Best Operating System

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Fedora is not among my favorites. It's a solid distro, I'll grant it that, but I like having the vast, extensive repositories that Debian-based distros enjoy.

Arch Linux.

Ubuntu is just a major load of s**t, it has come along way but its still got along way to go. The problem with Debian is sometimes the patching of the software doesn't work out to the best. Most things that Fedora doesn't have in their repository can be found in 3rd party repositories or you can just compile from source.

Exactly! I want to spend countless hours compiling someone elses software, which may or may not be malicious. After 2 hours it might fail, which will fill me to the brim with joy, and I can puzzle over the sparse esoteric error reporting, then start over again.

Its how I get my kicks.

I like Ubuntu (Live) and VistaPE... any Live OS really.

ReactOS looks cool, but it seriously need better USB support (USB Sticks and USB harddrives) as well as NTFS support. Also tried a few PortableApps in it, but none of them would work.

Doesn't have to be Ubuntu, could just as well be Debian. I'm on Mint at the moment. But really, Ubuntu is a nice distro, aside from a few lingering annoyances. Debian (and derived distros) have a crapload of software available out of the box, all of it maintained to very high standards. Fedora, I can't really say the same. The only chess engine available is the relatively weak GnuChess, they don't have the eboard-extras pack (and eboard itself had some really bizarre bugs under Fedora), and scid isn't in there at all. It makes using Fedora as a chess enthusiast a serious hassle. In any Debian-based distro, I'm quickly up and running with 9 or so powerful engines, scid for my databases, eboard with the extras pack, etc. Of course I know that my chess software is a niche thing, but presumably Fedora fails to deliver for other niches as well. Unlike Debian, they don't have Scilab or XPP, both of which I need for my scientific work. Unless your needs are quite basic, you will likely find that Fedora's repos don't provide everything you need.

As far as 3rd-party repos, I prefer when possible to stick to a distro's main repositories, since those are more trustworthy (less likely to break dependencies, etc) and if I wanted to compile everything I'd run Gentoo.

I dunno, I just don't see what Fedora really offers... I like their commitment to free software, but I can get that by using Debian, and to be honest I do like starting up Mint and actually having working Flash.

Well I haven't really had any problems with Fedora, I have had more issues with Ubuntu. I use the RPMFusion repo, which the Fedora community say creates no dependencies issues and is rather trustworthy.

I enabled RPMFusion when I was on Fedora too. It did not contain a single one of the missing packages I just listed. I remember getting stuff like VLC from it (why, for goodness' sake, would VLC be excluded from the main repo?) And of course Fedora is pretty much dead on PPC, while Debian still fully supports my paleolithic iMac.

I've run into issues with Ubuntu/Debian/Mint too, but you get issues with any distro and any OS. For me, having access to all the software I need is essential.

I understand where you are coming from, I was like WTF when I first ran into that. But it doesn't bother me at all, its only a few extra commands in the terminal to enable RPMFusion.

Sure, but even with RPMFusion there are a lot of packages missing in Fedora. Where's Scilab? Where's Sjeng and Toga II and Stockfish and scid?

I just enable the MOM repository. Your MOM has it all.

except the robot support I can get on Linux

I like anything that is *Nix based (Linux, Mac OS X, *H*ack OS X, *bsd, Rhapsody). OS/2 Warp looks pretty interesting, but i dont have a copy of it . I am a windows hater, but I have to use it.

*Typed on a Hackintosh*

You just pwned yourself Eggy. You missed the whole joke. I was making crude references towards your MOM.

lol. Why do I see visions of the crude trolls of OXhorns?

OS/2 or "half an operating system" like they used to call it

OS/2 was sort of nice, it had multithreading and a good filesystem (HPFS) when Windows 3.1 had...ehmm..Paintbrush. I remember IBM handing out free copies of OS/2 rev 2, 3 and Warp (4) at expos.