

Ask HN: Which open-source OS do you use and why? - quantumpotato_


======
DSMan195276
ArchLinux -- It satisfies my needs with the least hassle: I use a very heavily
configured i3 setup that's tailored exactly to my needs for school and
developing (Full DE's are clumsy and to slow on my cheap laptop), and I need
recent versions of software for school IE. Eclipse since we're required to use
it for Java, and LibreOffice for writing papers. Older versions of either one
of those either don't work as well or don't work at all, as I have to transfer
stuff to them from newer versions on school computers. (That being the newest
Eclipse and MSoft Office).

I _could_ use Ubuntu or Fedora or etc., but at that point I'd have to be
continually updating to the next version to keep my software versions current
enough to be used, and even then I risk my configuration breaking on the
bigger upgrades and having to deal with that during the middle a semester, not
very convenient. Arch has a reputation for being a lot of work, but as far as
I'm concerned it's much less work to keep up-to-date then a Ubuntu install, at
the very least Arch doesn't have massive breaking updates every 6 months. I
have yet to have my Arch system totally crap-out on me, as long as I update my
packages every few days or so, and check the Arch News before any upgrades
that may cause issues, it's been extremely easy to maintain.

~~~
mercnet
"check the Arch News before any upgrades that may cause issues," It took me a
lot of discipline to learn that rule instead of blindly typing pacman -Syu
every day.

------
bearble
I've been using Xubuntu for the last week, after some setup i've begun to fall
in love with XFCE. I tend to flip distros every few weeks since all of my
programming is done through Vagrant + offsite Git.

As far as servers go, we've been using CentOS and it's slowly built up to
become a pain in the buns. I'm considering trying out Debian for our servers,
but I don't want to bring my desktop distro habits over to our stack.

------
kevin-brown
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS - I chose it because it matched the OS we were running on our
servers, so matching environments made my life as easy as possible. I've also
used Ubuntu extensively in the past, along with other linux environments
(Linux Mint and ArchLinux come to mind), but went back to Ubuntu because it
was my first that I spent a lot of time in. It supports everything I needed
for school (LibreOffice for documents, OpenJDK for most things Java) and gives
me the flexibility I need. The LTS allows me to ignore the 6 month releases
and still know that I am one a supported platform.

------
grn
Debian sid on my desktop, stable on my laptop. I'm thinking about switching to
Arch though.

When it comes to the software I use:

\- window manager - i3

\- editor - vim

\- terminal emulator - urxvt

\- web browser - Firefox

\- e-mail client - Thunderbird

\- suckless tools

\- office suite - LibreOffice

------
DjangoReinhardt
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (both and with and without VMs.)

I am a newbie dev who usually uses Heroku to deploy but I also want to know
how to go about doing deployments using Chef/Puppet/Fabric and I want to know
exactly how to go about doing them.

------
johncoltrane
FWIW:

* Ubuntu 13.04 (because the the 13.10 upgrade went horribly wrong)

* The Cinnamon desktop

* Vim, Eclipse

* Gnome Terminal

* Chromium

and all the usual suspects on a linux box.

------
deadwait
slitaz, i used to make a live cd to run GNS3/Dynamips using slax and the need
to make it smaller led me to slitaz, once i began using it i ended up learning
shell scripting and for a short time was a package maintainer of a few
programs,then slowly picked up a little bit of web development, im no expert
on it but what i know of linux, i learned due to slitaz.

------
jamespcole2
UbuntuGnome 13.04 for my day to day and Ubuntu 12.04 on my servers and through
Vagrant for dev

------
ams6110
OpenBSD. Stable as a slab of granite and pretty much just stays out of my way.

------
helpermethod
CrunchBang Linux: fast bootup, small memory footprint, Debian- based

