Choosing a personal distro, comments appreciated

[Deadly Ferret]

I have been on linux.org, looking at the different distros. I'm currently trying to decide between Ark Linux and the Fedora Project, both of which I like the sound/look of.

I used Linux for a few months about three years ago, tried Mandrake, SuSe, and Gentoo. I never really got to grips with it, and found it too unwieldy. Nowadays though I tend to only use my machine for four tasks: browsing, email, watching media, playing music - so I reckon it's time to use it again as I can't really go wrong just doing those things, and I'm sick of worrying about security with Windows.

Anyway, if anybody informed has any opinions on which of the two above distros is best, whether based on ease of use, security, or anything else, I'd appreciate reading them. (Or if there is a distro which you think would suit me more.)

Oh yeah, when I used Linux before I quite liked the dark shell (Black Box?), so I'd hope that the one I end up using has it available.


PS: Please don't suggest Ubuntu. I can't put my finger on it, but there's something about it I just don't like.

 

[Deadly Ferret]

Thanks for your suggestions everybody. I've been playing around with various installs over the last day or two, and had quite a few problems caused by Ark Linux. I don't know how it did it, but somehow it asserted itself into the computer, such that it came up with its copyright message whenever I was booting from a CD. This seemed to cause problems with the Fedora and SuSe discs I had also made before wiping Windows. It wasn't the MBR, because I tried different HDDs on their own, and a CMOS reset didn't kill it either.

In the end, I put Windows back on and get hold of Debian. That has installed successfully and that's what I'm on now. Got some teething problems of course, but I'll start a seperate thread for those.

I'll see how I go with this, and might try Mint and/or Arch soon when I've regained a bit of familiarity with Linux.

Thanks again.