Which Linux distribution do you prefer? (2015)

[Lazy8s]

I'm giving Opensuse 13.2 a test run at the moment. I'm strictly a self taught user who knows how to google for most answers, and haven't used Linux for a number of years so there's a bit of a learning curve.

 

So far though, it seems incredibly polished and responsive, and easy on the eyes with the dark theme and a decent wallpaper. I'm dual booting on a win8.1 desktop that has an annoying habit of blue screening, which led me to think it may be hardware related, but Opensuse has been stable as a rock.

 

I've also used Mint and Ubuntu over the past couple of months. I like Mint, but Opensuse has my meager vote so far. Ubuntu - nah, I don't like the direction they took with Amazon search and all. easy to fix, but still...

[spy beef]

openSUSE is hands down the best distro for KDE.

[Lazy8s]

openSUSE is hands down the best distro for KDE.

I have installed that yet. "Once bitten tiwice shy" applies here as I had major issues with kde in the past and have avoided it, but then again that was several years ago. I'll have to give it a whirl to compare against Gnome regarding user friendliness...I'm sure it's come a long way since then...

[margrave]

I still wonder who bought PearOS?

[SJA]

Yum(DNF now), RPM, Rolling Release...etc..therefore Fedora...

 

[th3rEsa]

As this is in the "Linux / Unix" forum, why is this a Linux-only poll?

(It makes me sad that Slackware is so rarely used, by the way. If I had to use a Linux, it would be this one.)

[SoCalRox]

I use Xubuntu, but will admit a fondness for openSUSE. It's a bit heavy for the use I generally have (thus, Xubuntu) but I like the feel, and KDE has really gotten to be quite nice. 

[Mr_Karl_R_Dorman]

I like, Netrunner 14.2 because it is an up-to-date Linux OS with the new Firefox browser 40.0.3. It's totally beautiful.  Thank you, Neowin for letting me post my comment on this forum.

[PGHammer]

I use Xubuntu, but will admit a fondness for openSUSE. It's a bit heavy for the use I generally have (thus, Xubuntu) but I like the feel, and KDE has really gotten to be quite nice. 

I use Kubuntu (currently 16.10), but will shift back to Sabayon's KDE spin when the bugs are sorted in KDE.  Comparing Kubuntu to Sabayon's KDE spin, Sabayon is actually easier to deploy (which was a shocker, considering that Sabayon itself is closer to Gentoo than Kubuntu) and is more leading edge than a Kubuntu-easy distribution is expected to be.  I called Sabayon "Gentoo without the agony" when I first started using it - and it still fits.

 

[Tanikion]

Tried most of the Ubuntu distros at some point. Settled on Xubuntu mostly because it got me away from the KDE wallet nightmare that was Kubuntu.

Tried CentOS, OpenSuse and Mint. Not tried Arch or Fedora yet but will give it a go at some point.

Just remember: There is always room for just one more virtual machine on your computer, Just use a crowbar and a bigger hammer..

[Gone]

My signature may be biased but......

[Gerowen]

As this is in the "Linux / Unix" forum, why is this a Linux-only poll?

(It makes me sad that Slackware is so rarely used, by the way. If I had to use a Linux, it would be this one.)

I remember in college it seemed like Slackware was what a lot of the "real" Linux users ran, but you don't hear much about it these days.  Just went to their website, and I swear it doesn't look like it has been updated since I graduated high school 10 years ago,

For me personally, I like Debian/Ubuntu.  I've piddled around with Mandrake/Mandriva, Fedora Core and a bunch of others and just kind of settled in the Debian branch of Linux operating systems.  Ubuntu is easy to use and is probably the best for beginners, but I like how Debian is kind of a stripped down, stable OS with not much done to it in the way of developer customizations.  You're free to customize it how you see fit for the most part, and I feel like the Debian installer has found an excellent balance between expert options and ease of use, whereas the Ubuntu installer, while pretty and easy to use, doesn't give too many customization options.  The biggest bonus is the DEB standard.  3rd party developers don't like having to release their software in a kajillion different formats, and most of the ones that support Linux seem to have settled on the DEB and RPM package formats, I guess because of the success of Debian and Red Hat based operating systems.  Sure I know how to compile software from source, but I also like to actually use my computer to do stuff besides manually creating menu shortcuts, file type associations, adding repositories, etc., and when I can double click a .deb file for a trusted piece of software and have all of that stuff automated, it means I can stop working on the computer and start using the computer to work on other stuff.

[Royalty]

I'm surprised no one uses Red Hat here. I used to but then I switched to Ubuntu.

[Unobscured Vision]

When Mint switches over to 16.04 Ubuntu as a base I'll go back to that. Likely the KDE flavor, as it should be on Plasma 5.5 or 5.6 by then.

Right now it's Kubuntu 15.04 for me ... for *now*.

[Gerowen]

For those who want to go TLDR, the short and sweet is this.  I've switched to Debian for the time being and I like it.

Long version

I've been giving Debian 8 a shot for the past couple of weeks on both of our computers (Desktop in the living room that's hooked to the TV and my laptop), and using Gnome 3 on both of them, and I have to say, my previous grievances with Debian 6/7 have been relieved.  I spent about 5 minutes trying to use Gnome 3 in Debian 7 and maybe it was because I didn't really give it a chance, but Steam didn't work properly for me at the time, plenty of the newer software being developed for Debian/Ubuntu was based on newer libraries than what was available, etc.

I made the switch because it was about time for an Ubuntu upgrade anyway (15.10 comes out this month some time), and I normally do clean installs when I upgrade, so I decided to give Debian a try since it's good enough for Ubuntu and so many other projects to be based on.  I've long, ethically at least, preferred Debian over Ubuntu because of Ubuntu's willingness to package non-free software by default without asking, their willingness to, by default, send your Unity search terms to an un-affiliated 3rd party, etc..  However Ubuntu's ease of use and popularity has led me to run that because sometimes it took some work to get certain things going in Debian.  Non-Free software is fine and dandy if you "have" to have it, or if I choose to install it, but I should be the one to bless off on installing it, and it shouldn't be packaged along with the operating system by default since the Linux kernel and GNU tools were built on the principles of software freedom.  Debian 8 has improved on previous releases and in a couple of weeks of using Gnome 3, I've actually grown quite used to it.  It seems more responsive than Unity, at least on my hardware, and I really like the way it handles multiple desktops by including them in the "pan out" view that you get by mousing to the top left or clicking on "Activities".  It came with enough default extensions to make me happy by allowing me to add a classic applications menu, weather widget, Places menu, etc. without having to go hunt stuff down at some place like gnome-look(dot)org.  I have had one or two occasions where the Gnome panel would crash and restart (I didn't have to do it, it did it on its own), but those crashes seem to have been caused by 3rd party applications and not the panel itself because they always happened when running certain applications (Iceweasel was one I believe, they've stopped since switching to Chrome).

I'll probably leave Debian on here for a while unless I start having regular problems with old software versions not working with most 3rd party software, but since Steam tells developers to build their games around Ubuntu 12.04 (released April of 2012), I don't think that will be a problem since most of the 3rd party/non-free stuff I'll be running will come through Steam.  I don't mind compiling software every once and a while if I have to, but when I start having to compile one thing that is a dependency for another thing I have to compile so I can satisfy another dependency for something else I have to compile, I start to get really annoyed.  For the time being though, everything is working great on Debian 8, I've gotten used to Gnome 3 to the point that I actually enjoy using it, and Debian is a little more ethical in their approach to "free" software than the folks at Canonical.

For those who haven't used it, here's a screenshot of my Gnome 3.  When you mouse to the top left corner or click on the "Activities" menu (mine has been replaced with an applications menu but the mouse gesture still works) it basically lays out all of the applications on that desktop in such a way where you can see them all and click on one to focus.  On the right you'll see a list of all desktops in use plus one empty one.  You can drag running applications onto different desktops, and when you close the last application on a desktop and switch to another one, it automatically removes that desktop from the list on the right until you only have the desktops with running applications plus one empty desktop.  You don't have to worry about manually configuring how many desktops you want to have and being OCD about how you've got 2 of them with nothing on them, etc., Gnome 3 manages it all automatically for you, :-)  There's a few other niceties and improvements over my last experience with Gnome 3, such as the option to automatically purge your trash bin and temp files at a set interval, but I'm rambling on now.  I just wanted to share an update since I've been pretty happy with this recent move to Debian 8, :-)

[coolguy80]

I'm using Linux solely for some 14 years now. My first distro was RedHat 7.2 and later installed Debian (Woody). Although, I've some early experience with RH 5.x series during Engineering college years. Those were the dialup days, Debian CD's and all must come from uni's or some stores stock these cd's. Have tried many *NIX distro's like Fedora, Arch, Debian derivatives, Gentoo stage-1, FreeBSD etc. RPM or DPKG based distributions are the standard. Back those days, testing with apt-pinning from sid and experimental as well as rebuilding packages occasionally were the activities.

Debian and Ubuntu seems more productive although rolling distros like Arch also attracts many. With Debian, some rough edges are there with some packages which needs to be recompiled/rebuilt to achieve the needed result. Now, I'm using LMDE 2 which is Debian Jessie with mint optimizations on a Intel 330 series SSD. Yes, it's a mix-n-match distro but gets the work done. I hope Linux Mint shifts to Debian/Devuan base from Ubuntu. 

Systemd is a key problem now. The supporters and haters have divided the OSS community, although general users may not be caring for ANY. However, even if systemd can achieve faster boot results, the (unreasonable?) suspicion some of us, old users have in our mind cannot be quelled that easily. This piece of software wants full control of Linux systems.

http://suckless.org/sucks/systemd

http://localghost.org/

Gentoo seems to have alternate mechanisms FTTB with eudev and OpenRC for sysvinit.

 

[martin noname]

Zorin, because I'm trying to learn after being with windows since 3.1 whatever.

 

[liamnickelback]

Xubuntu really looks like the best choice. Both for power users and beginners.

[willi123yao]

Depends on how you decide it though. Especially the factors