What's your favourite Linux distro?

Post Reply New Topic

Different distros have different philosophies and designs, the whole point of Arch, Slackware and Gentoo is that they are designed to be minimal and basic from default therefore its up to the user to install and configure additional packages, I like it that way and so do many others. It boils down to what you are used to and comfortable with. I think its rather hilarious and quite absurd when people make claims of rolling releases being unstable and buggy, I have never run into stability issues that people claim to inherently come with rolling releases. Also I don't feel that bleeding-edge software is beta as you claim, I never had things crash or functions play up. I have had that on Debian, you couldn't even use the default installed GUI network configuration tool to configure a static IP because it never saved the new settings. That's not very good for a newcomer, is it now? I like how Debian's patches create vulnerabilities in software too.

Debian also offers a minimalist setup to anyone who wants it (use the netinstall disk). They just don't make it so needlessly difficult as Slackware does. Debian allows you to do anything you want manually- but they also have tools to help you along with sane defaults so you don't have to waste time mucking about on every inconsequential detail.

Yeah, everyone has different wants out of a Linux system. You were responding to a poster who wanted to set up a dev environment on a "lean, clean, and stable distro." Debian fits the bill and is easy to set up. Arch/Gentoo/Slackware are for people who want to worry about every little detail of their system before they can actually get down to real work. And there's nothing wrong with that. I have a last-century desktop that I revived with a barebones Linux system (don't even have X installed) and it's fun to play around with it, see what I can accomplish building up from a small base. But for a production system that I want to do work on? Heck, I'll slap Ubuntu on it if that's the disk I have handy. The important thing in that case is just to get up and running with minimal hassle so you can actually use your computer.


I have not run into such issues; everything works out of the box. YMMV, I suppose.


That's bound to happen on occasion since no dev team is perfect. Look at the massive amount of software they manage and package; of course there is a mistake every now and again. Still, the Debian security team is excellent and does a good job of managing any vulnerabilities that do crop up. If security is so important to you that Debian is unacceptable, then you should probably be running OpenBSD anyways. They do better on security than any Linux distro, or any other operating system for that matter.

I haven't actually been into linux much for several years and so I've got a lot to remember lol. But because of reasons like the above, I can tell you the most stable clean fun system I ever had was the one I built following the LFS, BLFS books. I knew every piece of software on it, absolutely zero bloat, and when something went wrong or I broke some dependencies I had no choice but to blame myself. Oh what fun

Hello, fellow Aspies!

I am using 64-bit Lubuntu 11.10 installed on a 16GB SD card stuck into a 64-bit (according to Ailurus) HP Windows 7 netbook with 2GB RAM, with the BIOS set to boot to GRUB on the SD card. I like being able to switch between the two just by ejecting the SD card with the power off. I DO use the HD on the netbook, but only to store big stuff like music and video.

The SD card is formatted ext2. Having learned that journaling filesystems are NOT a good idea on a netbook subject to unexpected power failures early in the game, I took a hint from Linus Torvalds on that one. I back everything using Redo Backup; all the other programs either wouldn't restore the backup

It DOES get sluggish when loading Web sites, but I like the software available for Linux that just isn't available for Windows. I'm also betting that there are a lot of programs installed that I'll never use.

Can anyone offer suggestions as to how to improve my current setup?

Have A Great Day!

Rob

I don't know exactly what your setup is as far as Software is concered, but one thing that I would consider doing is moving to a lighter Desktop Environment than the default Unity/GNOME Shell environment for Current versions of Ubuntu.

If I were you, I would seriously consider trying LXDE, which uses the OpenBox WM for reduced memory usage. --You may also want to consider just using the OpenBox WM itself, which will be a login option when you install LXDE alongside GNOME.

Furthermore, If you feel up to it, you may also want to consider using the AMD64 version of Debian Squeeze. Although there are some differances from Ubuntu, it works much the same without alot of the useless s**t that Ubuntu adds, ( Hello, Mutter/CompizFusion, Unity Desktop, etc)

What you will have to do should you decide to install Debian is remove Gnash, activate the unofficial Multimedia Repositories and perhaps the Backports repository as well, install Flash, and if your system uses an Nvidia /ATI graphics chipset also install the proprietary graphics drivers and kernel modules.

Last edited by Fogman on 27 Dec 2011, 12:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Unity is crap, use apt-get to install Gnome then select Gnome Classic at login. On a netbook you should get better performance from that too.

MATE is pretty good too, but is still a work in progress. You have to add some repos to get all of the features, some of which are still experimental.

I'm pretty fed up with both Unity and Gnome 3. Is MATE stable enough for general home use? Any difference running it in Mint vs. Arch?

Mint has a tendency to "Mintify" any software that they get their hands on. In the case of GNOME 3 that's a good thing. In the case of MATE it means that not everything will be installed right away and there might be some features that you need to change slightly. I've never used Arch, so I can't comment on MATE there and the differences between them.

When I first used it there were some bugs and a few things that were missing. None were too bad though. I have since managed to update everything out of the MATE experimental repos and everything seems to be running quite stably now. Unfortunately, in the process of doing that, I at one point I accidentally uninstalled a good chunk of the software on my computer, including MATE's default file browser. So accidents can happen. But at this point I'm feeling good about it. I'd recommend giving it a try.

Last edited by AstroGeek on 30 Dec 2011, 3:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

arch for work
gentoo for everything else

dwm, urxvt

I've been using Mandriva for about 10 years now. It was really popular back in the day, and did a lot of things no other distro even attempted. I remember reading in PC Mag or somewhere a list of things linux needed before it could be 'ready' for desktop use, and Mandriva already did all of them.

The company's had some issues, but for the most part I've always been happy. The past several years I've been able to do live installations through urpmi, which is great.

I've played with gentoo in the past, but got frustrated waiting for everything to compile. Not to mention that back in those days, compiling stuff with optimizations lead to slower code cause most computers(like mine) had too small a cache to handle the larger code. I think it took 2-3 days to finish compiling everything, this was on a Duron 686 . It had some very nice artwork though, at least back then.

When I get a new computer I think I'm gonna go with ArchLinux. Very nice documentation, I've been relying on it for a long time now.

Here's one advantage of my "outdated" Debian system. I've still got Gnome 2.30 with support for the next couple years until someone else gets around to writing a workable desktop environment. KDE4 is almost usable by now, so it should be good enough when I finally have to leave Squeeze. Or maybe Gnome3 will suck less by then.

Or MATE will actually be stable and usable by the time a new stable version of Debian comes out.

My question though, is what will the big UNIX deveopers go with for a desktop environment? They used CDE since the early-mid 90's, and it was a included as a fallback desktop for Solaris when Solaris switched over to GNOME 2 until only recently. Surely Oracle and any other SysV vendors that use GNOME are going to continue using it over GNOME Shell.

Call me old fashioned but I like the version of GNOME used by Debian. It's the most usable interface for Linux - it's not fancy, but it's easy and does the job well.

Basically, that's what MATE is. In fact, that's exactly what MATE is. They just forked GNOME 2.

MATE sounds awesome to me then

Here's a joke I saw on YouTube the other day, thought you lot would appreciate: Ubuntu is an ancient African word which literally translates to "I can't configure Debian"

Speaking of which, I appear to have screwed up my Debian install by attempting to enable SELinux...