What distro and why?

[sedrosken]

For the Linux nerds among us, what distro are you using, and why do you feel that it was the best choice?

I'm using Ubuntu MATE (though I have been known to use Arch and variants of Debian/Ubuntu/Mint in the past) because with an Ubuntu base things didn't take hours upon hours just to set up on my end. Frankly I believe Ubuntu gets better support than Arch so if anything DOES go horribly wrong I should be able to better be able to fix it. There's something to be said for the pure simplicity Arch provides in the way of installing and removing packages (i.e. no futzing about with repositories once you have an AUR helper, always being on the bleeding edge so bugfixes come faster, etc.) but I usually don't deviate from a standard image once I have everything set up how I want. Just about EVERYTHING has some sort of Ubuntu package; as a matter of fact, this is what many AUR entries are derived from. And I get MATE out of the box without using Mint, which I detest for forcing you to use Yahoo in Firefox unless you remove a very specific application from the system and just in general don't like.

I'm pretty open though, and will admit that I have tried nothing in the RedHat/Fedora or SuSE families, though I might if someone shoots me a recommendation. What do they have that Ubuntu or Arch and their ilk don't?

Sorry if this is a rehash, I haven't looked very far in the forum history as far as checking for a redundant topic. Heck, I might have even started it myself if there was one, but my memory is apparently rather short if I did.

 

[timwhit]

I ran Fedora for a few years. There was something constantly wrong with it and updates frequently broke functionality. PulseAudio never worked right.

I then ran OpenSuse for a couple years and it was fine until I did an upgrade install and couldn't get NFS working no matter what I tried.

I ran KDE with both Fedora and OpenSuse.

I ran Mint for a bit, but it was the first version of Mate and it wasn't terribly polished.

I switched to Xubuntu a few years ago. It's been the most stable Linux I've run yet. Updates almost never cause issues. It's easy to find answers to questions and any software available for Linux works with Ubuntu.

I run Xubuntu on my work laptop (used for software development), home htpc, and home desktop. I generally don't mess around with things unless they are broken or I need to update to the next LTS version.

If you want to tinker a lot this may not be the best distro for you. If you want something that just works then I like Xubuntu.

 

[sedrosken]

Ubuntu MATE seems a little more fully featured for a marginal requirements increase than Xubuntu, otherwise that's no doubt what I'd be on myself. XFCE is simply superb, but I found that I preferred several MATE applications to their suggested XFCE counterparts and found that the functionality from XFCE that I especially enjoyed was also in MATE and that it simply took just a little more work to be enabled. If there was an LTS version of Ubuntu MATE, I'd be on it, but it was only recently (post 14.04) accepted as an official Ubuntu flavor so the pre-merge builds aren't supported at all. That and the kernel included with stock 15.04 causes my hardware to freeze randomly even after I fixed the RAM issue, had to manually update to kernel 4.0.1 to fix it, although it's possible that switching to the proprietary nVidia drivers for my GPU also fixed it since I did both at the same time.

 

[timwhit]

You can use XFCE and install the MATE applications you want. I run Dolphin on XFCE.

 

[sedrosken]

I know, but if I don't need to then I don't particularly want to. Less work for me, y'know?

 

[Chewy509]

Work desktops are all Ubuntu 14.04 (w/GNOME or Unity as the user prefers), simply that's what everyone in the office knows... (lowest common denominator). We do have a number of RHEL/CentOS/Suse/Gentoo/Debian VMs for testing as well...

Home is Arch Linux, GNOME3 on the desktop, OpenBox (with tint2 as the panel) on the netbook.

Prefer Arch, as they do very few modifications/patches (if any) to upstream projects when it comes to packaging, so things tend to just work as the original developers intended. Also, you start from basically a bare minimal install, and only install what's needed. And to be honest, most of my software needs are met by what's in the main repositories and rarely have to touch AUR (only had to for Epson printer/scanner drivers).

I've found the Arch wiki to be very good (and generally kept up to date really well), and the forums are well maintained and civil when issues occur...

 

[sedrosken]

I personally loved Arch Linux. Well, love. I can't say that I don't, it's delightfully minimalistic and I have a bit of a thing for minimalist operating environments. I didn't consider it this time around mostly because I simply didn't think of it (and tried to justify my laziness afterward), but I suppose I could probably just do an in place install since my /home is on the HDD by renaming my home directory (and moving the contents to the new home directory after installation and my user is created), not formatting the /home partition and formatting / when I go to install it. Might be a project for this weekend, though I can't proclaim to care all that much for the install process. It's very true what you said about Arch, Chewy: they keep the Linux experience as stock as it can get without making it ungodly difficult to install things. I actually use the AUR for most of my games, such as the OpenMW engine for Morrowind, EDuke32 and GZDoom.

I can't say I care for GNOME 3 all that much. It's stable enough and it works the way it should, I just don't like how it makes you go about doing things is all. Cinnamon is doing some interesting things but even though my hardware is more than capable of powering it, I'm thinking of running MATE with XFWM4 acting as my WM because it can do quarter-tiling, which Marco can't do. I've been using Compiz to this end but I can't say I'm happy with it as it makes everything feel slow with the unnecessary animations and stuff... yes, I know I can turn that stuff off. I haven't gotten around to it. It works as well as it should, despite a few crashes initially, but I don't care for it.

I also enjoyed living on what was essentially the bleeding edge. Sure, I may not be able to keep up with HARDWARE, but I can certainly keep up with the software! :crnval:

If it's annoying you guys that I have something to say for all of your responses, I'm sorry. Now you know why I don't make topics myself very often.

 

[Mercutio]

I've been a Red Hat user since 1996 and I've stuck with Fedora for most production installations. I use OpenSuSE on my Linux workstation. I have a longstanding antipathy of Debian and Debian-derived variants, mostly because I remember the GNU people being complete fuckwads to everyone else in the mid and late 90s. I don't really care about my Window Manager or Desktop Environment (I usually use Afterstep, which hasn't meaningfully changed since Clinton was president) as long as I can make a contemporary browser run and it's highly likely that I'll be interacting with a shell to do whatever it is I need anyway.
Normally, what I'm doing with Linux machines is running Samba servers or LAMP setups, things I can by and large set up in my sleep at this point. I also have a few Xen servers.

I started out on Yggsdrasil Linux and moved fairly quickly to Slackware before settling on RedHat. Originally, I was just running Linux so I could do my CS homework without having to dial in to a Sun workstation. I kind of wish I had stayed with Slackware. My general UNIX skills would probably be a lot sharper these days if I had.

 

[Bozo]

At work I installed Oracle Linux on a couple of computers ( with a lot of help from the Unix & Open VMS guys ) During testing it never faltered once, even with an Unix idiot like me.
A few of us wanted to start using it on the computers that were isolated from the internet. Management nixed it. ( the management group are all related to the Ostrich family )
It was harder to use than Ubuntu, but it was rock solid.
I also tried CentOS with success.

 

[Handruin]

I've had good success with Xubuntu throughout the years I've played with it. Typically I gravitate towards Xubuntu whenever I need a Linux based system for personal use or rare projects at work where I get to decide the distro. I've recently installed Mint on my old workstation mostly to play around and learn some of the differences it has. The majority of time spent with any Linux distro is typically through a terminal connection rather than a GUI.

In work environments it has been a mixture of SLES, openSUSE, Xubuntu, and now CentOS. I spend most of my days playing with CentOS and working with yum/RPMs and Anaconda kickstart installs. I still prefer apt-get over yum for managing packages but that could also be because I'm still new learning the various nuances with Linux.

 

[timwhit]

It's definitely good to know your way around Red Hat based distros they are very prevalent in corporations.

 

[sedrosken]

Got back onto Arch. Running XFCE again, decided I didn't want to bother with installing MATE programs when the ones bundled with XFCE fufill their intended function and I didn't have to hunt them down to install them. Even got GPU folding working right off the bat!

Thanks for the advice. Working on getting together a Fedora VM in VMware... now if only I could get VMware to stop crashing when I mouse over it. Going to try running it from a terminal and watching the output when it crashes.

Frankly I prefer the pacman and yaourt one-two punch for package management. I never have to bother with adding repos. Though that may change when I try Fedora as I have never used yum before.

I'm betting Arch will still be my distro of choice, despite a few initial hurdles in setting it up. I kept my old home directory, and the config for MATE kind-of-sort-of conflicted with something or other and I ended up running without a window manager at all, so not wanting to deal with that I simply chose to remove it and instead install XFCE. Today was the first time I didn't have to consult the beginner's guide in setting it up, I remembered all the steps myself. Progress!