[OT] Good or best Linux distro?

[Chris]

On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 16:22:15 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 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

I'm kinda torn between the two sides. On the one hand I don't 
want to do too much manual configuring and tinkering (especially 
for basic things), on the other hand I don't want big fat apps 
I'll probably never use installed by default. I'll give Manjaro 
(Arch Linux) a try and see, if I can build up my own custom 
configuration as I go along. The only fear I have in this regard 
is that it might be hard to get certain apps i like or need, if 
they are not in the repository. But things will improve and I 
like to give new things a try. I can always come back to the 
bigger distros.