[OT] Good or best Linux distro?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 12:30:26PM +0000, 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.

As many have said, it really depends on what you're looking for.

I myself use Debian/unstable (in spite of the 'unstable' moniker it's
actually very stable, as far as OSes in general go). I'm extremely
CLI-biased, so my particular setup of Debian is probably far from
typical, but here's exactly why I like the way Debian is setup: many
packages actually go out of the way to support non-default
configurations. You can install the base system without X11 or
LibreOffice or any of the "big fat" packages, and even if you decide to
install those packages, they are broken up into core / optional pieces
so that you can control exactly what you want. At the same time, the
dependency system automatically manages what to install when you wish to
just install an entire package suite without further ado. When you
upgrade, packages are very careful not to overwrite any custom config
files.

In a nutshell, Debian is a tinkerer's paradise, where you can customize
the system to your heart's content, without some organization somewhere
deciding how things ought to be. There *are* reasonable defaults
provided, but non-default customizations are explicitly supported.

But again, my use case is probably extremely different from yours, so
YMMV, take this with a huge grain of salt, etc..

(P.S. Now I know Ubuntu is based on Debian, but the one time I had to
deal with an Ubuntu system directly I noticed that they were not as
friendly to customization. But I didn't spend too much time actually
using it to say this for sure -- I switched apt/source.list to the
Debian repos and apt-get'd the system into Debian/unstable within a day,
so now the system is no longer Ubuntu. :-P)


T

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