What's your favorite distro, and why? Nov-2015
Since Crunchhbang is no longer maintained, it's getting more difficult to keep up with Debian. The whole concept of "pinning" sources is a little crazy. There was a point where I wasn't sure if my dist-upgrade was completely botched. I was able to get Jessie, but the UI is starting to degrade.
A good friend of mine seems to enjoy Mate + Ubuntu. It seems like a popular OS with a strong community, but I don't really like the idea of Ubuntu using a weird package manager. I'm posting this because I'm at a point where I'm open to suggestions.
Will I continue on with Debian and the continuation of Crunchbang aka Bunsen Labs? https://www.bunsenlabs.org/ Or will I jump on the Ubuntu bandwagon? Or is there something else you recommend that I should look at? I'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 "thin" and minimal.
Also, this is not a high priority, but I would like a distro that supports Flash for "TV" 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's time to overhaul my system anyway, I'll just wait till I switch operating systems.
21 comments
[ 642 ms ] story [ 1311 ms ] threadI 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.
In that order. Ubuntu - getting things done. Arch - satisfying the desire for bleeding edge.
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.
I use Debian on a daily basis for servers, but I haven't bothered with a Linux desktop since about 2005.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.