Which Linux distribution do you prefer? (2014 edition)

[Aergan]

My Dell XPS L702X laptop died (motherboard fault, coming up to it's 3rd year) so I'm on Xubuntu 14.04.1 full-time now on the HP laptop (7 years old and still going).

[Max Norris]

Haven't had a good "It's not Linux, it's GNU/Linux" speech in a while, thankfully at least skipped the "recursive acronym" explanation, usually goes hand in hand, especially to those of us who prefer Unix.  I'm sure everybody reading this forum knows that.. it's just shorter and easier to type.  Not going to go to a store and ask for an "Android Plus Linux" device either.  

[Guest]

Not going to go to a store and ask for an "Android Plus Linux" device either.  

 

Do you want that on an ARM or x86 architecture? With proprietary non-free software, or with free software only?

[Ambroos]

Do you want that on an ARM or x86 architecture? With proprietary non-free software, or with free software only?

 

I'll have a FOSS GNU-Linux-Android OpenRISC ethical non-gender-identifying transfriendly biological vegan CO2-neutral conflict-metal-free phone please.

[duoi Veteran]

Do you want that on an ARM or x86 architecture? With proprietary non-free software, or with free software only?

 

When we call software ?free,? we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of ?free speech,? not ?free beer.?

 

These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual users' sake, but for society as a whole because they promote social solidarity?that is, sharing and cooperation. They become even more important as our culture and life activities are increasingly digitized. In a world of digital sounds, images, and words, free software becomes increasingly essential for freedom in general.

[Guest]

 

When we call software ?free,? we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of ?free speech,? not ?free beer.?

 

These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual users' sake, but for society as a whole because they promote social solidarity?that is, sharing and cooperation. They become even more important as our culture and life activities are increasingly digitized. In a world of digital sounds, images, and words, free software becomes increasingly essential for freedom in general.

 

 

Wow. Okay. :laugh:

[simplezz]

Arch all the way. I've tried virtually every distro under the sun, but I always come back to it. Gentoo is a close second though.

As far as reasons go:

1. Highly customisable.

2. A blank slate. I love nothing better than building a system from scratch just as I like it.

3. Pacman / Yaourt / AUR. Gentoo and Arch have the best repositories and package management tools hands down.

4. Rolling release.

5. Net install (tiny download).

6. Simple installation & great documentation.

7. I can run it on my Raspberry PI.

[simplezz]

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.[/size]

I agree. That's an important distinction that's often lost. The GNU programs and libraries are a core part of what makes a distro.

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

Arch all the way. I've tried virtually every distro under the sun, but I always come back to it. Gentoo is a close second though.

As far as reasons go:

1. Highly customisable.

2. A blank slate. I love nothing better than building a system from scratch just as I like it.

3. Pacman / Yaourt / AUR. Gentoo and Arch have the best repositories and package management tools hands down.

4. Rolling release.

5. Net install (tiny download).

6. Simple installation & great documentation.

7. I can run it on my Raspberry PI.

 

You can do all that with Debian, just saying...

[Max Norris]

Arch all the way. I've tried virtually every distro under the sun, but I always come back to it. Gentoo is a close second though.

Another plus, in my opinion, is the Arch Build System. I've been partial to Unix and later BSD as long as I can remember, just another thing that Arch does that makes it feel more "proper" to me. And yea, Gentoo for the same reason.

[TDT]

elementary OS Freya beta 1 is out :) Enjoy!

[Hussam Al-tayeb]

Arch all the way. I've tried virtually every distro under the sun, but I always come back to it. Gentoo is a close second though.

As far as reasons go:

1. Highly customisable.

2. A blank slate. I love nothing better than building a system from scratch just as I like it.

3. Pacman / Yaourt / AUR. Gentoo and Arch have the best repositories and package management tools hands down.

4. Rolling release.

5. Net install (tiny download).

6. Simple installation & great documentation.

7. I can run it on my Raspberry PI.

I use Arch but every single package is compiled on my machine. Most package maintainers on ArchLinux these days compile the packages on their own computers instead of clean chroots. I don't like that habit as it may on very rare occasions cause unexpected results. I don't blame them as Arch Linux has no build server.

One of my friends who works at a company that makes multimedia servers had that issue with Arch Linux.

Pacman itself is great.

So my system is fully compiled from source on my own computer without the need to dwell into the complexity of Gentoo.

 

As I already stated earlier in this thread, systemd did wonders for Arch Linux.

[Haggis Veteran]

You can do all that with Debian, just saying...

 

 

exactly

 

I always start with a network install with nothing but ssh, i then go in and start building from there

 

I mean ok they are deb packages and not compiled directly on my machine 

 

but

 

1. Highly customisable. Yes

2. A blank slate. I love nothing better than building a system from scratch just as I like it. Yes

3. Pacman / Yaourt / AUR. Gentoo and Arch have the best repositories and package management tools hands down.

4. Rolling release.

5. Net install (tiny download). Yes

6. Simple installation & great documentation. Yes

7. I can run it on my Raspberry PI. Yes

[Starbuck84]

Don't ask me why exactly, but I've always been fond of Fedora. I'm not doing much with Linux these days, but if I want to play around with it, I always go back to Fedora. Tried several, like Mint, Ubuntu and Suse. I'm a Linux noob :P

[+Elі Subscriber²]

ElementaryOS all the way for me, I love the look and feel, it doesn't look amateurish at all like so many distros, it's really a joy to use.

 

 

elementary OS Freya beta 1 is out :) Enjoy!

 

Thanks for that.

[Lion and Lamb Ministry]

I have been running Fedora Rawhide for quite sometime. Best Gnu/Linux experience ever!

[gohpep]

Fedora feels polished and comforting, even coming from Windows.

[Draconian Guppy]

ubuntu ease of installation and friendliness 

[simonlang]

ubuntu ease of installation and friendliness 

 

ubuntu is really a great distro for beginners, also for advanced users, as you can do all the stuff, but also don't really need to go into the konsole thanks to amazing package manager and .deb files.

also: for ubuntu there are some excellent wikis out there i would have killed for when i started to first use a comp with windows 95 and had to lear all by myself and buy expensive literature about it. yes it was that bad.

[link6155]

I run Elementary OS on my old computers, but for my extremely old computers that don't support it, I use CrunchBang: http://crunchbang.org/

[Krome]

I am very very excited to try Linux.  I have not used Linux ever since I am out of Uni.  Need to get back to it.  I can't wait to use Linux again.  Right now, there's a few things that is stopping me from using Linux.

 

1) Waiting for "Scientific Linux 7" to be compiled.

2) VirtualBox is still not stable.  Version 4.3.14 break many VM.  The bug is still being ironed out.

3) 128GB SSD is not enough to install many applications.  I am currently waiting till I can get the 1TB SSD so I can install any apps to my heart's contend.

[Radium]

I'm compiling Linux From Scratch at this very moment. :woot:

[vhane]

I've recently Dockerized one of my client's web service applications, and I'm sold on the technology. I've got the current iteration of the service running on EC2/Ubuntu/Docker. It follows naturally that CoreOS is the next distro that I'm going to investigate. I think that this is the future folks.

[Shiranui]

Ditched Scientific Linux for CERN Centos 7.

[BigItup]

Arch for me. I was put off trying it as I kept reading it was not for newcomers to linux and was too cutting edge etc. I am glad I tried it anyway as I find it the easiest to use and keep updated. The main reason I like it is I get up to date software not the ancient stuff I had to put up with when I tried Debain distros. That's the worst thing about Debian. You go to the web site of program x and the author tells you to use the latest  version as it has a lot of bug fixes and is better by far, but if you want to use it you have to build it yourself and hope that it builds fine for you because you cant find a recent version in the debian repos.