
What's your favorite distro, and why? Nov-2015 - pjbrunet
The first distro that I used full-time was Fedora. That was a good experience. Until Fedora started pushing the &quot;mobile&quot; interface so I switched my laptops and desktops to Crunchbang. (My servers are now CentOS, which I don&#x27;t have any issues with.)<p>Since Crunchhbang is no longer maintained, it&#x27;s getting more difficult to keep up with Debian. The whole concept of &quot;pinning&quot; sources is a little crazy. There was a point where I wasn&#x27;t sure if my dist-upgrade was completely botched. I was able to get Jessie, but the UI is starting to degrade.<p>A good friend of mine seems to enjoy Mate + Ubuntu. It seems like a popular OS with a strong community, but I don&#x27;t really like the idea of Ubuntu using a weird package manager. I&#x27;m posting this because I&#x27;m at a point where I&#x27;m open to suggestions.<p>Will I continue on with Debian and the continuation of Crunchbang aka Bunsen Labs? https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bunsenlabs.org&#x2F; Or will I jump on the Ubuntu bandwagon? Or is there something else you recommend that I should look at? I&#x27;m mostly thinking about my desktop system, because I have a feeling my next laptop will just be a plain Chromebook. FWIW I like to skin my UI so that everything is &quot;thin&quot; and minimal.<p>Also, this is not a high priority, but I would like a distro that supports Flash for &quot;TV&quot; shows. Recently my Hulu stopped working because Flash is deprecated or whatever. I followed several tutorials to fix my Flash support for Hulu and nothing worked. But as it&#x27;s time to overhaul my system anyway, I&#x27;ll just wait till I switch operating systems.
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mbrock
NixOS. I'm not interested in any other distro except Guix, which is similar.
I've used Slackware, Red Hat, Gentoo, Arch, Debian, and Ubuntu in the past.
NixOS won't botch your dist-upgrades; you can even Ctrl-C any time in the
middle to immediately and completely abort, since upgrades are _atomic._ You
can also choose to only download everything and only do the actual upgrade
steps at reboot time.

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greenokapi
I'm on Arch with i3wm.

Arch has support for Flash, and despite its rolling-release nature, I've found
it to be reasonably stable for a casual desktop user. Arch and i3wm probably
also fit your methodology with regards to being "thin", "bare bones", and
minimal. You may want to try Arch out, even if you don't end up using i3wm.

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veddox
i3 is a brilliant DE for hacking, but I found it rather wanting for "normal"
use, so I went back to Unity on Ubuntu.

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auxym
Can't say I've had a good experience with ubuntu on a laptop. Very buggy with
sleep/wakes. Often wifi and/or sound refuses to work after a wake up. Lately
it's refusing to go to sleep at all when on battery but not when plugged in
(!).

I've had good experience with both Manjaro (Arch-based) and OpenSUSE, though
not on a laptop. One thing I have found important is to use a distro which has
a good selection of third-party packages. AUR is perhaps to absolute best out
there for this, OBS is also pretty good.

Honestly, for the pc I'm currently building, I'll be running W10, with a few
linux VMs for hobbies. One of the biggest irritants of every single linux
distro I've tried is the f'ing screen going to sleep while watching
netflix/youtube/web videos of any sort. I've spent many hours googling for a
solution to this, apparently it's one of the great technical issues of our
era.

~~~
pjbrunet
That's funny about the screensaver. I had the same problem. My solution was to
reinstall XScreenSaver and set the timeout to a long period of time. Of
course, there's various energy-saving apps that might dim the screen and
there's various places where things autostart from a reboot.

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15DCFA8F
I was used to run Arch Linux, living on the bleeding edge and on the constant
moving and packages churning that a rolling release distro provides.

For some months now, I am using Debian Stable on my desktops, and the
experience is being very interesting. I don't use any apt pining, and just
some packages from jessie-backports (eg: LibreOffice and Intel Video Driver),
besides the official stable repos.

This distro is SOLID. My desktop runs very fine, and using a stable
distribution means that it will keep running fine for months (years?), instead
of that constant discomfort that a rolling release creates as your machine
stability and usage potentially changes each day.

Of course, things start to stay a little old, but in the end of the day, it
doesn't matter for the vast majority of packages. And you can always compile
and install on /usr/local some applications that you need more recent
versions.

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tvm
I'm using Mint with Cinnamon on my main laptop. It works reasonably out of the
box including rather great multimedia support.

I've used Debian for more than fifteen years and I wouldn't go back, at least
on desktop. These new distros made me terribly lazy.

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stephenr
You should probably specify that you're talking about a distro for _Desktop_
use.

I use Debian on a daily basis for servers, but I haven't bothered with a Linux
desktop since about 2005.

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pjbrunet
I really did consider that. If this was StackExchange, I would have been more
specific, but I didn't want to rule out a great tangent conversation about
Linux servers.

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archimedespi
I'm using Xubuntu 15.04 (going to upgrade to 15.10, but holding off for compat
testing for a week or two). I've gone through a ton of distros and I've liked
this one the best.

I ran Arch awhile ago, got tired of things breaking, then switched to, in
series, Linux Mint, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and then finally Xubuntu, which I
actually like the look of. I'm considering switching to NixOS with AwesomeWM
at some point, but everything's working pretty well for me under Xubuntu right
now.

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veddox
Currently running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. It has served me well, but I am planning
to migrate to elementaryOS later this week. (I want to try something new, and
I love the beautiful design of eOS.) I've tried out Arch on an old laptop, and
while I really like the total control you have over your (bleeding-edge)
system, I find it would require too much admin work to use on my main
computer.

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brudgers
I've been using Linux as my main OS for about two years. I wound up biting the
bullet last April, going with standard Ubuntu, and learning the Unity
interface. It's actually pretty good...but I have migrated to Xmonad. The pain
of working around a few missing utilities in exchange for tiling windows.

Love me some tiling windows.

Anyway, AskUbuntu on StackExchange is the killer feature for me. Beats a wiki
or a forum all day everyday.

Good luck.

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rayalez
Personally, I'm using Ubuntu with i3wm, and I'm extremely happy with it. It
was my first distro, it works well, both on my laptop and on the server, and
does everything I want it to do.

I don't have any experience with others, so this might not be an opinion
you're very interested in, but I thought I'd add my 2 cents.

~~~
pjbrunet
I'll keep i3wm in mind, the screenshots look similar to what I'm using now,
pytyle2.

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akulbe
Ubuntu. Arch.

In that order. Ubuntu - getting things done. Arch - satisfying the desire for
bleeding edge.

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mkaziz
No love for Elementary OS? It's based on Ubuntu so you'll get to use most of
the Ubuntu-related assistance on the internet, and it's well near as pretty as
you can get with Linux!

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TheSpiceIsLife
Linux Mint on three laptops in this house, two running Cinnamon and one
running Xfce desktop. Ubuntu package base. Meets my needs, hassle free, good
community support.

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crispytx
Puppy Linux!

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saywahat
Debian sid. Rolling release like arch but doesn't break when you upgrade.

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dman
debian with dwm.

