some best linux reviews from people around the world..................

u never forget your first love, as the old saying goes, and that appears to apply just as well to Linux as to relationships in real life.

To wit: "What was your first Linux distro?" is the title of a recent "Voice of the Masses" poll over at Linux Voice, and throughout the blogosphere the nostalgic reminiscences have been pouring forth ever since.

Some 100 bloggers used Linux Voice's comments section to proclaim their first Linuxy loves for all the world to hear. Others got teary-eyed recounting their first tender distro moments down at the Punchy Penguin Cafe.

Luckily, Linux Girl was there to record it all for posterity.

'It Did a Lot of Things Well'

"Back in the day there was the distro aimed at getting people going for the first time called Mandrake, and that was my first one," began Google+ blogger Kevin O'Brien, for example.

"It did a lot of things well, but ultimately was underfunded," O'Brien explained.

Nevertheless, "from it I took two lessons: 1) I really likeKDE more than any other desktop; and 2) I really don't like RPMs.

"Fortunately, Kubuntu came along and gave me a good combination of those factors," he added. "It has other problems, of course, but I have stuck with it as my main distro for years now."

'Better Than Win XP'

Similarly, "I actually encountered FreeBSD first, and might have gone that way exclusively had I been able to download it -- I was still on dial-up -- or if I had been willing to buy the discs," Google+ blogger Brett Legree recounted.

"However, I happened across a Linux magazine at a local shop that included a TON of distros," Legree told Linux Girl. "The first one that worked on my hardware of the day was Mandrake. Those were the days..."

SoylentNews blogger hairyfeet also started out on Mandrake, but "the best distro I ever used, the ONLY distro I had ever seen that could do in-place upgrades without trashing its own drivers, was Xandros," he said.

"Xandros Business was frankly better than Win XP in a lot of ways," hairyfeet opined. "It hooked to AD domains quicker than XP, had great Exchange support, could even switch between Windows, KDE and OSX layouts with a simple switch flip -- truly a great OS.

"It's sad that nothing today can match up to a decade-old OS, but none of the so-called 'user-friendly' distros come even close to the quality of