I started out with Gentoo, maybe 10 years ago. It was the coolest thing, but later realized that I was spending a lot of time compiling everything and wanted these magical things called "binaries" instead.
So I switched to Ubuntu - Warty Warthog! I loved it because it was a minimal distro that was very useful and fit on a single CD. (I neither had lots of internet nor CDs available to me at the time.) Also, I never knew which options to select for a Fedora Anaconda install. So many packages - what do I want??
Then I tried Mint. It was neat, I guess, but never seemed appreciably easier than Ubuntu. I was hoping for an easier experience doing things like playing MP3s and displaying patent-protected GIF files, but I dunno, I never really got into it.
I did, however, get into the Cinnamon window manager!
Today I begrudgingly installed Ubuntu 12.04. It's more or less the only distro that anybody supports - you can get directions to install $foo (driver, software, Steam, what have you) on Ubuntu but other distros are hit or miss. And Ubuntu is more or less as updated as I care to be, a guarantee that I don't know I can get with other distros.
Mind you, I don't really like ubuntu nowadays. I'm not into Unity, I'm not into paid-results-in-system-search, and as a power-user, I was really unhappy when the switched from init scripts to upstart. But the community has widely adopted it as a 'standard' platform for their software, so, well, here I am.
as a power-user, I was really unhappy when the switched from init scripts to upstart
Why? Personally, I much prefer the declarative configuration over the lengthy SysV boilerplate, and there's always pre-start and such if you want to insert some shell code.
By the way, may I suggest Debian Sid/Unstable? Most of the commands and package names are the same (for obvious reasons ;), it has a rolling release (so you're always up-to-date) and it's still on SysV init scripts.
At the time they made the switch, there was not much documentation or support for upstart. All documentation on the internet was (is?) for init scripts and runlevels.
For example, I wanted to take some old hardware and set it up as a server. Easy - just change init to runlevel 3 (no display) and boom, there you are, headless linux.
If I wanted to do that in ubuntu, I still wouldn't know how, to be honest. I guess I'd have to reinstall it with ubuntu server? Do we even have single-user mode any more?
(I learned sysadmin from "the armadillo book" [1]. I feel like most of the concepts are identical, but the tools are so different now. all I want to do is run a new script on boot. why do i want upstart??)
all I want to do is run a new script on boot. why do i want upstart??
Frankly, if all you wanted was that, you could just stick the script in the kernel init= parameter, no need for Upstart or SysV ;)
Both of them are daemon management applications, and frankly I don't think it makes much sense to optimize for the "running script on boot" versus sanely managing daemon startup.
That said, at least on Ubuntu the SysV infrastructure is still called (as an Upstart job), so you should still be able to stick something in /etc/rc.local.
Alternatively, you can just write an Upstart configuration file:
"I started out with Gentoo, maybe 10 years ago. It was the coolest thing, but later realized that I was spending a lot of time compiling everything and wanted these magical things called "binaries" instead."
I'm using Gentoo and I don't really notice this, but that's probably because my needs are fairly minimal and I take the approach of "if it's working, don't change it". Unless I happen to upgrade to something that requires a new version of a library that then breaks other things that were linking to it, setting of a chain of forced recompilation, I don't really spend much time compiling at all. (Amortized time compiling, in light of the library issue just mentioned, might still be high.)
Curious what other Gentoo users' perceptions of time spent compiling is.
You have to compile quite a lot just to keep up on Gentoo. If you don't, your system will fall out of sync with the packages that are in portage, and trying to install new software and keeping your system running will be painful at best.
In my opinion, this is Gentoo's greatest weakness. I don't really see a way around it, however, short of the Gentoo team somehow getting the resources to mirror every version of every package in portage.
When installing a new gentoo system, you basically let it compile overnight.
When something was broken - let's say X11 wouldn't start - the first thing you'd try is "re-emerge X." 2 hours later, the display is still broken and only later do you realize you had xorg.conf misconfigured.
(I think all of the auto configuration for displays is great, by the way. But on the occasion it doesn't work, I wish I could just edit xorg.conf, but of course that doesn't even exist any more because everything is autodetected by default.)
I loved the idea of USE flags, until I realized that they were just a wrapper around ./configure options.
Same here, around 8-9 years ago... on a laptop. Things would break all the time for me and it was hard to even use any vanilla kernels on it. It taught me most of my basic linux skills, and the forums were a treasure of information (before they took a dive, not sure how they are nowadays). I often had to boot Knoppix (livecd) to fix things.
It was a distro that invited a lot of experimenting and tweaking.
I've been running opensuse as my main distro now for a couple years. Great kde support, very stable, gets the job done. For servers I gravitate towards CentOS.
Oh yeah, gentoo's documentation was, hands-down, the best on the net at the time for getting your stuff to work (say, ndiswrapper for getting wireless working.) Their guides didn't really rely on gentoo-specifc features because gentoo doesn't really have features beyond portage, which more or less wraps gcc.
I just spent a few minutes looking through the gentoo doc again. Makes me really excited how good the community doc was - this is how it's done! [1]
I use Arch for years and can't say it's as good as it used to be. But I still use it since alternatives have bigger issues. and actually I would say there is no "good" distro yet. In my opinion, "good software" is the one that provides well modularized abstractions that connect to life easily and inexpensively, and can be reused by other software fully or partially.
We need an OS with declarative system directories, commands and configuration files based on a minimalist, human-friendly vocabulary and with good hardware support. It's 2013 and Linux is supposed to achieve some good abstraction levels that let people save time instead of reading fucking manuals. We should encourage good abstractions that document itself and communicates with the users. Linux systems don't talk English and they don't connect to real world easily.
Maintaining personal computers should not be expensive. If we're passionate about programming and systems, our goal should be to create good abstractions that connect to life.
Is anyone's choice of distro influenced by the type of servers they find themselves working on?
For example, I find myself doing alot of work on REHL systems in the cloud, and thusly run Fedora (so I don't have to figure out where config files, etc. are kept in other distros).
I use CentOS 6.x almost exclusively, since I work with several different low-end VPS for my businesses. I found it's much, much easier to have adopted a sort of "let it fail" philosophy and replicate across many (then worry about the failure when I have time) instead of paying dearly for a single high-end VPS that does occasionally have downtime. I'm also "sort of" in the business of CDN-type services, so geographical/latency distance is important to me, which is another reason this "let it fail" across many replicated servers around the world works best for my situation.
For hardware firewall/security appliance, I use pfSense (a FreeBSD "distro").
That was the case when I ran Linux on my server. I used Debian and so my (non-Windows)desktop was also Debian. I followed the trend to Ubuntu, but now I'm on OpenBSD for the server and kept Ubuntu for the desktop.
I used to do the same kind of thing, but now I just run OSX full-time because I like the user experience, and Vagrant virtual dev environments let me run whatever distro I want.
Is there any reason you'd use Ubuntu over an Ubuntu-like distro such as Linux Mint? I'm just curious, because I feel like not many people know about Mint here, and the general feeling is that people don't want to use Ubuntu, but like apt and the Ubuntu repos (which Mint uses, without so much of the bloat of Ubuntu, and with a different UI like Cinnamon, which is fantastic).
Not for me. It actually keeps me on my toes a bit regarding differences in distros, especially since I have done well taking on project where server (mis)configuration was an issue as well other devs were struggling with.
I use Gentoo, on a bunch of servers across many providers (RackSpace, AWS, Linode, &c) Like memset I had some issues with waiting for compiles - especially when I started using Gentoo on both the desktop (Chromium!) and server. In ab out 2006 I configured a nice build system - All servers and desktops come from this same BINHOST. Amazing how stable a known, predictable, repeatable environment can be :)
I still laugh when my associates complain about their issues with CentOS, Ubuntu or Fedora - like not having latest versions or when some upgrade breaks things. Haven't had those issues since about 2007.
On the downside, I do have to maintain a few lines of shell script and a cronjob - and every now and then delete an email from root@calcium if there is a hiccup
I have a debian wheezy server running a bunch of disks with zfs (from an ubuntu zfs-on-linux PPA), a jessie/sid desktop that is just awesome, a NAS (Western Digital Sharespace) running debian I installed via debbootstrap and a kernel I hacked together for it. There's also a debian netbook which is mostly retired now, and I have ubuntu on my chromebook, mostly because I'm not sure there's a debian release for it yet.
--edit-- I also use ubuntu at work at the moment. Regardless of the platform I like the XFCE environment, and ubuntu has made that quite pretty lately. Thankfully with a bit of theme downloading through apt, XFCE on debian can be made to look the same.
I'm actually a bit surprised to see Mint with so few users here. I expected Ubuntu to have less of a grip on the HN community than, say, Reddit or something. There's definitely a large Arch and Debian community, which is what I expected, but I certainly did not expect to see so many people using an OS that technical people pretty universally complain about. Mint Cinnamon == Ubuntu without some bloat and minus Unity (and plus a great UI called Cinnamon). That's very interesting to me.
I wondered about VPS/cloud server distros people are using, but there's a great comment here with several good answers. Looks like quite a few are using some kind of VPS out there.
I had to stop using Linux on the desktop, but I've tried out a few of the bigones (Debian/Gentoo/Ubuntu/CentOS/RH) and they were all mostly ok. For day to day desktop work I use FreeBSD, but I also use OSX, since both require me to do very little work to maintain them and I can focus on doing actual work. In terms of the OS I have to spend the most time fixing (for customers/friends), hands down its Ubuntu, Debian/RH/CentOS require some time but not nearly as much. I attribute that mostly to popularity and frequency of updates, but I also kinda think that could be controlled with a heavier QA process. enh :)
Currently Ubuntu; likely switching to Debian in the near future.
I was a huge Gentoo fan early on, but switched to Fedora when I stopped enjoying the USE configuration (which I still believe is awesome, just way too time-consuming), then to Ubuntu when I stopped enjoying yum (well, I never enjoyed yum). I think aptitude is the most stable package manager I've ever used.
Likely going to Debian soon, though. Trying it out in a VM (love those buggers!) It doesn't matter a whole lot since I run openbox, but as a developer, I think knowing the package manager well makes a big difference in the quality of the experience.
Same here. Using 12.04 currently, but with the recent release of Debian Wheezy I'm considering using it for my daily work and getting more involved with Debian as a whole.
I am an Arch user, but I am thinking of switching to Fedora or Ubuntu again.
Arch just takes too much configuration and time, and the dual-head is a pain. It also doesn't support fglrx drivers, because the X version they use is too high. It's more of AMD's fault, not Arch's, but it still requires too much work.
In general, I like Arch's minimalism, and it uses very little RAM, but I am sick and tired of wrestling with it. Ubuntu has a completely different vision of what an operating system should be, and it's probably more suitable for general public (but probably not me). It always worked great out of the box, and Unity is not that bad (even through I prefer tiling WMs). I just don't like the technical direction Canonical is heading (MIR, upstart). I wish there was more input from the community in this kind of decisions.
Kudos to Mark Shuttleworth for having such a strong vision of what an OS/computer/smartphone should be like, and going through with making it a reality. It takes a lot of determination to not yield to the critics, and follow your ideals. I just think it would be better if Ubuntu contributed back to Desktop Linux ecosystem, and not re-invented the wheel.
Also, a lot of criticism of Ubuntu is minor details, and short-sighted. Ubuntu is one of the most rapidly changing distros/OSes, so a lot of things are going through major changes. This causes it to often be buggy, unstable and crash-prone, but in the end it improves at a much faster pace than other OSes. I believe once they polish it, and get some OEMs for phone and computers, they have a real chance of competing with Apple/iOS, Android and Windows.
> It also doesn't support fglrx drivers, because the X version they use is too high.
Friends don't let friends use fglrx. The open source drivers work fine. If I can run Gnome-Shell while playing StarCraft 2, Left4dead 2 beta and team fortress on open source AMD drivers with acceptable performance then so can you.
All the things I tried were either too slow or didn't start at all with open-source drivers. With fglrx everything works. But I hate installing/upgrading them, because they either mess something up, or uninstall incompletely.
I started in 1998 with Debian 2.0 and the dreadful dselect, went on to 2.1 and 2.2, and I was happy and in control.
Then at work they imposed me to use RedHat 5 to 9. A nightmarish experience of broken package dbs and way too much reinstalls.
Only highlight was the awesome Ximian Gnome and Red Carpet, which lately more or less became the even more awesome Synaptic.
When Fedora came out, I was fed up with rpm and started my own little Gentoo (from Stage 0) revolution.
So much fun! Everything was optimized and fast. Like Flash-fast!
But after 2 wild years of emerges, my HDD went in pieces and I learned the dark side of continuous recompiling: the HDD suffers.
So I felt again the debianist inside me and in 2005 installed the most natural evolution of Debian.
It was stable, it had apt, it was up-to-date. It was Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog).
Never looked back since.
Today I'm very happy with 13.04, but I'm also now starting to long for a MacBook Pro.
Because I'm older, wiser, and I need a laptop with top-class hardware and an OS that just works.
New Linux convert here. Been an Ubuntu user since early April. Chose Ubuntu since it's what I defaulted to for my Linode instance (which I've also only had since January) upon referencing some guides, and since it seemed to have strong guides and references I could look to if I got stuck on something.
Ubuntu is a nice choice. It's easy enough, it has huge amounts of software available, commercial support is available, etc. The user generated support is variable in quality. There are a lot of people who know just enough to give the wrong advice, which can be frustrating.
There are some problems with Ubuntu. There are some political things about the benign dictator, and about contributing fixes, and about the direction it's going. These might not be at all important for you.
If you ever decide you want to leave Ubuntu you could chose Mint, which is popular (and they're doing interesting things). Mint should be as easy to use as Ubuntu. Or you could chose Fedora. The Fedora community is lovely! If you want to learn more about Linux and fancy a challenge you can try Arch. The Arch documentation is excellent, and is recommended reading even if you're not running Arch.
It's not so much that I don't care about the dictator/fixes/direction, but rather I'm not knowledgeable enough to know the significance. It's like an election where I'm not yet even capable of informing myself of the significance of the issues at hand.
Hopefully I'll be able to make an informed "vote" in the future.
I've been through Redhat, Gentoo, Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, OSX, and Arch over the past decade. Arch seems to be where I'm staying for a long time, for a few reasons.
First, it is a great distro for tinkering. I (obviously -- by my list) enjoy shaking things up and trying out new things, and Arch doesn't get in the way of doing so. Neither does Gentoo, but the compiling does get old after a while.
Second, I really enjoy the rolling-release system. It is nice to spend a few minutes every day updating the system to the latest & greatest rather than going through the 'big upgrade' every six months or so.
Finally, I feel like I'm the target market for Arch. OSX and Ubuntu are more general computing platforms. They are certainly usable, elegant, and outstrip my Arch/i3 setup for multimedia. But they don't scratch my particular itch. Arch does, and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.
Fedora here, but I'm on something of an older release (F16), and I haven't heard good things about the latest release so I'm reluctant to upgrade. Not sure if I'll switch to something else or what, at this point.
Suggest moving sideways to CentOS/Scientific Linux/Springdale Linux (RHEL 6 clones) if Fedora 12/13 based desktop with some updated packages is not too old for you.
It's weird; I was introduced to linux via CentOS (while working) and I immediately fell in love with it, but I can't pin down /why/ I genuinely like this particular distro. Anything I come up with seems pedantic at best.
Maybe I'm just in love with a particular part of linux. Maybe its how I'm able to look at the innards of an OS and see how components of a system interact. Or maybe I'm in love with the puzzle in an enigma that is dependency management. I just don't know.
Long time Gentoo user (almost 10 years) here. I'll admit that it is NOT a distribution for everyone, tailored more towards power users and tinkerers in general, but for me it is the ideal distribution. Here are a few reasons why I think Gentoo is great:
* Customizability / minimalism: Binary distributions usually come with tons of packages compiled with all kinds of bells and whistles, and often times make choices for you like what init system to use, what DE/WM to use, heck even what kernel to use. They are customizable to a degree, ie. you can install additional DE's after the fact, but not as much as Gentoo, which puts you in control of exactly what should be installed, and exactly what options to turn on. On a machine without bluetooth? Don't compile any bluetooth support into any libs/apps, not even in the kernel. Gentoo allows you to build a custom-tailored minimal software bundle for your exact hardware.
* Bleeding edge: Being a rolling release distribution, you get to experience the latest and greatest of open source software as it is being developed. Admittedly Gentoo has fallen behind lately on some areas due to not having as many active maintainers as it once used to, but for most areas it is still as bleeding edge as you can get (probably behind Arch overall). GNOME 3.8.2 became available the next day after its release, I'd say that is pretty bleeding edge.
* Documentation: The Gentoo forums and wiki are a great source of information for any general linux desktop (and server) issues. Arch has taken over in terms of having the majority of the mindshare, but I view both distributions' forums/wikis as the primary source of informed discussion on desktop linux topics.
* Speed: Not everyone is into -Oomg-optimized ricing, but for people who are, few other distributions will let you use custom CFLAGS all around and push your hardware truly to the limit.
I'm currently running Fedora, but I'm really tempted to switch over to Arch or maybe even NixOS.
The latest version of Fedora was a bit of a mess compared to previous versions, including things like bugs with waking up from sleep. Moreover, I'm finding the release schedule a bit slow. Also, I've heard good things about Arch and NixOS in terms of Haskell support.
Used to run Arch until recently, but moved to Ubuntu when 13.04 came out.
Currently using Ubuntu with MATE (haven't bothered with Unity in quite a while, considering my experience with it in previous Ubuntu versions was quite underwhelming - might try it again someday) and - surprisingly - not missing Arch that much.
My work environment is currently a chaotic mix of a variety of linux distros, most of them broken in some fashion. I was hired to club the system into submission, and am using CentOS as my base for rebuilding everything.
Work system is Fedora-XFCE, home system is Slackware.
Kubuntu at work — Ubuntu because it's the done thing where I am, and K- because it's the only ‘desktop’ I'm aware of that lets me avoid the Windows practice of overloading the Control key for menu shortcuts and stealing it from ASCII and editing.
I'm only on servers, so it's Debian or CentOS. I've had too many flaky issues with Ubuntu on servers. Also I have OpenBSD, Illumos derivatives, OpenWRT, etc. on servers/devices.
Desktop is nearly always OS X, except for Windows for "toy" gaming use.
Does anyone have a good alternative for Ubuntu's Unity. I like Ubuntu because of the community, but I just can't get over Unity. My normal keyboard shortcuts are all jacked up and it's just... impossible to deal with for me.
I use Ubuntu because I'm too lazy to switch to Arch. I've stripped out everything Ubuntu about it and replaced the DE with awesome. New computers always use Arch and new servers always use Debian.
* Sabayon - It's a better experience than pure Gentoo
* SliTaz - You won't believe me how insanely fast it is!
* Peppermint OS - Perfect for mum and friends
Debian has been my home for 5+ years. It was the only distro I ever tried where the package manager didn't eventually (or immediately) fail on me and require me to fix either the package or my whole system manually.
I have tried my share of distros in the past [0], but haven't felt much need to go outside of Debian recently. Perhaps things have changed, but now I'm happy here :)
Ubuntu for the up-to-dateness (relative to debian) and stability. If I want something more up to date I can use a ppa if it exists, or pip, or compile. Mostly I take what's there and I'm fine.
LXDE for the minimalism. It's just windows and a panel, none of the Unity drama.
Canonical recently seems to be emphasizing Canonical (which is their right), so I'll likely go to Debian; LXDE will make the desktop part all but a non-event.
Started out on ubuntu around five or six years ago, then I switched to debian about 4 years ago. And now I've been running crunchbang waldorf on my laptop for about two years, mint on my desktop for one and angstrom on my openpandora and debian wheezy on my tablet for about six months to a year. So mainly debian based for my systems, but then again debian is easy to use, easy to configure and just fun to use.
I know pacman doesn't do everything that apt/dpkg does, but for a personal machine I highly prefer it to any other. What exactly don't you like about it?
I used to use Debian for everything until I started working with OpenStack, and now use Ubuntu because it has releases in sync with OpenStack releases.
So now I plan to have OpenStack running on both the server in the office & on the laptop that has a KDE desktop on it, too. It'll be nice because I can take my Windows 7 VM with me when I take the laptop out.
Ubuntu has gotten me started on Linux thanks to the simple/low-hassle install process, and enough polish to be a bearable alternative to OSX or Windows. Now that I'm getting the hang of things, I'm beginning to prefer it in spite of the issues. I also like distros using Gnome 3+ but Ubuntu is ubiquitous enough that I defaulted to it.
I used Ubuntu for years, but the constant barrage of updates (every six months outside of an LTS release!) and the fact something /always/ broke when moving to a new release (usually video) eventually got annoying enough that I switched back to Debian. For me, Debian's slower release cycle is a plus in itself.
Ah, same here. At the risk of sounding negative, the Gnome folks really jumped the shark on that one (though it's a bit better now). Things are just so much more complicated.
I understand that taste is a very subjective thing and most folks will stick to things they're used to, but this was one thing I really couldn't get un-used to.
I use Arch Linux with a tiling windows manager like Awesome/Xmonad (currently using Awesome). I like how lightweight this and prefer to not use a mouse as it cuts down efficiency so I use a combination of Vim, Vimperator, tmux, and Awesome to quickly get things done).
I'm on Ubuntu for no good reason really, I guess I just like feeling like there's a large community, it's well supported and that I have a complete OS which many distros (understandably) don't seem to provide. I don't like Unity though, so I use Cinnamon.
Fair point. I guess it's more that since you can mix and match pretty much anything on any distro, and I don't use Unity, I wouldn't really be affected if I moved to something else.
For desktop (and on my laptop) use, I dual boot Windows 7 and Linux Mint 13 currently. Going to upgrade to Mint 15 soon enough. Also have a lot of experience with CentOS for server use and Ubuntu 12.04.
I've been an Ubuntu user since Breezy but currently trying out Mint. Considered using Fuduntu, since we mostly use RHEL for work, but since the project will end soon, will wait for what will "replace" it
I do most of my daily productivity work in Windows 7 but I use a couple Linux VMs for all browsing (one more trusted than the other) and for some tools that are just "easier" on Linux
After using Arch, going back to anything else is a pain. I want the latest packages, systemd, and the simplicity. It's easy to tinker with custom kernels, wms... anything really.
I use a combination of Arch on my main PC, and a combination of ChromeOS/Ubuntu-through-crouton on my Chromebook (it's the Samsung 5 550, not the Pixel, sadly)
When I see comments like these, I feel like there must be two different KDEs. Every time I've tried to use it, I've had the exact opposite experience: it runs really slow and provides a complete nonsense UI.
Hear, hear! I can (and do) run Crunchbang on tiny embedded devices all the way up through those netbooks. For all of those smaller (capability) devices, you really can't go wrong with #!.
Every time I've tried to use Elementary I find it really buggy and slow. I know that it's currently in beta, but every time I read about it people talk about how stable it is, which doesn't seem to be the case for me.
I've tried several times to use it as my main OS, but every time I keep coming back to Arch. The same is true with Ubuntu and other Ubuntu flavors, most recently Ubuntu Gnome, which is basically the same as what I run with Arch, but with an Ubuntu foundation and less time spent getting it working. Even that felt slow to me.
So I switched to Ubuntu - Warty Warthog! I loved it because it was a minimal distro that was very useful and fit on a single CD. (I neither had lots of internet nor CDs available to me at the time.) Also, I never knew which options to select for a Fedora Anaconda install. So many packages - what do I want??
Then I tried Mint. It was neat, I guess, but never seemed appreciably easier than Ubuntu. I was hoping for an easier experience doing things like playing MP3s and displaying patent-protected GIF files, but I dunno, I never really got into it.
I did, however, get into the Cinnamon window manager!
Today I begrudgingly installed Ubuntu 12.04. It's more or less the only distro that anybody supports - you can get directions to install $foo (driver, software, Steam, what have you) on Ubuntu but other distros are hit or miss. And Ubuntu is more or less as updated as I care to be, a guarantee that I don't know I can get with other distros.
Mind you, I don't really like ubuntu nowadays. I'm not into Unity, I'm not into paid-results-in-system-search, and as a power-user, I was really unhappy when the switched from init scripts to upstart. But the community has widely adopted it as a 'standard' platform for their software, so, well, here I am.