in my opinion

What do you mean when you say "elegant"?Wearing Blue Suede Shoes?Or a nice graphical display?Or a smart way installing with easily automated setup?Yordan

sorry, i mean nicely laid out GUI and ease of use...

LOL@Yordan By the way beauty of linux operating system is that no matter what distro you use, basic stay the same. You don't have much learning curve from one to another version of kernel update. All you have to do is keep up with the window managers and their respective changes. That is all one needs with linux. Otherwise terminal life is still the same and i'm sure that those who love linux for the terminal are still using it for the same reason. Window manager are evolved with time, take case of gnome and KDE. Both are undergone some changes which have lots of learning curve and for average linux user it is quite uneasy to digest. I guess this thing happens with almost everyone using another OS as well and much more in comparison to the linux.What i like about linux is it's decentralization. I can cookup my own linux distro and use it on vmware or directly on any hard disk. Also i can choose the apps i want to use on linux. In case of windows or apple, when they make big changes and drop apps or features it becomes hard for us to get back. In case of linux we have plenty of options and most likely many good things like apps and features are still there. YOu're not tied to any service or company. You just get it from any source possible. That is the reason slowly i am planning to move to linux. As windows 8 is going to break many things in future like OEM boot keys and metro UI etc.As for your question of most elegant linux distribution, i think Ubuntu with unity desktop seems to be the way to go. I do think mint and mephis are good. But i guess opensuse, fedora are too heavy for my needs.

i'm trying out openSUSE 11.4 with KDE - looks elegant... heard some positive reviews on it... and also i just wanna tryout RPMs...

Edited September 29, 2011 by manuleka (see edit history)

i'm trying out openSUSE 11.4 with KDE - looks elegant... heard some positive reviews on it... and also i just wanna tryout RPMs...

Dear Friends:

I think the best is:

Dreamlinux-5

http://www.dreamlinux.info/

It is wanderfull!!!

Dreamlinux is XFCE based so yes, its got to be good on low end machines. I do think that now a days xfce is quite high on the system so 256 on wards should be the ram. I have used on 1GB of RAM and noticed that there is no way to check the performance difference between them.You will notice that they are quite the same at the performance even though there is increase in the RAM amount. I do think there should be program like ubuntu friendly that checks the system for the hardware and parts and certifies if it is valid for the respective hardware.In case of dreamlinux there seems to be no way of checking that as there is no such checking program. I would love to check if there is any local group or software that runs programs like ubuntu friendly and manages the certification for other distros. In any case, dreamlinux is good for low end system as there is XFCE. So yes, if anyone is in need of low end machine then this is good system for them to work with. I will check it's performance over virtual machine if i get time.

I think ubuntu is quite elegant as well. For me visual elegance is a secondary thing. I need the extra bit of performance and reliability and I can trade them for visual effects. So for me ubuntu is the best deal.

Ubuntu after version 11.04 has higher system requirements. So with gnome 3 and unity 2 the system has to be new or with some higher RAM and GPU. So that way old machines are less likely to work on that. In case of xubuntu, it works fine on the older machine as well as newer machine. The dream linux which was explained in the previous reply was one more distribution that uses xfce and is quite fast in my opinion to run on older machine.Enlightenment desktop or xfwm or openbox based distributions are the one with some higher limit but they do run on the old or limited hardware too. In case of puppy linux which works like a perfect desktop machine from the USB or similar media can be alternative. As the puppy linux only takes around 122 mb or lower system resoources for both HD and RAM.In case of ubuntu, pentium 3 or pentium 4 machines are less likely to run the precisse pangolin which is version 12.04 releasing this monday. As per my test, it is hard to see that working on pentium based computer, so i suggest xfce or openbox or say lxde based distrubution. LXDE is lightweight and good distro compared to ubuntu. LXDE flavor of ubuntu is called lubuntu, you can check it out.

I think ubuntu is quite elegant as well. For me visual elegance is a secondary thing. I need the extra bit of performance and reliability and I can trade them for visual effects. So for me ubuntu is the best deal.

then i would suggest you test XUBUNTU... try it out on VMWare and tell me what you think of its performance, and always remember that if installed on Hard Disk (Dual boot with Windows) they perform a lot faster...

Other than the Login Ugliness... the Desktop layout is quite nice one you're in hehe