Yeah, Parabola isn't for everyone by any means, though I think it might be
for me if I could figure out how to install it.
But basically, the free distros to choose from that are worth looking at are
Trisquel, gNewSense, Ututo, Dragora, and Parabola. BLAG is horribly
out-of-date, dyne:bolic is out-of-date and not meant to be installed, and
Musix is not meant to be installed and focused on one application.
Out of those distros that are worth looking at, they each have certain
niches:
- gNewSense is a Debian-based distro, and it supports non-x86 architectures.
It's a little out-of-date at the moment (the "beta" is based on Debian 6
"Squeeze") because of a delay involving developers leaving or something, but
it's picking up speed recently, so I guess it will catch up to Debian Stable
soon enough.
- Ututo's information is all in Spanish, I think, so I don't know much and
haven't tried it, but it's based on Gentoo.
- Parabola is the bleeding-edge distro, based on Arch.
- Dragora is an independent KISS distro, supposedly similar to Slackware in
its design.
- Trisquel is a stable beginner and intermediate user's distro, based on
Ubuntu.
The reason Trisquel is so widely recommended and supported is not because
it's inherently better or more special than the other major choices. Each of
these distros I've mentioned have their own niches, and Trisquel's is being
very easy to install and use, which makes it perfect for recommending to
people in general. But that doesn't mean that it's the best choice for
everyone; actually, some people here prefer to use Parabola. If you use and
like Slackware, I think you might want to give Dragora a shot.
