191–200 of 329 posts
Your requirements are met by any distro so you'll get people recommending their distro of choice here. Mine is Fedora. Arguments for Fedora include: * Best SElinux implementation if that sort of thing turns your clock. * Latest gnome 3 and yearly new releases with even more recent desktop software. * dnf, or yum as it was called, which from personal experience I think is very good. On par or better than apt/dpkg. * B…
Exactly. You'll basically just need to experiment to find what suits you for the little things.
For me, it's Elementary OS, and before that, Slackware. When I finally started getting over my aversion to systemd I started using Elementary full time, and it's a great fit for me. The interface is superficially a near-clone of macOS, but in reality, only where it makes sense to do so. It's Ubuntu LTS based so it's got a solid foundation, and it has some great features for developers. The Terminal app is great, the built in visual text editor (Scratch) is good but not superb (it meets my needs but programmers will probably stick to what they're used to), and hardware support in my experience is, again, as good as Ubuntu. It also happens to have excellent laptop support, with ACPI and sleep/hibernate/resume usually working out of the box unless you have esoteric hardware.
Two downsides I've found: One, it can be a bit slow on underpowered hardware (but that's probably not an issue in your case), and two, it's not a rolling release which is a dealbreaker for some. If those are issues, Arch may be a better fit. I've found Antergos to be a beautiful, painless introduction to that distro.
An honorable mention is BunsenLabs, which was started by former users of Crunchbang Linux. It's almost pure Debian with a well-configured Openbox+Tint2+Compton theme and some really great defaults. It's as minimalist as you can get while still running a stacking WM and visual effects. Hardware support is slightly less robust than Ubuntu thanks to being Debian based, but I never had any issues with it except on one old Pentium M laptop that didn't support PAE kernels. They do offer a non-PAE installer for just that scenario (again, not a concern you'll have).
Your post seems to suggest that you won't be developing for Linux and just need something that's a good virtualization host and all-round desktop. In this case, any distribution that you can get along with will do. Especially if you don't have much experience with Linux, Ubuntu and Fedora are both excellent choices. I tend to recommend the latter over the former. If you do actually need to develop for Linux, I would…
I've been using Gentoo since 2002 I think. It's a great distribution for developers, especially if you're developing Linux packages. It's very easy to create your own local overlay and test your package changes against a system, without needing your own custom repo or VM. I'm glad you mentioned Void too. I'm currently using that on my router. I like how Void is systemd free and Gentoo makes it optional. If you try bu…
Not having systemd isn't such a big deal to me, but it helps. I had to learn it at $work a while ago so it doesn't baffle me anymore. I get why it's so appreciated by DevOps and software outsourcing companies, but it doesn't do anything I need. I can live with it (and I have), but it helps if I don't need to.
Gentoo is great, but with Linux land being the way it is lately, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who's not very familiar with it. Asking someone to get a working system with Grub 2, xdg-* and the like using nothing but the Gentoo handbook and the Gentoo forum is more or less the equivalent of sending someone to fight World War II with a fork.
ArchLinux is very decent distro. If you need something that you can tweak to be the continuation of your mind, environment designed exactly for you, it is Arch. If you have some time in the beginning to read archwiki, you will avoid a lot of problems in the future. After you understand how it works, it is easy to fix whatever breaks. For me Arch breaks extremely rarely. I use it for 7 years and remember no more than…
Yup. I switched from Ubuntu to Arch after I realised I was trying to make Ubuntu work like a rolling release distro. This lead to frequent breakage. Arch definitely has a learning curve, but it also helps you realise that some things really are as simple as they appear (if that makes sense). That said, if you're like me and prone to fits of 'mad science', you will find yourself breaking your OS from time to time. But…
If you just want to run linux, Ubuntu will be better choice .
As a side note, I love how this question would be begging for a distro war anywhere but HN. Here everyone says things in the way of "There's no best distro " or really humbly say what they are using and why. This is the best way IMHO that HN shows how it is the opposite of any random internet website; In HN we can have civilized conversations about some topics that are not possible almost anywhere else on the interne…
I was really tired of not being able to find insightful content and discussions on so many other social networks and/or forums. Most of them are full of frivolousness, hatred, squable, swear, all that memes, gifs... etc. Then I came across HN, ~3 years ago. I am not a coder (trying to learn fundamentals on my own, though) and not so fluent in English either. Even though, it was (and is) like brilliant content filter - in terms of both news and comments. You cannot get a grip if you are not civil enough or if you are looking for some visual entertainments. You know, I guess it's all about text. You read. You get valuable information and knowledge from other readers'/writers' experiences. Text is not dead here on HN.
All in all, HN is like "The best content aggregator for humans, by humans".
Before I discuss specific distributions:
1) powertop is your friend for battery management
2) Pretty much all distros will let you run virtualbox and qemu-kvm so there's no real wrong choice for your use case.
A lot of people like Ubuntu, but I've had terrible luck with it. It somehow seems to be in the (for me) uncomfortable spot where it adopts certain things before they are ready for prime time while also having other things feel old compared to a rolling-release distro.
Debian "testing" tends to be more stable than Ubuntu and "unstable" more bleeding edge. If you want a middle ground between those two, give Ubuntu a try.
That being said, nearly 20 years of running linux has given me a strong bias for source based distributions. Rolling binary distributions (e.g. Arch) tend to have issues with DLLs, and release based binary distributions are often a pain to switch releases.
For non-laptops I use Gentoo, but you don't want to have to install or upgrade packages when not plugged in as you will be able to watch your battery usage go down in realtime.
My current laptop uses Nix, which is a source-based distribution with a binary caching system. I love Nix, but it's a small enough community that you are likely to find software for which no package exists; as a source based distribution, you can often write a package expression in a few minutes, and I've done that about 6 times in the past 6 months. It is a very non-FHS layout so a ./configure && make && sudo make install like you can do on Gentoo is unlikely to work.
Another upside of Nix is that it also has a lot of great tools for developers, letting you easily make isolated environments with different libraries and utilities in each one. All this being said, I usually don't recommend it to someone who is asking "what distro should I use?" since the small community and sheer difference of the approach makes it much harder to do google-based troubleshooting.