On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 12:30:27 UTC, Chris wrote:
> At work we use Ubuntu, however, I'm not at all happy with it and don't want to use it on my private computer. Which is the best alternative (I've been looking at OpenSUSE; Mint is based on Ubuntu/Debian but only shares the repository with Ubuntu (right?); Fedora has bad reviews at the moment and might be a pain to set up (drivers etc.)). I'm also considering FreeBSD, a completely different beast.

If you've never heard about it, NixOS is quite interesting project.
It would require a bit of Linux knowledge and even worse - time - to use it.

So far I have found Kubuntu to be the least amount of work to get a system that works the way I want. I have tried Arch and OpenSuSe but both of those seem to be a lot more work.


On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 10:50 AM,  <"Mariusz `shd` Gliwiński\" <alienballance@gmail.com>"@puremagic.com> wrote:
> On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 12:30:27 UTC, Chris wrote:
>>
>> At work we use Ubuntu, however, I'm not at all happy with it and don't
>> want to use it on my private computer. Which is the best alternative (I've
>> been looking at OpenSUSE; Mint is based on Ubuntu/Debian but only shares the
>> repository with Ubuntu (right?); Fedora has bad reviews at the moment and
>> might be a pain to set up (drivers etc.)). I'm also considering FreeBSD, a
>> completely different beast.
>
>
> If you've never heard about it, NixOS is quite interesting project.
> It would require a bit of Linux knowledge and even worse - time - to use it.

On Wednesday, 22 January 2014 at 05:31:02 UTC, Danni Coy wrote:
> So far I have found Kubuntu to be the least amount of work to get a
> system that works the way I want. I have tried Arch and OpenSuSe but
> both of those seem to be a lot more work.
>

I installed a flavor or ArchLinux (Manjaro, cos I'm lazy) and could get things to work (including the touchscreen) fairly easily. It took less time than trying to fix all the problems I had with Ubuntu ("low graphics mode", touch screen etc.), and the documentation is really really good. What they say works, unlike askubuntu* that gives you 1,000 answers that don't work, and you end up having changed 1,000 things more or less randomly. I'm beginning to like ArchLinux, it gives me freedom and control over my own computer.

(*What really annoys, now that I have made the switch, is that on askubuntu it often seems as if it's the vendor's fault, if the hardware doesn't work properly with Ubuntu. However, with ArchLinux my hardware works very well. Hm.)

On Wednesday, 22 January 2014 at 00:50:36 UTC, Mariusz `shd` Gliwiński wrote:
> If you've never heard about it, NixOS is quite interesting project.

Woah! Atomic transactional configuration. That's cool! Debian with Nix would be great.

I've been a loyal Debian (testing) user since I dropped Slackware in the 90s, and can't see why a programmer would use anything else for their own use. Debian is good at not telling you how your setup should be, so you can more easily go minimal without sacrificing much. But you get the occasional configuration hiccup. Not often even though, and usually easy to fix.

On Wednesday, 22 January 2014 at 10:40:47 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> and can't see why a programmer would use anything else for their own use.

For me deciding factor was Debian focus on stability. Software evolves just too fast and I always want bleeding edge. Even [unstable] is too stable/old in my opinion.

On Wednesday, 22 January 2014 at 10:50:41 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> On Wednesday, 22 January 2014 at 10:40:47 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> and can't see why a programmer would use anything else for their own use.
>
> For me deciding factor was Debian focus on stability. Software evolves just too fast and I always want bleeding edge. Even [unstable] is too stable/old in my opinion.

I agree. Nowadays software evolves so fast that it's better to be reasonably bleeding edge. It's often no longer feasible to just wait and see what happens, and if it happens.

On Wednesday, 22 January 2014 at 10:50:41 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> For me deciding factor was Debian focus on stability. Software evolves just too fast and I always want bleeding edge. Even [unstable] is too stable/old in my opinion.

Yes, Debian is a bit conservative when it comes to open source policies and stability. Usually a blessing, but an annoyance when you have to do things from scratch to get around it.

On Wednesday, 22 January 2014 at 10:40:47 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Wednesday, 22 January 2014 at 00:50:36 UTC, Mariusz `shd` Gliwiński wrote:
>> If you've never heard about it, NixOS is quite interesting project.
>
> Woah! Atomic transactional configuration. That's cool! Debian with Nix would be great.

Thanks to you guys mentioning NixOS. This seems to finally solve my biggest issue with Linux. (System breaks after update)
I tried many distributions over the years (Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, Suse, Mandriva, Debian, Fedora,...)
All of them suffer from the same disease.
A rolling release system like Arch has it is fabulous, but only if you also get a rollback functionality.

On 1/20/2014 9:53 AM, Chris wrote:
>
> I've had a look at Arch. While it seems to be a nice and (c)lean distro,
> it is a bit of a pain in the neck to install / set up. Also I don't
> know, if it will be easy to get the hardware support I need. I don't
> want to spend ages configuring it and tinkering with drivers etc. I
> prefer UI installers and out-of-the box support (and if the latter is
> not possible, at least an "easy-to-get-the-drivers-later-system"). The
> laziest option would be Mint, but Mint is basically Ubuntu (if it's not
> LMDE).

While Linux isn't my primary desktop system, the desktop Linux stuff I do work with has gone from Ubuntu -> Debian -> Mint.

I left Ubuntu because Canonical was starting to piss me off, partly because of their apparent obsession with being basically just an OSX clone. So I went upstream to Debian. Still run Debian on my server, but I abandoned it as a desktop OS partly because so much of it is out of date literally before they even release it, and also because once they do get a newer version of something, there's a fair chance you can't actually get it without upgrading the whole OS because not everything actually gets into backports (and Debian backports is a whole other beef with me - I don't know how they managed to take what should have been trivial to use and make it so...well, now I'm rambling).

I say all that not to bitch, but to point out that despite everything that bugged me about Ubuntu and Debian, I've actually been fairly happy with Mint 15 XFCE so far. Plus, the similarities it does have to Ubuntu/Debian are actually kinda nice since it's that much less to re-learn.

But I'd recommend doing what I did: Grab VirtualBox, and try out a bunch of different distros and DE's.

On 1/21/2014 3:26 AM, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> On 20 Jan 2014 15:35, "qznc" <qznc@web.de> wrote:
>>
>> On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 14:53:55 UTC, Chris wrote:
>>>
>>> Maybe I'll give Fedora (+ Xfce) a shot.
>>
>>
>> You could try Korora, which is based on Fedora, but includes a lot of
> convenience. For example, proprietary software like Skype and Adobe Reader
> is already in the repo. Fonts and Drivers are a little bit nicer.
>>
>
> I wouldn't call proprietary software a convenience. ;)
>

I would, but not when the proprietary software in question is Skype and Adobe Reader ;)