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Ask HN: Linux laptop distro of choice?

18 points by bluehat ↗ HN
Disclaimer: I respect people of all distro beliefs, just looking for a hand finding my own.

Since Ubuntu seems to be devotedly jumping the Unity shark and has started releasing software a little closer to beta than I am comfortable with, I'm looking for a new daily-use distro. I have heard good things about Arch and Mint, but I am mostly looking for usable system which emphasizes stuff like having flash and wireless just work and has reasonably modern compiled versions of most packages (the reason debian has not been my default). Bonus if the community already tested this distro for MacBook Airs.

(Just running X11 on OSX Lion is not an acceptable solution for me, Lion broke a lot of my X11 stuff and it is very tedious to compile them anew for Lion)

26 comments

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jk
I am using Fedora on my laptop. XFCE desktop is a good environment. rpmfusion provides major "nonfree" packages.

For me everything has worked out of the box.

cryptolect
After sincerely giving the latest Ubuntu a shot, I've gone back to Fedora (running a pre-release build of 17, KDE) on my Lenovo X220.
plg
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS seems to install and work on MacBook air
oaxacamatt
Xubuntu is great, requires low resoucres and all the debian packages you coul ever want!!
GFKjunior
I'm an Arch Linux user and love it.

http://www.archlinux.org/ Installation is not for the feint of heart though.

hello_asdf
I'm gonna add to that 'not for the feint of heart' line. Install a couple linux systems like Debian, Gentoo, or Arch, and it's like riding a bike. It just comes to you after that, so try out Archlinux. It's my personal favorite, and I'm running it just fine on my Macbook. Read the new user guide, and spend the time to experiment and make a system that just works for you. If you're worried about stability don't enable the testing repos. Flash is as simple as pacman -S flashplugin. Actually I think it's time to install Gentoo in VirtualBox and see if I want to switch back to my old love.
dubiousjim
Arch is excellent, and seems to have gained a lot of visibility/users in the past few years. And it's a great way to learn. But it is not for someone who says Ubuntu "has started releasing software a little closer to beta than I am comfortable with." Arch will look like the Ubuntu alphas. But you'll learn how to back out of and work around bad upgrades, and usually things will shake out in a few days. Doesn't sound like what you're looking for though.
jejones3141
I'm happy with Bodhi Linux on my netbook. The initial install is ascetic (which I guess is appropriate), but one can easily pull in other apps. E17 provides a beautiful desktop with low overhead, and Bodhi configures it so that things just work. It's based on Ubuntu LTS releases--a 12.04-based version isn't out yet, but when it is I guess you'll have to decide whether it exceeds your comfort level.
ixacto
Debian 6.0.4 on a Thinkpad T400. Everything is supported out of the box if you use the non-free installer. This is the first linux I have used where wifi/bluetooth/suspend & hibernate all worked without any problems. It's still running gnome 2.3x, which I don't really mind.
bluehat
I was really turned off to Debian when I hit "apt-get install firefox" and it gave me ice weasel :/ Computers and religious whackjobs don't get to second guess my command line :/
lumberjack
I understand that you feel somewhat violated but before you say anything else let me just put a few facts on the table for you to make a better judgment.

1. Debian boasts of their totally free system and Debian users would feel equally violated if they think that they are using totally free software only to discover later that it was not the case. Disclaimer: The definition of "free software" is up for debate. I'm not condoning Debian's definition. Just informing.

2. Every distribution has it's package managers that tweak the packages in the repositories in various ways. Iceweasel is just a slightly tweaked version of Firefox. It's not a completely different package. You have noticed this background play only because they changed the name but it's not in any way different from the way the package managers decide which version of Gimp they put in Stable and what features of such version are to be disabled by default for security reasons or otherwise.

3. Iceweasel is fundamentally the same as Firefox. Except it's usually a bit older and more stable and goes through more rigorous security testing and maintenance. It also has all trademarks removed, hence the name change.

bluehat
This is a very legit counterpoint, but I think both sides could have been made happy if a little prompt had popped up saying "this is non-free software, press Y to get the debian free fork, F to get the non-free Firefox, and n to quit"
ixacto
They actually have the non-free software like dropbox and some firmware. So all you have to do is nano /etc/apt/sources.list and append "contrib non-free" to everything and then apt-get update && apt-get install whatever.
dman
Debian - runs rock solid and doesnt spring surprises with new releases. In the past I tried things like Ubuntu that look and work better out of the box but invariably a year or two later there is some change that left me cringing. Thing with debian is that you pay the upfront cost of customizing / installing codecs once and then from that point onwards things just work.
ra
or Crunchbang, which is Debian configured for Openbox instead of Gnome.
simplon
Tried a few distros before. Each has their pros and cons of course. But settled on Fedora now. Using F16 KDE.

Most things work out of the box, except my Broadcom WIFI, which is solved by RPMFusion.

Running stable. Maybe switching to XFCE for lighter resources usage.

Mint looks really good too. Was using Mint 10 before and it looks really slick.

buu700
This is a bit of an unconventional approach, but here's my plan for when I buy a Macbook Air over the summer:

* Keep OS X / X11

* Install a command line Ubuntu VM in Parallels

* Set up the VM as an SSH server and configure public/private key authentication

* Configure any necessary filesystem sharing in Parallels

* Configure OS X to run your Ubuntu VM on startup in headless mode (background / non-graphical)

* Replace your OS X bashrc with 'ssh -Y localhost'; this will cause any terminal you open to run a Linux shell, with the capability to open graphical applications (I'll personally be using TotalTerminal; I'm a sucker for Quake-style terminals)

In the end, you pretty much have the best of both worlds. You get an Apple-polished day-to-day experience (with no hacking required for things like multitouch gestures), with all the power of Linux also at your fingertips.

---

Though, if that doesn't sound like your thing (or you just really want to be rid of OS X), my original plan before I had that idea was just to go with my standard Kubuntu. Kubuntu is an incredibly polished KDE distro in my opinion (despite its naysayers), and from what I can tell KDE is the only desktop environment which really rivals OS X (except maybe Unity, which I haven't played much with). Given the latest release, now is a better time than ever to get rolling with a *buntu.

Also, no matter which distro you choose, if you're using an Air it seems you'll need this: http://code.google.com/p/touchegg/

bluehat
Please do write up how your Air holds up to that kind of abuse! If the system doesn't cry (Airs don't have a lot of hardware in them) this sounds quite excellent.

To be honest though, I don't totally understand how this headless Linux runs graphical Linux in your mac without going into the X11/Lion rage area.

buu700
Abuse? A headless vm running in the background is hardly a major drain on resources... You'll have to partition off a slice of RAM (half a gig to a gig should suffice), and the CPU will have a little more work to do, but realistically there won't be a significant performance difference.

The magic here is SSH and X forwarding, which basically runs the non-graphical side of the application in the vm and the graphical side in the X client. Here's an example of X forwarding an application remotely: http://buu700.com/xforward

If you decide to use this approach, let me know if you need any help with anything.

bluehat
Yes, however, maybe this is just me, but Lion wrecked a lot of standard Linux stuff running in X11 (for example, the selector tool in GIMP, it just doesn't work) and under this setup I don't see how you are getting around those issues unless you plan to run OSX Snow Leopard...
buu700
The point is that it's all running in Linux, not OS X.
ixacto
I was actually thinking about doing this with a hackintosh now that Ivy Bridge is out.
lholden
I'm personally quite happy with Fedora on my laptop (2012 Samsung Series 9 15".)

Straight up Gnome 3.X

X4
I'd recommend Slackware, OpenSuSE, or Linux Mint.

Slackware because it really just works perfectly. I mean seriously, it's very stable! I'm using it.

OpenSuSE, because they have been there for a very long time and still offer great support for newcomers and make hardware support easy.

Linux Mint, because it offers even better hardware support, but comes at the cost of stability. Heck it's at least dead easy. A zombie could install it.

If you've no problem with headache go Gentoo/Arch. Not sure if the work you invest is worth it, except you do it to just learn.

bluehat
While I do enjoy project computers like I do enjoy project cars, my main laptop needs to be a "daily commuter" vehicle: it can't be taxing to drive and it can't be taxing to maintain. I need to have it working in order to do work. What are your recommendations for that?