Ask HN: What's your linux distro? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's your linux distro?

#11

Post by fredsanford » Sun, Oct 13, 2013, 10:55 PM UTC

staunch wrote: post #10

Unless you have some reason not to you should just run Ubuntu. It's by far the most popular desktop Linux distribution, which tends to make your life easier. I've been using Linux as my desktop for 15+ years, so I've run lots of distros, but I'm using a stock Ubuntu 13 on my machines. It works, gets out of my way, and let's me get work done.

Not anymore.

According to distrowatch, the order is:

1. Linux Mint

2. Debian

3. Ubuntu

Me, I prefer Mint with MATE because with just a few patches the screen is much more readable than any other distro and it is based on Ubuntu, so I have something to fall back on.

Otherwise I would use Arch.

Re: Ask HN: What's your linux distro?

#12

Post by mcintyre1994 » Sun, Oct 13, 2013, 10:57 PM UTC

WiseWeasel wrote: post #4

EvolutionOS: everything works AND it looks good doing it. If you're coming from MacOS X, you'll feel right at home; there's apparently significant Apple talent contributing to it, and many of the design features are inspired by OS X.

I'm not trying to be smart or anything, but do you mean Elementary OS? http://elementaryos.org/ If not then sorry, but do you have a link to the project because it sounds similar. :)

Re: Ask HN: What's your linux distro?

#13

Post by lsiebert » Sun, Oct 13, 2013, 11:01 PM UTC

Mint 15 Cinnamon. Still lighter weight then ubuntu, but nice eye candy. I'm tempted to switch to a tiling WM, but I haven't found one with a good built-in menu bar yet.

Re: Ask HN: What's your linux distro?

#14

Post by gumballhead » Sun, Oct 13, 2013, 11:09 PM UTC

Mint

Re: Ask HN: What's your linux distro?

#15

Post by mos6502 » Sun, Oct 13, 2013, 11:28 PM UTC

As a GNU/Linux user since '97, I've used many distributions over the years, but now I'm down to just two that I use in my day to day life.

1. Arch Linux on three laptops and one desktop all running encrypted btrfs root filesystems, and two Raspberry Pies each running their roots off of 1TB, unencrypted ext4 external drives.

2. NixOS on an Asus Eee PC 900HD netbook with an unencrypted XFS root filesystem. The functional language for the package manager and system configuration, as well as the interesting package pool symlinking, makes for a unique GNU/Linux experience. I use this for Common Lisp coding and server administration when I'm on the go.

All systems run StumpWM as their desktop environment, though the Pies are usually running headless as a simulated OpenVMS cluster, and dual torrent seed boxes.

Re: Ask HN: What's your linux distro?

#16

Post by WiseWeasel » Sun, Oct 13, 2013, 11:42 PM UTC

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #12

WiseWeasel wrote: post #4

EvolutionOS: everything works AND it looks good doing it. If you're coming from MacOS X, you'll feel right at home; there's apparently significant Apple talent contributing to it, and many of the design features are inspired by OS X.

I'm not trying to be smart or anything, but do you mean Elementary OS? http://elementaryos.org/ If not then sorry, but do you have a link to the project because it sounds similar. :)

Yeah, sorry, elementary, not evolution... Way to embarrass me with facts! : P

Re: Ask HN: What's your linux distro?

#17

Post by grumps » Mon, Oct 14, 2013, 12:29 AM UTC

Debian / Unstable.

I've had some thoughts at looking into FreeBSD but that's not Linux.

Re: Ask HN: What's your linux distro?

#18

Post by phaus » Mon, Oct 14, 2013, 12:44 AM UTC

fredsanford wrote: post #11

staunch wrote: post #10

Unless you have some reason not to you should just run Ubuntu. It's by far the most popular desktop Linux distribution, which tends to make your life easier. I've been using Linux as my desktop for 15+ years, so I've run lots of distros, but I'm using a stock Ubuntu 13 on my machines. It works, gets out of my way, and let's me get work done.

Not anymore. According to distrowatch, the order is: 1. Linux Mint 2. Debian 3. Ubuntu Me, I prefer Mint with MATE because with just a few patches the screen is much more readable than any other distro and it is based on Ubuntu, so I have something to fall back on. Otherwise I would use Arch.

Distrowatch tracks hits per day, not installed user base. I love Linux Mint, but I doubt it has a larger user base than Ubuntu. However, it may eventually.

Mint has been consistently winning on Distrowatch since 2011, the year Unity was released.

This is just one poll (although a pretty large one), but Reddit does an annual poll. Ubuntu is still killing it.

http://constantmayhem.com/ty-stuff/linuxsurvey/2013.html

Re: Ask HN: What's your linux distro?

#19

Post by FireBringer » Mon, Oct 14, 2013, 1:14 AM UTC

Ubuntu Gnome and sometimes Debian. Mostly because apt and ubuntu are so widely used everything just seems to work.

Unity is nice when it works but gnome seems to work more often so that is what I prefer.

Re: Ask HN: What's your linux distro?

#20

Post by vermasque » Mon, Oct 14, 2013, 2:28 AM UTC

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

I've been using Ubuntu for 3 years and just never bothered to switch away to another distro. Before I started using Ubuntu, I had a Windows Vista laptop, and I just wanted to migrate to some Linux away from Windows. Chose the most popular option.

Since I began, I've had two major issues. A failed upgrade from 11.10 to 12-something put me between a rock and a hard place. I couldn't find a way to fix the upgrade or restore to a clean state without reinstalling the OS. Eventually, I just installed 12.04 LTS because I could install it from Windows. The other major issue was my wireless not working (Realtek on a Dell Vostro from 2009). I had to install the wireless drivers from source code (Ubuntu installation tools didn't help at all) and then reboot a few times to get it working.

I use Linux primarily because I wanted a first-class *nix command line: bash, GNU core utils, etc. When this laptop dies, I'll probably switch to a Macbook Air.