Personally I would recommend that you set up a partition scheme that
allows you to change out the os without losing data. For example,
1. /boot (100MB is way more than enough)
2. / (20-40G depending on distro and preferences)
3. /home (biggest)
4. swap
A separate /boot partition makes it easier to reinstall grub or a kernel
if needed, it also makes multi-booting easier. The / and /boot
partitions are the only things that will really change. Your /home will
have all your data. You'll want to delete or move your hidden folders
and it would be best to back up your hidden folders with settings or if
you use wine, the applications there. That way you won't get
configuration file issues on the next os. You could also use different
user names between different os so that the files are kept separate.
Personally if you're looking for a get to it and stick to it kind of os
for everyday use I would suggest straight up debian. Careful management
of a debian system will make the thing last forever. I have a friend
who invested a lot of time into a debian server and the thing has had
about 2 days of down time after 3 years of constant operation. Great
stuff, you'll want to know though that debian's stable is only good for
servers, desktops will want to use testing version at least.
Rpm? Mandriva maybe I've heard good about it. Opensuse has random
quality issues for me but I'm not going to knock em down for my
experience because I know its a dream for most people. Fedora is a pain
in the ass. You'll be updating upgrading and overhauling the damn thing
every day it seems to me. That is when the new software works to begin
with. One time a year back they released an update to the package
manager that broke it bad and had to reinstall the os to get the update
that fixed the previous issue.
As for my personal recommendations for exploration,
I would go with slackware, they take their time upgrading the os bits
and leave most other stuff up to the user. Its not as hard as it looks
but be warned you'll want to learn a bit about how compiling programs
work and how dependencies work too. Most everything after the os itself
is compiled by the user so that you can get the features you want in the
environment you want. This means large apps with tons of dependencies
make things insane during an upgrade but if you are a minimalist its a
good place to look. Better for desktops in my opinion but there are
plenty of folks who use it for their laptop because slackware is capable
of being twisted and abused a bit to get things to work. A good
tinkerer's os.
Good luck in your distro hoppin.
-Matt
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