[OT] Good or best Linux distro?

[Nick Sabalausky]

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I abandoned it as a desktop OS partly because so much of it is out of 
date literally before they even release it, and also because once they 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.