Well in my boredom, in the last week, I decided to try out Slackware 8.1, FreeBSD 4.7, and Suse Live 8.1. Slackware went on my laptop, FreeBSD went on my old 200mhz monster, and SuSe Live temporarily went on my father's 1.8 ghz Pentium 4 box.
Slackware is as good as I heard, and runs much faster than my Mandrake Linux box. KDE runs smoother and applications opened a lot faster. However I did have trouble getting the sound to work. The install is all text based, but not at all very difficult. I went ahead and installed the 2.4.20 linux kernel on my Slackware laptop, but I had a little difficulty. When I installed the new kernel in Mandrake, a new lilo entry was automatically created. This was not the case in slackware. How do I edit lilo to offer the new kernel option at boot time?
FreeBSD had a very tricky install. For people like Void Main who know their *nix better than I do, it probably wouldnt have been nearly as hard. My main difficulty came in setting up X. After the install was complete, I logged in and typed "startx". At this point the most archaic window manager I had seen in years popped up. I installed sawfish and gnome, so how do I get those up and working?
The SuSE Live evaluation CD showed me that SuSE makes a linux that compares in functionality with Mandrake and Red Hat. It easily detected all of my father's hardware including a USB printer and mouse, a DVD Player, and a 24X cd burner. The only thing it didnt detect however was the network interface card. His computer has a nic that is integrated with the system board. Are integrated nic's known for compatibility problems?
As I write this Im downloading Debian which I will test on my laptop, and OpenBSD which will go on my current FreeBSD box. My goal is to find an OS that will replace Mandrake as my server and desktop. So far Slackware is winning.