
My Search for the Perfect Linux OS Just Ended - dsr12
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/11/05/my-search-for-the-perfect-linux-os-just-ended--with-an-unexpected-surprise
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freedomben
I normally steer clear of these articles as I long ago realized the "perfect
distro" was like the best flavor of ice cream: contentiously debatable and
variable by individual.

I got sucked in tho and actually enjoyed the article, despite it concluding
that there is no perfect distro.

For me I've settled on Fedora and am extremely happy. I went the Arch/Gentoo
route for years and also went the Ubuntu/Mint/Debian/Elementary/etc route. I
learned more about Linux/open source using Arch than anything, and loved how
customized and hackable my system was. The rolling nature was great until it
wasn't (breakage and unpredictability paired with Murphy's Law). Ubuntu et al
were too slow moving. Old software, strange hacks in the kernel that made
custom kernels/modules difficult to use (it's gotten better the last couple of
years ftr), and PPAs were a must but often broke upgrades requiring nuke &
pave.

What I found was Fedora is the perfect middle ground: quite bleeding edge in
many ways without being a rolling distro and upgrading your gnome suddenly
without warning, but fast enough moving that I rarely notice any outdated
packages. It's a "just works" install but super easy to tweak and customize in
any way desired. Much of the Arch wiki (my favorite thing about being on Arch
next to the AUR) is also mostly applicable to Fedora since they follow similar
conventions. If you manage RHEL/CentOS servers in any way for work, it also
gives you a chance to get intimately familiar with the next round of
improvements coming your way in enterprise Linux.

Disclaimer: I work at Red Hat but I've been a Fedora user much longer than
I've worked at RH

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craftoman
You have to tailor it yourself. There's no perfect OS or distro unless you
start building it from scratch.

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ivolimmen
I am waiting for the "BTW I use Arch" remark...

~~~
WinonaRyder
I'm here!

IIRC I started on a Knoppix live CD and over the next year or so I hopped
around Mandrake, Ubuntu, Gentoo[1], Red Hat, etc. mostly coming back to
Mandrake... and then I found Arch and fell in love with its simplicity and
speed.

Around the time of GNOME 3 and KDE 4 I went looking for a new DE and found
Unity to be the best and most polished - even to this day it's better than
anything I've used before or since - which meant I had to use Ubuntu for a
while, but eventually the Debian-isms and instability got to me and I went
back home to my Arch.

BTW, I use Arch Linux... _on servers_ and have found it to be very stable,
simple and pain-free esp. when compared to Debian and Ubuntu.

[1]: [https://funroll-loops.oya.to/](https://funroll-loops.oya.to/)

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soul4krsna
No such thing. Distros are bundles of software. Linux is just the kernel. The
perfect distro is the one u never have to change because u built it urself. In
so sick and tired of these types of links all over the internet. Blah blah so
boring.

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masonic
TL;DR: Peppermint OS

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Not really. Better TL;DR: Peppermint is so great it tempted the author into
making it the _one_ distro. But then he realized that he didn't _have_ to pick
one - that part of the beauty of Linux is that he could just keep choosing new
distros without changing anything much.

