What's Been the Best Linux Distro of 2014?

An anonymous reader writes With 23% of the year remaining, Linux Voice has donned flameproof clothing to subjectively examine what it feels have been the best distros of the year so far, including choices for beginners, desktop fashionistas and performance fetishists, before revealing a surprising overall winner.

Comments

FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

It's so close, can you feel it? https://www.freebsd.org/where.html

Re:FreeBSD

[uvajed_ekil]

FreeBSD is not Linux though.

Re:FreeBSD

[Sarusa]

This is it! The year of FreeBSD on the desktop!

Re: FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank God for that!

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Their is a lot bugs in *BSDs, cd /boot!

Re:FreeBSD

[phantomfive]

It's so close, can you feel it? https://www.freebsd.org/where....

Have they gotten USB 3.0 support working yet?

Re:FreeBSD

[ThePhilips]

No idea. But the sound works real real good!!!

No PulseAudio, no "committee design" ALSA - the proper OSS.

Low/no jitter - clarity and definition of sound you can't experience under Linux.

If you have hi-fi/better connected to the PC, and your sounds card is supported, you owe it to yourself.

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Hm, I used to run OpenBSD from a Zip drive in the 90s and still don't know the difference to FreeBSD. And I'm much too lazy to look it up. Anyone care to explain?

Re:FreeBSD

[TyFoN]

Unfortunately, neither my Steinberg UR-22 nor Asus Xonar d2x is supported in FreeBSD.

Both work out of the box on arch.

Funny thing is, these devices work even better in linux than windows (i.e. absolutely no installation in linux compared to massive driver downloads in windows that clutter the system)

Re:FreeBSD

[jon3k]

Good? Considering I can't seem to avoid systemd these days.

Re:FreeBSD

[MrNaz]

The main difference is that FreeBSD users know what Google is and how to use it.

Re:FreeBSD

[CronoCloud]

Unfortunately, neither my Steinberg UR-22

Well, look at that, 192khz. Can do MIDI and hook up a gee-tar too.

I've DJ'd in Second Life now and again and have thought about picking up one of those Behringer Xenyx 302USB's so I could use a nice mic instead of a headset, but I don't DJ all that often, and I"m not sure how well it works with Linux.

there's a M-Audio device similar to the steinberg:

http://smile.amazon.com/M-Audi...

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you fail reading comprehension?
The thread is called "What's Been the Best Linux Distro of 2014?"

Has freebsd been the best Linux distro of 2014?

Re:FreeBSD

[Lawrence_Bird]

ha you beat me to it! As much as I loved Slakware for so many years, I will not go back to linux. FreeBSD and .. gasp... xmonad.

In fact, the past year or so I've been running my (desktop) FreeBSD installs through virtualbox on top of Win 8. If I really want, yes I can boot directly into FreeBSD. But the virtualization solution has really worked well for me. FreeBSD on one desktop and windows on another, both across dual monitors.

Re:FreeBSD

[nullchar]

Has freebsd been the best Linux distro of 2014?

By the end of 2014 it will be, thanks to systemd.

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

So you advocate we don't advance and stay with init scripts and their known issues?

I want this to start before this, so instead of introducing a dependency, i just call this one 90_start and 91_start?

Great...

Re:FreeBSD

[nullchar]

Gentoo seemed to figure out init script dependency.

I'm open to changing init scripts, but do we have to change everything else too? Like binary logging and needing an interface to access those logs instead of just tailing/grepping them. (Though I think systemd does support duplicate logging to certain syslogs.)

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo seemed to figure out init script dependency.

Yep, and they did this by porting the BSDs rc/rc.d, calling it OpenRC.

Just for the record, because GP seems to be horribly misinformed, that is not sysvinit, so

i just call this one 90_start and 91_start

is simply not how it works.

Slackware

[ArchieBunker]

Minimal install footprint meaning no bloat. Install only what you choose plus no systemd bullshit.

Re:Slackware

[uvajed_ekil]

While Slackware has stood the test of time as a distro favored by many developers and admins, it is still not exactly "user friendly" for the average person. It is the first distro I ever installed, so it holds a place in my heart. However, I've tried it a few more times over the years and it has not been the best fit for my non-guru abilities.

Re:Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

Arch is more minimal than Slackware, and like Slackware in many ways

Debian can install a very minimal base with the only extra stuff you don't want being the dpkg/deb stuff to install/uninstall packages. That minimal base can even use busybox as the main suite of shell applications.

(I say this having a Slackware subscription and most of the CDs from Slackware 96 on to Slackware 14.1. with only a few gaps in due to occasional lapses in subscription or loaning out CDs and never getting them back)

Re:Slackware

[Orgasmatron]

You are doing it wrong. Slackware isn't for gurus, it makes them.

Re:Slackware

[drinkypoo]

Arch is more minimal than Slackware, and like Slackware in many ways

Arch moved to systemd, and if you click around and try to find out why they refer you to a forum post which does not immediately get to the point.

Re:Slackware

[TWX]

And Debian is for when those gurus get tired of manually maintaining hundreds of boxes.

Seriously, I've been dealing with an ancient legacy Slackware install at work that's being phased out. I expect to put in Debian boxes with a deb repository so that I can keep the rest up-to-date by maintaining the package server. These boxes are there to be used, not simply to be maintained. I don't want to have to fight with libraries and dependencies just to deal with simple commandline utilities. I've had this problem with the Slack boxes; libraries never installed in the first place, libraries so out of date that even compiling from source with gcc not an option, etc.

Re:Slackware

[fahrbot-bot]

You are doing it wrong. Slackware isn't for gurus, it makes them.

Sounds like an ad for a sex manual ... except for the slackware part.

Re:Slackware

[geminidomino]

And Debian is for when those gurus get tired of manually maintaining hundreds of boxes.

This is literally the *only* reason we use Debian or derivatives for work. We're just too small to have that kind of time, which is depressing. Especially with this SystemD crap... One of these days soon, when my Copious Free Time makes another appearance, I need to re-evaluate FreeBSD. Hopefully, the upgrade process has improved since "make buildworld." :) Otherwise, I dunno what we're going to do...

Re: Slackware

[Grant_Watson]

Indeed it has. Check out freebsd-update.

Re:Slackware

[Spacelord]

Minimal footprint? The recommended installation method of Slackware is still to install "everything". From the installation guide:

If this is your first time installing Slackware, the "full" method is highly recommended. Even if this isn't your first time, you'll probably want to use it anyway.

This gives you a much bigger footprint than what Mint, Ubuntu or Arch give you by default.

Mind you, I love Slackware for its straightforwardness and simplicity in configuration, but footprint is not really a reason to recommend it.

Finally, I don't think that footprint matters a lot these days. What do I care if my distro takes up 5GB or 10GB... Sure I may not need all of the packages that are installed, but the convenience of having most commonly used libraries and programs at hand and not having to track things down as-needed is worth more to me than a few measly gigs of disk space.

Re:Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

How much slack you have is everything in that industry.

Re:Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to love Arch, it was my go-to for any type of low-power or server installs. Even more than slackware, which I also loved to death.

Until systemd reared it's ugly head. Who the fuck thought it was a great idea to compartmentalize everything into cryptic little config files?

Now I use Ubuntu server, because... well package management is nice to have and time is money.

Re:Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

no it only makes ignorant assholes who think they are '1337'

Re:Slackware

[metrix007]

This is nonsense. It certainly used to be true, but it isn't anymore.

Slackware has fallen prey to trying to compete with Ubuntu and ilk. Now you need to have a full install and the community isn't willing to support uou if you have anything less than that.

This used to be fine, but now they have made it so that there are crazy dependencies. You can't install mplayer without installing Samba for example, because mplayer was compiled to be able to play files over SMB shares.

It was important to me to have a clean, well maintained, minimial unix system.

Arch looked perfect, but I don't like the fact that it is a rolling release/bleeding edge. Alpine Linux seemed interesting, but it's really more suited to a firewall type device. The rest of the Linux distros don't really meet my requirements and OpenSolaris is dead, which means I had to look to the BSDs.

I will never run OpenBSD, as I don't think they understand what security is, and do a lot of showboating. They are great OpenSSH maintainers though. FreeBSD is just too big, and s hard to get minimal. There is no advantage in running FreeBSD over NetBSD for me.

Enter NetBSD. It seems absolutely perfect. It has package sets like Slackware and a full install still fit's on a CD. It's under 300MB without a desktop environment. It's stable, and only has major releases about once a year. Security updates are pushed out, it can run linux binaries for software you can't compile, and it has some very interesting security features. Specifically kernel level file monitoring for executable and config files, full disk encryption, and a port of PaX which I think is a superior implementation of ESP when contrasted with W^X.

Of note to me also, is the Linux teams attitude towards security. Linus and Greg K-H have gone on record multiple times stating that security issues do not deserve special treatment and do not need to be fixed sooner than other bugs, since they are "just bugs". That is a dangerous attitude, and leads to things like the 'Wunderbar Emporium' exploit allowing root across many major kernel version releases.

The NetBSD team takes security seriously, and issues security updates as a priority as needed.

For anyone truly looking for a secure, minimal and clean *nix system as a replacement for Slackware, I can't recommend NetBSD enough.

Re:Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to have executable configuration files?

The new ones are not distro-specific and tend to be shorter. Also, you don't have to do crazy things in order to daemonize a script. Plus, you get actual control over your services, instead of a best-guess.

Configuration files should not be executable by default. If you really need to insert a random script into your boot process, go ahead, but most people will not need to do this most of the time, and a large percentage of people who want this functionality are not going to be able to do it correctly anyway. Because it's absurdly complicated. Double forking and magic PID files are broken, crufty relics from a time when the Unix Machine was maintained by the Gurus, without whose secret incantations the System would fail utterly! Fast forward to this century, and ain't nobody got time for that. If you don't like this century, go play in BSD land.

Re:Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

Have fun running Openoffice on Xfree86 on GNU/Hurd

The OSS landscape is filled with forks and shifts. SystemD is just the latest.

I used to enjoy messing around with your stone age distro, but for me it got old in the 90s. I have other things to do now.

Re:Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

Seconded. Posting from Slack64 on MBP.

The beauty of Slackware is really in it's simplicity. It's all there and ready to go out of the box, you just have to enable it. The BSD's are nice, but there's so much more available for Linux (read: Video Drivers). IMHO Slack is right in the centre of the sweet spot.

Re:Slackware

[kenshin33]

did the same, although I was considering Gentoo too.

Re:Slackware

[Vyse of Arcadia]

When was the last time you tried it? I'm hardly a guru, and I find Slackware to be perfectly usable.

Re: Slackware

[geminidomino]

Playing with it a bit before bed tonight. Looks pretty slick.

Dear gods, though... they're still shipping it with sendmail? O_O

Re: Slackware

[Grant_Watson]

I don't know why they still use sendmail. I wrote a sendmail configuration file once in my life: never again.

Also, you should check out the new package system if you haven't already. (It was called pkgng while in development; now it's just pkg, but pkgng is probably more googleable.) Ports still work fine, but there's been a lot of movement toward making binary packages the "cultural default" now that the tooling is better.

Re:Slackware

[fisted]

For anyone truly looking for a secure, minimal and clean *nix system as a replacement for Slackware, I can't recommend NetBSD enough.

Seconded that from my NetBSD machine.

Re: Slackware

[geminidomino]

I've been playing with pkgng/pkg a bit, it does look much nicer. That's a good change, imo. Ports are nice, and I know that back in the day they were FreeBSD's "thing", but when you've got a few dozen servers to update, waiting to compile each update is kind of a dealbreaker.

Re: Slackware

[Grant_Watson]

I've never done it, but if you're managing that many FreeBSD servers you can use poudriere to build packages from ports with your preferred options and then deploy them as binaries. That should give you the best of both worlds.

Re: Slackware

[geminidomino]

I'd say it's more of "bypassing the absolute worst of each worlds." The closer I can get to "apt-get upgrade", the better. But it looks like pkgng might have that mostly covered for most of what I'd need to set up.

When crunch-time passes, I'll experiment a little more deeply into it, but I'm glad to see there's been so much improvement. I loved me some FreeBSD back in the day.

Re:Slackware

[dragonturtle69]

You are doing it wrong. Slackware isn't for gurus, it makes them.

Yes!

Re:Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, there are a few derivative of Slackware that have a very small footprint.

systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

But Arch uses systemd which, as we have heard, everybody hates!

...perhaps all the hatred is only from a vocal minority?

Re:systemd

[gweihir]

Only from people with a clue about UNIX technology. Even among Linux users, that is a minority. I will not touch Arch with a 10 feet pole due to systemd. And no, I do not hate systemd, I just think it is a far substandard product. What I hate is that it is being made very difficult to avoid in a culture that prides itself on "choice".

Re:systemd

[Spy Handler]

systemd is the wave of the future. Or at least something similar to systemd that they'll probably hate just as much.

I haven't seen this much hate since OOP started getting popular and old school devs were dragged into it kicking and screaming. But guess what, OOP was the wave of the future.

Let go the hate and embrace.

Re:systemd

[grcumb]

systemd is the wave of the future. Or at least something similar to systemd that they'll probably hate just as much.

I haven't seen this much hate since OOP started getting popular and old school devs were dragged into it kicking and screaming. But guess what, OOP was the wave of the future.

Considering where the OOP-For-Everything crowd got us, and how long it took us to recover from the fact that it was the hammer for every nail for far too long, considering that we're finally emerging into a sane world where OOP has its place, as one approach among many....

... I'd say you're right about systemd:

It's being touted as The One True Way. Its detractors are ridiculed as hidebound old neckbeards[*] who don't know any way of doing things but their own. Its adherents are clever, antisocial alphas whose faith in their own intelligence is far too complete, and who don't know the difference between an argument and a quarrel.

Yep, it is OOP vs The World all over again. Dog help us all.

--------
[*] Seriously: I will punch the first person who uses that term in my presence.

Re:systemd

[thieh]

I suppose if systemd develops to a way that violates arch's philosophy either arch will change the philosophy or arch will get rid of it from the default.

Re:systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

a implies b, thus c implies d. Logical fallacy. Nice troll though.

Re:systemd

[jones_supa]

"UNIX" is a sexy word which is thrown around a lot, but does it matter that much? UNIX is an old crusty architecture just like Win32. It's not the end of the world if we disregard it and build things around something more modern. The traditional UNIX way of "one tool for every little job" can be challenged. Computers are much more complex beasts these days, so new approaches might actually provide more value.

Re:systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

--------

[*] Seriously: I will punch the first person who uses that term in my presence.

So ... neckbeard is the new n-word, eh?

Re:systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's being touted as The One True Way.

not unlike the Unix way touted by the opposite camp.

> Its detractors are ridiculed as hidebound old neckbeards[*] who don't know any way of doing things but their own.

Its detractors rarely comment on technical merits/shortcomings, 99% of the time they only throw "pid1", "monolitic", "poettering blight", "binary logs" and "they took our jerbs^wkludgy init scripts!" around. Just look at the comments of recent article of extracting VT from the kernel code to a separate barebone init module. Almost zero technical discussion why, how, just a massive anti-systemd, anti-Poettering circlejerk.

Re:systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

I have yet to see anything with smaller footprint, blazingly faster speed, and well functioning on the desktop than plain old Win95 style Win32 C, or even VB Classic or Delphi 5 or 7 built on top of Win32. That said I heard good things about old BeOS, never having tried it, and still, DOS is very close to my heart, and it rejoices when I see it on a thing like it on a cashier machine, that has no mouse to begin with, just a keyboard and a handhel barcode scanner plus the scanner built into the weight scale on the table. That probably too is Linux, it just feels like DOS. And it's good enough for that function, and if it's good enough and runs in 640KB, why the fuck would you get a 2 GB mouse driven desktop as a cashier's machine? Talk about security issues arising from unnecessary complexity.

Yours, &c,
~Slashdot user sillybilly

Re:systemd

[aaaaaaargh!]

That's not a very compelling analogy. OOP has turned out to be a tremendous resource hog, unnecessary in most cases, and leads to code that is extremely hard to parallelize. Now functional programming with immutable data structures is en vogue - not saying that it's better, you've got to choose the right tool for the right job anyway, but if your analogy held then systemd would correspond to Java and I surely don't want to have it.

Re:systemd

[Zeromous]

Systemd gives me nothing I need. So tell me again why I need it or should want it.

Re:systemd

[dave420]

You honestly do sound like an angry neckbeard. You might want to get some therapy or something. That rage isn't helpful.

Re:systemd

[Gunstick]

systemd basically transforms linux into windows.
If you want to use windows, with it's hidden startup, binary logfiles and other cumbersome and useless administrator (non-)functionality then just go ahead and install windows. Don't shovel those silly concepts down the throats of millions of happy linux users.

I have seen similar stuff on other unixes, like AIX and Solaris. It's a headache, non controllable and impossible to debug. After linux goes to systemd, the only OS left with a file-based philosophy will be BSD and... HP-UX!

Maybe we can hope that HP-UX gets ported to x86 after Itanium is dead. And that HP never gets the idea "oh everyone else uses databases/xml/binary for system relevant data, let's just fuck it up and do the same"

Well my next linux is going to be non-systemd, and if there's none, well then it's to be a BSD.
After linux for the desktop never happened, linux in general will not happen.
It was a nice time, I'll move on.
Which BSD is the best "distro"?

Re:systemd

[Hognoxious]

What's wrong with init scripts? If there's a problem that needs to be solved, I've certainly never suffered from it.

How many people are going "OMG, init scripts make my life a misery because X Y and Z! I'm saved! Canonise Poettering!"

Re: systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

MacOS-X

Re:systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

> What's wrong with init scripts?

they are brittle, require shittons of boilerplate to deal with edge cases and at the end of the day can still fail.

> If there's a problem that needs to be solved, I've certainly never suffered from it.

yes, but that doesn't mean that in the age of cloud services and virtualization other people don't have to deal with scenarios that fall outside the scope of bash kludges. "I don't have a problem, therefore there is no problem" is not a true sentence.
What are you losing with systemd in the first place? That intangible, unmeasurable sense of UNIX purity?

Re:systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand what exactly you are losing with systemd? Probably nothing really so why bitching?

"i have no problem, therefore there is no problem" is not a true sentence. Other people see their problems solved, workflows simplified and streamlined. Feel free to roll out systemd-less system if you don't like systemd that much, but be warned - it will require actual work, not a lot of bitching how the world is not focused on you.

Re:systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right, fall back on attacking the person instead of addressing their points. That's certainly a far better person to be than "an angry neckbeard".

Re:systemd

[Zeromous]

Answer the question AC.

What actual issues and typical usecases do systemd address? I've heard about all the minor nuisances it supposedly addresses although none of them have ever effected me personally. But please tell me why I **need** it. And if you can't please tell me why it is default? It should not be default is all.

Apps should support SysV init and Systemd and if this is the case, why is systemd default as it is quite frankly not the lowest common denominator? Each time I ask this question I get personally berated by the pulseaudio meathead's personal fan club. I want actual answers because so far I haven't been shown a good reason for this, other than "Why not stupid old neckbeard?"

It flies in the face of everything I've ever been taught about UNIX. But don't berate me with bullshit like "Linux isn't UNIX".

Re:systemd

[gweihir]

Really, do you have any clue what you are talking about? UNIX is not an architecture, it is on that level you are talking about an API. It is small, clear, efficient and used in many UNIX-like systems with great success. The problem with everything that ignores the UNIX lessons is that these things turn out to be not very good, time and again. And while challenging its lessons may have some (limited, after all this time) merit, significantly superior results and at least equal long-term stability, maintainability and security need to be achieved for such a challenge to be successful. Systemd has not shown any of that, and with its monolithic architecture, blatant disregard for its users and gross violation of KISS, it is unlikely it will ever be even able to match what is there.

Re:systemd

[RavenLrD20k]

Tool for the job. OOP has its place in programming as does procedural. The same can be said of systemd. My desktop system I'm probably not going to care when the upgrade forces me into systemd since it's not a system that I need to be concerned about long term uptime and stability. My servers on the other hand, they're a completely different story. I've got another year or so on my LTS, and in that time I intend on putting systemd through its paces on a test machine to force it to fail, and then observe the ways in which it fails. If it does what my hypothesis says it will, based on its generally monolithic design strategy, then I will be looking for a distribution that hasn't drunk the systemd Kool-Aid for my next LTS. If it surprises me and performs well during the fail testing, then I will consider using it.

I believe that this is where the core hatred for systemd is really coming from. It's not so much that it's a bad init system or that people are resistant to change, though the latter is certainly a factor with good reason. It's the fact that Distributions are forcing this change on System Administrators and removing the choice for the Sysadmins to continue with a technology that they have working and have learned the core of how it works or have to install and learn a whole new system that they may not know their way around yet. Has RH or Debian offered the old System V init package as an alternative on their default install? Not that I've seen. This is where the ire is coming from. The defense for systemd is "if you don't like it, it's open source; change it in the source." The people that say this don't realize that in a corporate production environment, this is rarely a feasible argument. Sysadmins are not usually programmers, and these operating system distributions -- Redhat, CentOS, Debian, etc -- have just sold them out and made more work for them to test the ways systemd can fail on their systems and reanalyze their disaster recovery plans to account for this new anomaly. Or management may just decide that they need to go get a service contract with Microsoft for their needs and dump Linux altogether as they may deem the MS option as cheaper and easier to maintain long term.

Fast blanket changes to new technologies by the distributions without accounting for the slower moving but gigantic enterprise user base without offering the option to keep their current technologies was probably one of the dumbest moves they could have done. Why did most Enterprise that use windows software keep on XP until Windows 7 came out, skipping Vista? Why am I using a windows 7 desktop at my employer right now when Windows 8.1 is out there and mature enough for the next phase of OS to have been announced? For the same reason you're not going to get Enterprise customers jumping on board with the next release of the Linux OS they're using...if they're using one of those that is dropping System V.

Re:systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

The ability to 100% control exactly what can and will run at startup and shutdown.
The ability to have a SECURE run environment through the use of an insecure, immature web server integrated into a bloated crapware replacement for init.

Re:systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but SMF isn't anything at all like systemd, systemd is a poorly implemented, poorly designed, insecure hack trying to do what SMF does brilliantly.

Re:systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't your neckbeard itch? Grow a nice long beard, fine, but shave your neck!

Re:systemd

[TangoMargarine]

"Those who do not know UNIX are doomed to reimplement it, poorly."

Re:systemd

[TangoMargarine]

I haven't seen this much hate since OOP started getting popular

I seem to remember quite a lot of shouting when OOXML was being pushed out, at least around here.

Re:systemd

[grcumb]

You honestly do sound like an angry neckbeard. You might want to get some therapy or something. That rage isn't helpful.

You know the part where I said there are people who don't know the difference between an argument and a quarrel?

You might want to read it again.

If you can't respond substantively, why respond at all? I've offered a little insight into history so that you can draw a parallel between present and previous conflicts in the software world, and all you can do is call me names that you know are infuriating to me, and you suggest I get therapy?

Re:systemd

[grcumb]

> It's being touted as The One True Way.

not unlike the Unix way touted by the opposite camp.

Wow, once again, Poe's Law rears its ugly head.

What follows is not for your benefit, but because somewhere out there on the wilds of the internet, there might still be some youngster with a clue who needs to get this:

Systemd, OOP and a number of other technologies have been touted by people who have a curious mixture of cleverness and a lack of imagination or experience (something altogether too common in the world of software development). They claim that because they have solved a problem, they are therefore entitled to use the same approach to Solve All Problems Ever. So instead of exercising a little humility and moving their work ahead in a way that's accepting of other approaches, they charge in full speed, damn the torpedoes and devil take the hindmost.

It happened with Microsoft and ActiveX. It happened with Object Oriented Programming languages - most notably with Java: there was a time when it was hard to find work programming in anything else. It happened, to a smaller degree, with design patterns. You can find numerous other examples if you search for them.

It's happening again today with systemd.

Now, parent here is implying that the conflict between The Unix Way and systemd's kitchen-sink approach is a contest between equal ideologies. In other words, each represents a single thing, one of which is old and full of faults, the other of which is new and shiny and presumably lacking in faults. The only choice we have, then, is to weigh each in the balance and choose the one that's superior.

There's a fly in that ointment, though: You see, the Unix Way is a process, not a product. It states that it is better to take a toolkit approach - that is, chain together a series of tools that do one thing and do that one thing in a well-defined, simple manner. Systemd, on the other hand, is a particular set of services. Its implementation is antithetical to the Unix Way, because although it's contrived out of dozens of smaller executables, they really only work when they're chained together. You currently can't, in other words, use journald outside of systemd (you'd have to build a completely new interface), or use systemd without journald.

The people who like systemd are willing to discard the decades of experience that brought us the awkward-but-workable Unix world, full of text files, single-purpose utilities, shims on shims on shims.... They see it as ugly and awkward and ungainly. It is all of those things. The place where they go wrong, though, is that they think they can do better in one simple stroke. They think that they're good enough to design a system *cough* that inhabits the space between kernel and userland, and that they can do it in the course of a few short years. That's admirable. I applaud their ambition.

But....

But there is no way in Hell that I would let someone with that kind of confidence get within a mile of my machines. That would be Daedalus and Icarus all over again. (Google it; I'm not your nanny.) What systemd supporters fail to understand is that The Unix Way is the way of humility. It's essentially a way of expressing our own understanding that we cannot do everything well. Therefore, we do the one thing that we can do, and we do it simply (which is not always as well as it might be, but will at least work reliably).

Empirically, systemd does things neither well enough, nor simply. For reasons that are particular to each of them, most adherents are incapable of admitting to either of those things. For example:

> Its detractors are ridiculed as hidebound old neckbeards[*] who don't know any way of doing things but their own.

Its detractors rarely comment on technical merits/shortcomings, 99% of the time they only throw "pid1", "monolitic", "poettering blight", "binary logs" and "they took our jerbs^wkludgy init scripts!" around.

Re: systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

UNIX is much more than an OS, it's a philosophy.

Re:systemd

[fisted]

Its detractors rarely comment on technical merits/shortcomings, 99% of the time they only throw "pid1", "monolitic", "poettering blight", "binary logs" and "they took our jerbs^wkludgy init scripts!" around.

So..in your world, pid1 bloat, monolithic design, binary logs and getting rid of simplicity/flexibility achieved by shell scripts are /not/ technical shortcomings. Aha.
Face.. meet palm.

Xubuntu 14.04

[soupbowl]

I have been using xubuntu 14.04 pretty clean and works well for me. i am not enjoying the rift between qt,gtk2 and gtk3 skinning though.

Re: Xubuntu 14.04

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu server with xfce works well for me.

Re: Xubuntu 14.04

[stinkyjak]

Ubuntu server with xfce works well for me.

Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly biased to Arch.

Re:Arch

[uvajed_ekil]

"But what makes Arch our winner is this: for the large part, its information applies to other distros."
That is very funny of them to say, since I'm not sure how that makes Arch itself a "better" distro than the competition (and since Ubuntu and Debian help apply to many many distros) though something to remember when you get tired of Arch and switch to Ubuntu or Mint. That said, the Mint forums have been an excellent resource for me. If I have a problem or can't figure something out, I first Google it, then Google it with "Ubuntu" as a search term, then if necessary I can ask a question in the Mint forums and generally have it answered within 24 hours. I have precisely zero intention of switching to Arch, but maybe I'll try their wikis and docs next time I have a problem.

Re:Arch

[uvajed_ekil]

They do seem to like Arch an awful lot, but their case is less than compelling.

Re:Arch

[santax]

Being a former dev and pro for SuSE, going to Debian for years and since 3 years switched to Arch I have to say, there is no documentation better in linux land than the one you can find at the Arch Wiki. It really is an example of how great docs should be. Nothing wrong with mint, ubuntu, slack, redhat and by all means, pick one that you like. I would not have picked arch as the best, since it's geared towards to technical crowd that knows where and how to fix things, but they are right when they say that the Arch documentation stands out alone. Openbsd's might just be better. Might.

Mint

[uvajed_ekil]

Mint has become the leader for home/desktop users. The Ubuntu base lends stability compatibility, while the more complete out-of-the-box experience and homegrown tools Mint offers make it a no-brainer (although I personally use Mint's Debian-based distro). For enterprise use I'd probably stick with RHEL, and perhaps CentOS for in between needs, but Mint just works so well that it has become a truly viable Windows replacement for many tinkerers and average, average people, and those who prefer not to support MS for whatever reason.

Re:Mint

[revxul]

The more I look at Mint, the more I wish I had started with that instead of Ubuntu.

Re:Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

For enterprise use I'd suggest Ubuntu or Debian, and more importantly suggest that they learn how to create .deb packages and distribute their software and configurations from their own repository.

I've only worked at a couple of companies that did this, but it worked brilliantly. Like night & day compared to the ad hoc, proprietary mechanisms most companies use.

RPMs simply aren't as flexible and powerful, especially for this kind of usage, but I wouldn't be surprised if they still worked better than most current systems.

Re:Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the pleasure of working with Mint for the first time today, actually. It was a strange experience; I'd been tasked with resurrecting an iBook G4 and needed to find a usable OS for it. I knew there were PowerPC versions of Linux, but the question was, which one? Once I learned that Ubuntu had a compatible version available I decided to check it out, which set off a long and difficult slog of troubleshooting and inexplicable flakiness. I expected this going in, of course, given what I was working with, but even after I managed to resolve the major issues (the OS outright not loading because of a firmware issue, no wireless connectivity at first, video problems, no sound, the whole nine yards) I thought it performed poorly. I figured maybe Ubuntu had simply outgrown computers of that generation, or something.

Whatever. My next candidate was Mint. A coworker of mine had already tried but failed to get Mint working on the iBook already, but I suspected there was a problem with the discs he'd tried to use. (His Ubuntu disc didn't work either, while the one I burned did.) I wasn't sure what other issues he had, something about the kernel not installing and the system not booting right afterward. I figured it was worth another shot, and whaddaya know, on the very first try my disc worked. Mint installed without a single catch and immediately ran wonderfully; the computer ran smoother, didn't chug as much while opening programs or windows, it really felt like a new machine. There are still some firmware issues to iron out but fixes for the iBook G4 aren't uncharted territory (after all, researching them is how I got Ubuntu to work, and how I got sound working in Mint) so I'm certain that getting wireless and so forth working won't be too difficult.

Mint's look and feel closely matches Windows, so it's easy to get used to. The programs that come with it are nice, too. If it can get a computer like that to run not just passably well but actually run good, and ready to perform useful work within fifteen minutes, I imagine the user experience on more modern i386 machines is even better. If I retire Windows from any of my current computers I intend to replace it with Mint first unless something better comes along.

Re:Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

RHEL/CentOS - all used /bin/bash for /bin/sh and were highly vulnerable to heartbleed, among other bash exploits.
I'm still amazed that Mint took off like it did, I don't know anyone who actually uses it, but it's apparently more popular than Ubuntu and Debian combined for home users. (Debian and Ubuntu are about the same in terms of numbers of home users, which is a tricky metric to measure)

Re:Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know anyone who actually uses it

As for myself and most other Mint users I know, it's pissed off ex-Ubuntu users who felt unheard by/shit-on by Ubuntu. I'm very happy with the change.

Re: Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

For enterprise, you want **EL

Re: Mint

[phantomfive]

For enterprise, you want **EL

I keep hearing that, but why? I've seen Ubuntu work perfectly well in enterprise. It's not my distro of choice, but then neither is Redhat.

And certainly, Debian is as stable as any distro out there.

Re:Mint

[Soft]

I personally use Mint's Debian-based distro

How do you handle security updates? I thought this distribution (LMDE) was ideal for my needs until I realized that, apart from Firefox and Thunderbird, practically no packages were being regularly updated despite vulnerabilities being discovered: LibreOffice, ffmpeg, file, apt, libnss, qemu to name some recent ones. Bash did get updated recently, and openssl eventually did after heartbleed, though I'm not sure it got all the updates.

I read some flamew^Wdebates on this topic online, which I think boil down to "LMDE is not a server OS, if you want security use Debian". This neglects the fact that even an end-user's desktop or workstation handles data from the network, which could be malware. To this kind of security philosophy, my reaction is that LMDE shouldn't be used except in very controlled environments.

As for regular Mint, I like it better than Ubuntu, though I was disappointed by their not supporting OS upgrades: as I understand it, installing a new Mint version requires a reinstall. (I tried doing it anyway, from 15 to 16 I think, and X broke. That's when I decided to try out LMDE, in fact.)

Any advice?

Re: Mint

[ruir]

Debian stable is certainly more stable than many distros out there..much more.

Re:Mint

[mwvdlee]

I thought Mint just used Ubuntu packages?

Re:Mint

[HJED]

heartbleed wasn't a bash exploit, and had nothing to do with the shell you used. The majority of linux distros had /bin/bash as their default shell.

Re:Mint

[Soft]

I thought Mint just used Ubuntu packages?

Regular Mint, indeed, is based on Ubuntu and each Mint release is derived from the corresponding Ubuntu release. LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is based on Debian, and doesn't really have releases: the packages get upgraded (from Debian Testing, I believe) perhaps twice a year.

On paper, I'd prefer LMDE's update scheme, but the apparent lack of day-to-day security updates is a big no-no.

Re:Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no real reason to use Mint besides being a fanboy. You can Install Cinnamon already in Ubuntu and Ubuntu MATE will be an official flavor soon. you are not forced yo use Unity, I think a lot of people don't understand that. Why use a hacked up version of Ubuntu (Mint) with a different UI when you can have the real thing with a click of a button.

I personally use Xubuntu but may check out MATE when it's official. Just something to hang your hat on.

Re:Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

WINNER THIS!

Mod +++

Re:Mint

[DavidCBillen]

Until you want to do a distribution upgrade :(

Re: Mint

[Chris Mattern]

I keep hearing that [you want **EL], but why? I've seen Ubuntu work perfectly well in enterprise. It's not my distro of choice, but then neither is Redhat.

Mostly because that is only thing the commercial software you're using officially supports.

Re: Mint

[Bigbutt]

Because infrastructure tools including some backup and monitoring agents only work with RHEL. I don't mind using different distros for my desktops (my right one is Ubuntu, left is Slackware, home is RHEL for cert study, coworker uses Mint) but when it's a server, I have to go with what's supported by various vendors and at the minimum, all support RHEL.

With that said, some third party application vendors use different distros for their application. A recent one had their product working only on SUSE. When we said we couldn't support it from an infrastructure management point of view, the vendor said their next version will work with RHEL. I guess they are seeing what we do. If I can't manage the environment (1,100+ servers), I don't want your product.

And to the developers, I personally don't care what your favorite distro is. When it comes into production, it must fit into the environment. We provide a standard supported distro. If you can't be arsed to check with us first, don't be surprised when we kick back your product pointing you to the standards document, and force you to ensure it works on RHEL.

[John]

Re:Mint

[Zeromous]

dash now apparently in debian.

Re:Mint

[synapse7]

After having recently had some updates break things in my xubuntu installs I'm becoming a fan of Mint's rated update system.

Re:Mint

[dimeglio]

I concur. For me, Mint is currently the leader in desktop Linux. Things just work. I expect other distros will also get better as a result. This is beauty behind the GNU license.

Re:Mint

[Tempest_2084]

Oddly enough, I prefer Ubuntu over Mint simply because it DOESN'T look like Windows. I like the Unity interface,it reminds me of OS X in a way. I know I can use various dock programs in Mint to do the same thing, but Ubuntu works out of the box for what I need. I'm a very novice level Linux user, but I've completely replaced Windows with Linux and I'm learning more every day. Eventually I think I'll move onto something like Arch and try my hand at customizing things at a low level.

Re:Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Ubuntu for a long time. Ubuntu 10.10 was the last Ubuntu I used. I jumped over to Mint 11, and have been with Mint ever since. It's not too late to switch.

Re:Mint

[hendrips]

I'll throw in my agreement with Mint for desktop users.

In my house, my wife is the Linux advocate, while I'm the one who's fond of Windows 7. This is in spite of the fact that I am usually the technically competent tinkerer, and she wants things to "just work." But my wife loves Linux because she never has to call me for help any more now that she got a new laptop and put Mint on it (that's not really a knock on Windows, it's just that her old laptop was a supremely crappy Vista machine that was always crashing).

My wife doesn't have a clue what ALSA or Pulseaudio are, she just knows that she can play all of her music through Amazon Cloud Player. She could care less about open vs. proprietary document formats; she just knows that she can do word processing without paying for Office, while still saving to files her friends & family can read. And she certainly doesn't care about the finer points of human-computer interface design; she's just happy that all of the icons and buttons are in the "right place," where she expects them after almost 20 years of using Windows. Most of all, she loves the fact that Mint never crashes.

Congratulations, Linux advocates. I never thought this day would come. But there's finally a distro out there that 1) can be installed and operated by a technically un-savvy but vaguely intelligent home user using only basic Google skills 2) requires minimal support from technically inclined friends/family 3) is rock stable 4) never, ever requires the use of the console 5) can perform all the basic functions an average home user would want (actual average users, not Slashdot's imaginary "average user") 6) and is still open-source, Unixy, and tinkerable.

Heck, I don't even use Linux, and I'll still say that I love Mint. Why are you Linux On The Desktop advocates not making a bigger deal about Mint?

I will note, however, that my wife flatly refuses to use the GIMP, both because of the weird interface and the awful name. It's the only thing that can make her switch back to her Windows partition. Can't someone come up with something better?

Re:Mint

[ArhcAngel]

For many other Mint users such as myself it's the inclusion of the non-free stuff that Ubuntu avoids due to licensing issues. I use my laptop to listen to music and watch videos. I can install everything I need on Ubuntu but it's a hassle and takes considerably more time than just installing Mint and running updates. I was installing Slackware and RH in 1994. Hell I've even built several Gentoo boxes over the years. As others have eluded I have grown weary of starting from scratch. Call me the anti-neckbeard if you will.

Re:Mint

[deadweight]

I use it. It is easy to install, works fine, and looks just like Windows 7. For my non-techie inlaws there is no learning curve to speak of.

Re:Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

I've upgrade Mint 15 to 17 and Mint 16 to 17 without any problems. It's not officially supported, but in place upgrades can be done. With Mint's new release model, I don't think upgrades will need to be performed as often either.

Re:Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

so linux is STILL IN FUCKING 2014 not able to guarantee you sound out of the box.

autists are predictable atleast.

Re:Mint

[Reid]

Yes, I switched from Fedora to Mint several versions ago, and the upgrade process was such a hassle that I switched back to the most recent Fedora several months ago. Mint was fine, but I didn't think it was all that much better than Fedora. (I started with Red Hat way back in the day, so I am partial to it.)

Re:Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

+1. I've got a mint laptop that's stuck with an End-of-lifed version of the OS. No upgrade path. It's just left to die.

Re: Mint

[phantomfive]

Because infrastructure tools including some backup and monitoring agents only work with RHEL.

Ugh, I hate that kind of incompatible software

Re: Mint

[Bigbutt]

The problem is we have a mixed environment of Solaris, HP-UX, and even Tru64. Red Hat is newer. So we needed to use a Linux that worked with the existing infrastructure. Our software already worked with the main two we were using and even had a client for Tru64. When investigating possible Linux platforms we wanted OpenBSD first (I know, not linux but the Unix team is a fan) but no support. But of course we had to check the compatibilities of each of the agents we were using at the time. All worked with RHEL. That limits our choices quite a bit. :) Now it's momentum. We have 1,100 systems of which about half are RHEL and some CentOS. Even if the agents started being compatible across the board, we don't have the manpower to start support an even more diverse environment.

[John]

Re: Mint

[phantomfive]

makes sense

Re:Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's worth emphasizing that the main reason I preferred Mint in this case is that for an old PowerPC like the iBook I've been working on, it simply ran better and was ready to go much quicker. Unity was definitely pretty (and it looks and feels very, very Apple-like) but the whole computer ran slowly. (Unity on that computer may have actually been part of the problem but by the time I discovered that I was ready to try something new. I figured, hey, if it doesn't work, I can just go back.)

It's strange to me because as I understand it both distros have the same foundation and everything. Mint's based on Ubuntu for crying out loud. Maybe this experience is unique to the PowerPC version, or that particular model of computer? I really can't say.

Re:Mint

[TangoMargarine]

Does Ubuntu do it any better? (I'm not even going to ask about Debian.) When I tried to upgrade my last Xubuntu install, it hosed my graphics driver somehow. I was rather surprised as before that I can't remember having any trouble with dist-upgrades.

Oh, and apparently they still have that bug where if I launch Firefox from the LiveCD, it kills my graphics, too. When I was putting the fresh (Mint) install on after the above, that happened. And for some brilliant reason the bootloader gets written at the END of the installation. Oh, and they redesigned GRUB a few years back to make it basically impossible to boot from outside as far as I can tell.

*goes off and bangs head against the wall*

Re:Mint

[TangoMargarine]

For one specific guy's case. The only problem I've ever had with Ubuntu/Mint audio before I started halfassedly tinkering with it was that Ubuntu didn't disable the speakers when you plugged in headphones for like 6 releases in a row. Other than that, smooth sailing.

Random data point is random

Re:Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

My mom uses Mint on the laptop I gave her to replace her windows machine. No complaints and about 10 minutes instruction to get her started.

Re:Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried Mint Cinnamon and Mate, then noticed Mint also supported KDE and XFCE, so I tried those. My conclusion was Mint's update manager is nice, but it's really not ready to be a standalone distribution, because "apt-get dist-upgrade" ends up pulling in Ubuntu packages that try to overwrite Mint's /etc/lsb-release and such as Ubuntu 14.04.1LTS instead of Mint. Maybe the answer is "don't use apt or dpkg." Well I mix and match tools, and if it can't do that too, then it's not ready for me.

Apparently you have to use unsupported plugins for Cinnamon and KDE for features that were standard in GNOME2. Screw that! I will not download a pluging maintained by jrandomuser@example.com (not literally example.com; they're all just weird random people I've never heard of). That's how you get owned. Find the good ones and make them officially supported. Cinnamon also got a double strike because it froze while I was trying to add stuff to the panels, so it will not get another chance until 2016 at the earliest.

Anyway, I ended up with Xubuntu 14.04.1LTS. It's the most like GNOME2, but it's also very immature and really not ready for prime-time. You have to make your own .desktop links, and you can't drag launchers from menu to toolbar, and you can't search for "system tools" without going through the "settings" page (the xfce equivalent of windows control panel). That's really annoying, and it's what will probably end up forcing me to give kbuntu another chance.

Re:Mint

[Blaskowicz]

There are special purpose live CDs just for the task of GRUB 2 booting now (Super Grub Disk).
I got used to grub 2, though it pissed me off of course (ditto empty xorg.conf, followed by custom resolutions moved out of xorg.conf)

If you want a new nightmare there's UEFI :D, ah, sorry for mentioning that I guess. Main gripe here is if you install Mint (and probably deb, ubuntu and others) on a UEFI system you don't get a memtest86 entry in grub, because hey it's UEFI so it no longer can boot "legacy", useful stuff. On that same PC, Windows 7 was more dumb : it refused to install. Maybe destroying the whole partition table and starting over would have worked but no thanks, no. In good BIOS times, Windows installed and only fucked your bootloader over, now it doesn't want to work! That is funny.

Re:Mint

[TangoMargarine]

They updated SGD for 2? I used it back in the day when it only supported legacy (not that it was "legacy" at the time of course).

Yeah, don't even get me started about SecureBoot.

Re:Mint

[Blaskowicz]

LMDE will soon just track debian jessie, with a major release in November. It will effectively become "Linux Mint debian stable"!
That effectively puts an end to the LMDE semi-rolling model, but they'll still have their Minty stuff. You should expect security updates as in regular debian or ubuntu and also support for upgrading to the debian stable that comes after jessie.

Would this not be better asked as a poll?

[hermitdev]

Enough said in the subject.

Re:Would this not be better asked as a poll?

[uvajed_ekil]

Enough said in the subject.

Just because you say "enough said" that does not mean debate has ended or enough has been said. That is an over-used conversation stopper. Nuf said.

Re:Would this not be better asked as a poll?

[Anonymous Coward]

Enough said in the subject.

Just because you say "enough said" that does not mean debate has ended or enough has been said. That is an over-used conversation stopper. Nuf said.

hermitdev meant that the subject of their post already contained their whole message/question, not that discussion should be stopped because enough had already been said about it.

- aiht
(AC because can't be bothered logging in rn)

Lubuntu

[oodaloop]

Clean, light, beautiful, fast.

Re:Lubuntu

[dkman]

I agree. I've been using it for a few years now. It simply works and stays out of your way. I haven't had a problem finding out how to do something online. For many it might very well be the best OS you've never heard of. It just seems to be not well known for how well it works.

Re:Lubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

eh.... I am currently trying it on my junk laptop and it certainly is not beautiful. A variant for older computers in LXLE is far better. I just wish they made it in x64.

Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Gentoo....... As a software developer the ability to freeze certain packages without giving up critical updates is a game changer! Nobody else seems to let me do this without some binary C/C++ incompatibility. For that I love Gentoo. I also do weird things like rebuild the linux kernel using my ICC enterprise license along with firefox/chromium/ffmpeg. ICC compared to GCC is just blazing fast. Nearly 360% speed increases in some areas. No other distro makes something that crazy as easy as Gentoo does. It's a real hackers delight. (not the new-age incorrect interpretation of hacker)

Runners up

2. Slackware
3. Debian

Re:Gentoo

[santax]

Well personally, being a hacker since the early 80's wouldn't consider setting some compiler-flags being a hacker. Second, Arch (and I believe most distro's actually) let you hold back packages while still being able to upgrade all the rest. In Arch AUR there is even a package cold downgrade... so you can compile any given package again from version control where you can pick one you liked better. If you really wanted keep a package at a certain version, you being a 'old-age-interpretation' of a hacker, could also consider compiling it static. Not sure if Gentoo mentions that option in their standard flags or if you would have to do that manually ;) Don't get me wrong, gentoo is nice, but any system can compile packages. You just need to learn how to read and alter the make files. In most cases, Gentoo costs you time and learns you nothing. But it's a nice hobby.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo's cool for a few week, or a few months if you're really determined. Then the endless compilation with continuous breakages and the odd build system change that breaks everything get to you, and you move on to Debian.

Re:Gentoo

[arth1]

My main server is Gentoo. I have a few others, with various OSes, but they all suffer from lack of long term support and upgrade options. My Gentoo system was installed in 2002, and now, 12 years later it still runs - with everything upgraded many times over, both hardware and software. Everything is up-to-date with patches too, and features I do not want for security or resource reasons are left out.
It's the only OS I know of where either of this is possible.

Re:Gentoo

[agm]

I run Gentoo on both my work and home PCs, and I use a special flavour of Ubuntu with real-time extensions to drive a CNC controller. I have experienced hassles with Gentoo along the way, but they seem fewer are farther between now. Compiling from source isn't an issue for me. I can have all 4 cores pegged to 100% for a couple of hours and I hardly even notice it. I prefer the control I have with Gentoo.

Re:Gentoo

[csirac]

I think he means that it's trivial in Gentoo to run arbitrary versions of any old library or dependency for the sake of a given application that is stuck in the past, not just package-pinning as we do in Debian-land. For example, I have an old gnuradio application that was written for gnuradio 3.6.x, but this was never shipped in any official release of Debian (it went gnuradio 3.5 in wheezy -> gnuradio 3.7 in jessie).

In gentoo it's trivial to have a specific old version of libfoo (and all the old, terribly specific versions of its huge pile of dependencies) installed along-side whatever passes for the current version of libfoo for the rest of your applications which aren't stuck in the past.

In Debian I had to re-build gnuradio from the 3.6 source, with much tweaking of the debian/control, debian/rules files and wading through debian-specific patchsets intended for gnuradio 3.5 or gnuradio 3.7, that don't apply to gnuradio 3.6. And all its dependencies. And suffer the fact that now all of the rest of my applications are forced to use gnuradio 3.6.

Re:Gentoo

[SlashdotOgre]

I have been using Gentoo for over a decade now across multiple systems (starting with an IBM Thinkpad T21 with a P3 800MHz) and completely disagree. I have ran unstable for that entire time and while there was occasional breakage, it was never so bad that I couldn't fix it myself within a day (and usually learn a ton in the process).

With modern multi core processors, compiling is hardly endless, and maintaining multiple systems using one build server is fairly trivial.

Don't get me wrong, Gentoo does require some dedication and a willingness to learn. However it's a great distribution that's fairly easy to maintain for years, and it provides endless flexibility.

Also it's one of the few distributions willing to put up a fight over systemd which is important to me as a believer in the Unix philosophy.

Re:Gentoo

[lucm]

Well personally, being a hacker since the early 80's wouldn't consider setting some compiler-flags being a hacker.

Hacker since the early 80s with a 7-digit user id... Where were you in the late 90s and early 2000s? Parchman? Bedlam? A cabin in Lincoln, Montana?

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be like you - including having an interest to try compiling Gentoo with ICC. However, one day - I really mean just one day - a simple thing my friend had said about valuing time made me change my approach completely. Now I always choose whichever distro I assume will "just work" (opensuse at the moment) since really, how much - or how little - do I value my time if I spend hours each week just to save a few ms. here and there. My computer is a tool for working (or having fun) and not a neverending maintenance project. If it's no longer fast enough, the most cost-efficient solution is simply to buy faster hardware if my time has above zero value.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

I tought that compiling everything from source would be like that after having tried AUR on arch ($package was compiled against libfoo.so.2 which was removed in the last update? who cares if it breaks), but instead every time something tricky happened portage was verbose and refined enough to easily fix it.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo's cool for a few week, or a few months if you're really determined. Then the endless compilation with continuous breakages and the odd build system change that breaks everything get to you, and you move on to Debian.

I would say it is exactly the opposite. It sucks to set up a new gentoo box. Maintaining it, though, makes it worthwhile. Updates are relatively easy, and I have yet to have an update screw up my machine. I have fedora on my laptops, and I cringe a little bit for each "upgrade," and have had a couple of upgrades that trashed my machine. With gentoo everything is incremental, and you have fine grained control about what is installed and what version you use. You just have to pay a little bit of attention, and in the long run it saves more time than the anguish of the first install.

Re:Gentoo

[Bill_the_Engineer]

If he's like me he stopped going to slashdot for a while, forgot his UID/password, realized the email address that was assigned to that UID no longer exists, and found it much easier just to create a new UID.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Irrelevant. I've been 'hacking' since the late 70s, but I didn't join Slashdot until pretty late. Since when is a freakin' Slashdot UID an indicator of someone age and skill?

Re:Gentoo

[TeknoHog]

This. To put it short, Gentoo doesn't make this needless user vs. developer distinction.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

A cave in Ash Hollow Nebraska?

Re:Gentoo

[lucm]

1998

Dislike Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Gentoo a little over a decade ago, and it was awesome for exposing me to how Linux worked.

Arch today reminds me of that. Problem is, I don't have the time or patience to sit around fixing my Linux machine and playing Mr. Package Manager like I did when I was 17. Now I need something that just works.

I tried Arch about a year ago and was quickly turned off: the ISO that I downloaded wouldn't boot. Turns out they were shipping a broken kernel that week. No big deal, just hunt down the flag I needed to pass to the kernel, got it booted and installed. Configured, usable, a week later, do some updates, breaks something minor. OK, I can fix that. Wash, rinse repeat. I gave up, went back to Ubuntu.

Arch does have great documentation and good forums. Both the documentation and the forms for Ubuntu are worse than useless.

Yeah, I know, Ubuntu is too popular to be cool. But it has the right mix of recent packages (I used CentOS 6 at work for a while and was frustrated by how old everything was; installing package foo requires bar-2.4, but CentOS ships with bar-1.9.8 with 18 dependencies on that particular bar, so if you want foo you're stuck playing Mr. Package Manager) and support (I only go for the LTS releases). If a package I need isn't in Ubuntu's repositories (or the one that is there is too old), it's a good bet that there's a legitimate Ubuntu builds provided by the author.

Anyone using Arch in production? What's your rationale? How do you keep it from breaking?

Re: Dislike Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

'Playing Mr. Package Manager' cracked me up for some reason. You have made my day.

Re:Dislike Arch

[uvajed_ekil]

Not sure why this was posted anonymously, but someone needs to mod it up - a score of zero is plain silly.

Re:Dislike Arch

[santax]

One could consider using pacman on Arch for just that task. Or yaourt if you wish. (package managing ;) ) I am using arch for about 3 years now. I wouldn't use it an a production server, it's too bleeding edge for that and there is no such thing as LTS on Arch. But it's awesome as a dev system and as a general state of the art desktop/laptop. I would not recommend it to first time linux users or people who are afraid to open up vim. To get the most out of it, takes quite some time in the configs. After install it's pretty much naked, while being considered a good thing to me, might not be a good thing for someone who wants to start typing on a new book. I think Arch takes a bit more from the user in many ways. The community is helpfull, after you have proven to do your own research. It resembles openbsd both in docs as mentality. Because the documentation indeed is awesome.

Re:Dislike Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have the time or patience to sit around fixing my Linux machine and playing Mr. Package Manager like I did when I was 17.

Ubuntu's bug reports are good, lots of people posting their troubles there and often the responses have a few good things to try.

I put together custom Linux distros and kernel patches for a living. And I don't have time or interest to go home and do it either!

Re:Dislike Arch

[blackiner]

Hmm. You must have had a device with particularly poor driver support. Was the issue with a graphics driver? I use Arch on my desktop and laptop, update it multiple times a week. I have never had an update break the system. That is part of why I like it so much.

I don't use it for any production stuff but I imagine if you wanted to do that, it would be best to have a test machine to run updates on first. Or just stick to RHEL/CentOS.

Re:Dislike Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

No. I'm a long-term Linux user. I know what I'm doing. I don't have driver problems.

It was stuff like.. I update the whole system and all of a sudden networking just quits working. Time to drop what I was working on and troubleshoot. Ok, they changed some tool from one thing to another, and the configuration that I had didn't survive the transition. Easy enough to fix.

Update later on and audio is broken. Google around, okay, for some reason it wants to use my GPU audio instead of my actual audio. Alright, here's an incantation or a config file tweak to fix it. Back to what I was doing.

The point is that I don't want to have to do that. My time is too valuable to me to waste it fucking around with the configuration of my OS. That was interesting to me when I was a teenager, and back then it was not time wasted: learning Linux by rooting around in the guts, breaking/fixing/reading/repeat was awesome.

But now, that IS time wasted, so I use something boring and stable.

Re:Dislike Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

You keep it from breaking by using it and fixing it until it stops breaking. Might take 10 years or so if you don't experiment much, but once you're done it's pretty much indestructible (Also near impossible to use for anyone else. And trying to get work done on a different machine will have you chewing on the keyboard in frustration in turn.)

Re:Dislike Arch

[marsu_k]

I wouldn't use it an a production server, it's too bleeding edge for that and there is no such thing as LTS on Arch. But it's awesome as a dev system and as a general state of the art desktop/laptop.

Very much this. We use some quite rapidly-developing technologies like node.js at work - the production servers are obviously updated very conservatively (and don't run Arch), but as a developer I can check out the latest version pretty much immediately after it is released and see if the updates cause some issues, or if there are new features that would benefit us in the future. And as said, works very well as a desktop.

Also, I was pleasantly surprised a while back when this laptop had to be repaired for a while - I had an older laptop that I hadn't used / updated in over six months, and thought getting it up to date would cause a lot of pain (Arch had moved into systemd during that time - no, not getting into that debate here). All that was required in addition to a regular pacman -Syu was to alter my boot line a bit to use systemd.

Re:Dislike Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us have been on Slashdot for over 15 years but never registered a username. Some of us have no need for such things. Please consider that.

Re:Dislike Arch

[wrook]

I use Arch for my day to day programming machine. I would not use it for an outward facing server mainly because it does work as well as some other distros for nailing yourself down to a known, stable set of versions. For a dev platform, though, it is fantastic. I've got bleeding edge everything (in fact, it is hard to stop it from being bleeding edge) and it is highly configurable.

The best thing about Arch is that most of the configuration for packages is not done by default. You have to do it yourself. While this is indeed a pain in the neck most of the time, it is awesome for keeping bloat away from your machine. The netbook I'm using to type this post on, does not have NetworkManager, Avahi, Pulse Audio, etc, etc, bt *does* have Gnome Shell on it. Try doing that on an Ubuntu machine... I use this box for hacking around on the train and for practicing programming, and despite being many years old it's absolutely fine. My main dev is also running Arch, manly because I get rolling updates and bleeding edge updates. Occasionally I have problems with stability, but nothing I can't deal with fairly quickly. It is much, much better than having the big bang upgrade every X months.

Missing one key point

[msobkow]

They're all missing one key evaluation point: how do they handle system upgrades? Not updates, but major release upgrades.

I'd been very happy with Ubuntu until it came time to do an upgrade, and it barfed when it encountered my DB/2 LUW server, crashed, and left the machine badly corrupted. Who knows if Debian will fare any better when the time comes, but that's one of the main reasons I chose Debian as my next distro: it doesn't force major upgrades every year or few. (I had been on the Ubuntu LTS cycle for the same reason.)

Re:Missing one key point

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing you said makes any sense.

1) Since when has DB/2 LUW been distributed as a Debian package.
2) If it wasn't distributed as a Debian package, how could it possibly be "encountered", unless it scribbled over existing files already managed by other Debian packages, in which case it was DB/2 that corrupted your system.
3) What do you mean by crash? I have no idea how Apt could possibly crash a server.
4) Why would you think Debian would be immune to what happened on Ubuntu?
5) How does Ubuntu force major upgrades, and how does Debian differ in that regard?

Re:Missing one key point

[Randle_Revar]

Dunno about more recent Ubuntu versions, but historically it has not handled version upgrades as well as Debian. Not sure why, but there is it.

That said, I agree with 1, 2, 5... 3, I would be amazed to see on Stable. I have certainly seen apt crash a few times on sid/experimental, but you would hardly use that for servers.

Re:Missing one key point

[GigaplexNZ]

Arch is rolling release. It doesn't do "major release upgrades". In that sense, there are absolutely no issues with major release upgrades. Updates, on the other hand, can often have issues similar to major release upgrades, but they are usually less severe and occur more frequently.

Re:Missing one key point

[msobkow]

The Ubuntu upgrade encountered DB/2's configuration and startup scripts in the /etc tree, didn't know what to do with them, had updated half the packages on the system, barfed, and left the system with a non-responsive command prompt. As half the packages were for one release and half for another, the system would no longer even boot. Without the ability to boot even into single user mode, it was clearly impossible to recover the system so I switched to Debian.

I don't know that Debian is immune to the problem, but I've heard far less people complain about failed Debian updates than Ubuntu updates.

Having software that was locally installed, built from source, or otherwise not part of the system software database should not cause an upgrade to crash. At worst it should warn you that there are unrecognized files present and that you'll have to update them manually.

This is the only time in 30+ years of working with computers that I've seen an update crash because it ran into something it didn't recognize. I guess that's "hats off" to Ubuntu for another first. :P

Re:Missing one key point

[ruir]

I would like to remember people Ubuntu uses a base for the next releases Debian unstable, as far as I remember...I had a couple of Ubuntu servers in the past and got badly burnt, it just reinforced my opinion that Ubuntu is only for desktop and Debian for servers.

Re:Missing one key point

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian stable on the desktop is great for me. It has a security updates only policy that means I have to get used (or find alternatives) to the annoying new stuff (like Gnome 3 or the GIMP toolbox) only when I upgrade to the next version.

Re:Missing one key point

[kenshin33]

debian (unstable, which is a rolling release if you want) is not immune, you'll have to deal with upgrades that break things. The only difference is you'll deal with theme one (or few) at a time, which is not ideal but way better than what you encountered.
Plus, AFAIK, when dpk installs a new packages that has a different configuration file (in /etc/) it will stop and ask what to do (use new use old merge ...etc).

Same as it's been forever.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're serious and doing serious business, RHEL is the only acronym you will ever need.

If you believe you're serious, but happen to be poor, you've got CentOS.

If you're one of those neurotic Linux on the Desktop folks, Mint is where it's at.

If you're completely insane and are sexually aroused by compiler flags, you want Gentoo.

If you're a crochety old bastard who writes out config files via echo and redirection, Slackware is your drug of choice.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[uvajed_ekil]

Very well said, and accurate! And that it is why it is hard to name a winner of the "best distro" contest - there are so so many with so many different target audiences and points of emphasis that it becomes impossible to simply and concisely rank them all. So while this is a silly exercise I think you actually answered it correctly, on all points. I like Mint and Mint-Debian, I would definitely use RHEL for enterprise use or CentOS for a university or large non-profit (or with admins much more capable than myself), and Gentoo and Slackware users are unique breeds. Everything else is redundant, aside from personal preferences and all the niche uses you can dream up, which are incalculable. So I for one am glad we have choices AND that we can acknowledge some clear leaders (or starting points, I guess) for certain categories, at least.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[wisnoskij]

How exactly is RHEL and its derivatives different from Ubuntu-likes? Other than I assume the business OSes do not radically overhaul their interfaces every 3 months.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[armanox]

RHEL's support cycle would be my first answer. Red Hat's support cycle is close in length to Microsoft, rather then Apple.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[phantomfive]

If you're serious and doing serious business, RHEL is the only acronym you will ever need.

RedHat is the group pushing SystemD. I'm not sure they're going to be great for business much longer.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[xvan]

Some closed source hardware providers choose them as targets for their products.
yum is better than apt
Lots of time is put testing so you don't get nasty surprises on production services that support millionaire businesses.
Long (really long) term support (and by support I mean security updates).

On the other hand, It's not a fair comparison, you should compare RHEL against Debian Stable.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[arth1]

RedHat is the group pushing SystemD. I'm not sure they're going to be great for business much longer.

RHEL 6 which doesn't have systemd will have support until 2017, and extended support until 2020. So they may not notice the full impact of pandering to Poettering until later.

I suspect that they think they'll get a large number of their customers to convert to using the cloud and no longer admin systems, so that it alienates admins doesn't matter.
I believe they are betting on the wrong whores.

Re: Same as it's been forever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Systemd lets clouds be easier to manage. Cloud sell compute, networking, and storage for a profit.

Yea, they are so screwed !

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[Anonymous Coward]

What amuses me is that once I freed myself of the frills of distros like RHEL I actually learned what was going on and stopped fearing Linux/BSD. Now I can use pretty much any distro without even thinking about bashing them. I can work around their cheap attempts to hold my hand, and actually do my job effectively without worrying if I'll break their delicately sculpted balance by say, shooting the server a glare or if a stray charged particle does its magic.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[Zugok]

If you're serious and doing serious business, RHEL is the only acronym you will ever need.

If you believe you're serious, but happen to be poor, you've got CentOS.

If you're one of those neurotic Linux on the Desktop folks, Mint is where it's at.

If you're completely insane and are sexually aroused by compiler flags, you want Gentoo.

If you're a crochety old bastard who writes out config files via echo and redirection, Slackware is your drug of choice.

Kinda reminds me of this post http://linux.slashdot.org/comm...

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, very well said! I run CentOS/Mint/Gentoo depending upon a context, so I guess it makes me a shape shifter.

We were having a water cooler discussion at work regarding the choice of distros, and I'm going to send a pointer to this around.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[ruir]

I gave up on RH somewhere around RH 7.0 where they fucked up badly gcc and glibs. RH also patches heavily a lot of things, always had. Nevertheless, got used to Debian, and, after RH, Debian is one of the hot items in the market. I have done versions upgrades LIVE and even with some nasty hacking, migrations LIVE from 32 to 64 bits.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[Anonymous Coward]

The profits of Redhat will see quite a rise soon, as current generation of admins are complete toothless on the face of every problem systemd causes. I would assume that this is the main driver on them as they can now sell the more expensive services to the businesses.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[TeknoHog]

Gentoo is no more about compilers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Of course, this has nothing to do with the possible phallic symbolism of telescopes.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[mu51c10rd]

This.

Try running Microsoft Integration services on anything other than a RHEL derivative. Same with CA, Symantec, and who knows how many other closed source software providers. They only supply binaries and instructions for Red Hat. Therefore, those of us who need to run large systems that have third party software tend to prefer Red Hat's ecosystem.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[heson]

The systemd haters are not the doers they are the talkers, so you will hear a lot of systemd hate but see a lot of systemd integration.
Get over it, let the meritocracy of open source work its pace.

Put up or shut up!

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[phantomfive]

Put up or shut up!

ok

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[TangoMargarine]

Man who shoots self in foot is doer, not hater.
Man who talks about shooting self in foot but doesn't comes away happier.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[bill.e.gloat]

What? No mention of Fedora? How does one diagnose his disorder if he uses Fedora?

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can only assume you are incredibly ignorant on the topic. Redhat is a terrible distribution for business (or anything). The only thing going for it is that its corporate parent supports each release for 10 yrs. But, when that time is up, you are fucked. Every other distro besides the Redhat based ones are trivial to in-place upgrade for major updates (been this way since before redhat was even created, but NIH ensured redhat would do things their own pathetically shitty way, so you can't even upgrade a system). Even Windows isn't as crippled as Redhat in this regard.

At least they finally have a package manager that doesn't _completely_ suck. If it weren't for yellowdog, redhat folks might still be manually tracking dependencies (uptodate was a joke).

Of course I am currently extra annoyed at Redhat because they are fucking up every other distro with things like that godawful abomination systemd which has completely fucked every system of mine running Debian testing-- even after it is purged from the system because other stuff (cgroups and udev were both points of breakage) now seems to require that gawdawful redshat shitfest.

And, remember redhat other fuckedupidness- fucking kde project by adding their own patches that broke kde, and letting the kde team deal with the pissed off users. Not accepting patches for disk corruption issue for ReiserFS, 'caus "fuck them users as long as they keep payin us", the gcc fiasco where redshat decided they would be FIRST, and pulled cvs head, slapped the upcoming version number on it, and then let gcc team field the shitstorm of pissed off folks with a broken compiler-- gcc ended up skipping that version number to avoid confusion. Redshat is a terrible choice, if you give a shit about stability or your data-- things most businesses care about.

Captcha: "hating" Yeah, I guess so.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're a crochety old bastard who writes out config files via echo and redirection

I think you meant cat, not echo.

$ cat >> file
type a bunch of stuff
that gets appended to the file
[ctrl-d]

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[rdnetto]

If you're completely insane and are sexually aroused by compiler flags, you want Gentoo.

Gentoo really doesn't enough love - it wasn't even mentioned in the article, despite being on par with Arch.
If anyone is interested in Gentoo but put off by the prospect of having to compile all your packages, I suggest they try Sabayon - it's a Gentoo derivative that uses a binary package manager in addition to portage, so you can install packages as easily as with apt-get/yum while still being able to use portage if you really want to mess around with USE flags.

Re:Which Religion is Best?

[uvajed_ekil]

"Which Religion is Best?" ...sound familiar?

No. Please explain. (Or, even better, don't.)

no mention of gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo has wonderful docs and an extremely active and knowledgeable irc channel--in fact, quite often the folks there are answering questions for users of other distros more than for gentoo.
It is a DIY distro so it does force you to learn the basic nuts and bolts, however:
- its package management is excellent
- its package repository is very large: over 16000 packages
- package dependencies by default are very few, since there are few default USE flags enabled--allowing the user to control exactly which libraries to use (eg, no need for alsa, oss, and pulseaudio to always be installed just because one binary package enabled them all)
- a minimal install can be made very tiny
- because it doesn't load or run any services by default it is very fast and uses few resources
- service configuration is very straight-forward, well documented, and fairly well normalized across services
- uses openrc by default; systemd is merely an option

There are derivatives that coddle beginners even more such as bintoo which can transition back to gentoo at any time.

Re:no mention of gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are a developer and love Gentoo, good for you, keep using it. But damn is it intimidating and hard to pick up for new users. It definitely has a devoted user base, but one thing it is certainly not is a catch-all desktop distro for people who just want to use their computers for productivity, communication, and fun stuff. Don't think I'm knocking it, but also know that it will probably never be installed on any computer I use or setup for anyone else.

Re:no mention of gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony is that nothing will teach you more about Linux's underpinnings than using Gentoo for a while. Then you can go ahead and resume thinking you're being productive in another distro if you want, while knowing what to do when that distro shits the bed. You will no longer feel like you're angering the gods by merely looking at a config file and actually know what the hell all those scary-sounding dependencies are. It's nothing short of empowering.

Fedora 20

[Anonymous Coward]

nuff said

Re:Fedora 20

[CronoCloud]

While I use F20, it's not necessarily the best for everyone. Heck, I've even thought about switching to CentOS now and then, since I'd prefer a longer release schedule than Fedora has traditionally had. 6 months is too short, 18 months is too long, 9-12 months is just right.

linux mint

[vasilevich]

linux XFCE (lightweight) or lubuntu (lightweight ubuntu). I used them for development.

Tails, Kali

[uvajed_ekil]

The article is a bit fluffy and their favoritism for Arch is a bit puzzling, but props for their mention of Tails. It is nice because it makes security and privacy much more simple to achieve if you follow a few basic steps, which is useful. It does a good job of filling the niche of a light, portable, usable distro that covers your tracks well.
But they did leave out another good distro that is also frequently used in live mode, Kali - my favorite distro for, um, "penetration testing." Yeah, "testing," that's what we use it for...

Re:Tails, Kali

[Hognoxious]

When Windows XP shuffled off its mortal coil I installed the last version of Backtrack (Kali's ancestor) on my old T40. This was partly because somebody gave me a DVD about the, ummm, testing tools but also it was the first one I tried that was non-PAE compatible and just worked, wifi and all.

Mrs Hog is not the most technical person in the world and she was able to use it fine.

In terms of install base...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say the winner is Android. *runs*

Re:Best of 2014?

[gweihir]

For me it is only those that are not planning to. The others will be screwed in the not too distant future.

What's the best distro of 2014?

[bangular]

What's the best distro of 2014? The one that works best for you. It's a click bait article meant to start a flame war.

Next up "Windows vs Linux: Is the king still supreme?" or "Coke vs Pepsi: Do we have a changing of the guards?"

Windows 8.1

[Anonymous Coward]

Because fuck you that's why.

Re:Windows 8.1

[Anonymous Coward]

sad git

Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Its definately Gentoo.

Most Linux users just want Unix ...

[perpenso]

FreeBSD is not Linux though.

Which isn't really much of a problem. Many, if not most, Linux users just want Unix functionality and don't care about the Linux brand itself, don't care about the GPL and its politics, etc. Hence the popularity of Mac OS X for many *nix users. It just so happens that for commodity PC hardware Linux is one of the more convenient *nix offerings.

Re:Most Linux users just want Unix ...

[7-Vodka]

FreeBSD is not Linux though.

Which isn't really much of a problem. Many, if not most, Linux users just want Unix functionality and don't care about the Linux brand itself, don't care about the GPL and its politics, etc. Hence the popularity of Mac OS X for many *nix users. It just so happens that for commodity PC hardware Linux is one of the more convenient *nix offerings.

Speak for yourself. I don't buy your claims to be able to speak for others.

Re:Most Linux users just want Unix ...

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD is not Linux though.

Which isn't really much of a problem. Many, if not most, Linux users just want Unix functionality and don't care about the Linux brand itself, don't care about the GPL and its politics, etc. Hence the popularity of Mac OS X for many *nix users. It just so happens that for commodity PC hardware Linux is one of the more convenient *nix offerings.

Speak for yourself. I don't buy your claims to be able to speak for others.

Thank you for sharing the minority perspective. :-)

Re:Most Linux users just want Unix ...

[TyFoN]

I run arch on all my workstations/laptops both at home and work. The servers at work run debian.

I've tried so many times to get freebsd on my computers, some it will work on, but far too often it will kernel panic on ACPI, smp, driver bug etc. Especially on recent computers.

Graphics/games is another thing.
Now the most recent have started to implement the proper kernel features for nvidia blob, but it's still not as good as the linux driver, and I can't run steam except via wine.

Linux just works, that's why I use it.

Re:Most Linux users just want Unix ...

[snkhere]

Was Steam not working a hardware/driver issue? The support on FreeBSD for NVIDIA is fine, and it is very much possible to run games on Steam (not all), and games like EVE Online, WoW, etc.

Re:Most Linux users just want Unix ...

[TyFoN]

It is possible to run a few games, but not with the performance you get in linux, and that's not the only problem.
I play EVE via wine in Linux and I suspect it will run okish in FreeBSD too. ....If I can boot without kernel panics which I haven't been able to on either my main gaming computer nor my gaming laptop.

Crashing a self compiled kernel is bad.
Crashing with the GENERIC kernel means I uninstall and wait another year to see.

As I said, Linux just works.

Re:Most Linux users just want Unix ...

[wrook]

At work the other day someone said to me, "I've heard a lot of devices are running Linux, but they don't do the stuff that I want. For example, I don't want Android. I want something like my Linux desktop, but I don't know what to call that".

It was the first time that I could say to a normal user, "What you want is called GNU". I will know I've lived too long when normal people start asking for software freedom, unprompted. But the world is changing. What used to be flame war material for programmer geeks on obscure mailing lists is now starting to be relevant to the average person. Already I have people telling me how they just heard how stupid software patents are and how I have to get behind the movement to stop it. Most of the 20 or so programmers on my team have never programmed using proprietary software libraries ("What do you mean you don't get the source code? How would you be able to use it?")

I think what you say is probably true for the moment. I wonder if it will be true forever.

Re:Most Linux users just want Unix ...

[perpenso]

By politics of the GPL I am referring to things like GPL v BSD. I don't think many *nix users will ever care at that level.

Proprietary vs FOSS, that is something different, that may one day become an issue. But FOSS in general, not the GPL specifically.

Re:Most Linux users just want Unix ...

[perpenso]

Linux just works, that's why I use it.

That's my point. Its convenient, it works, its *nix. The fanboi'ism and politics, don't care, its as bad as and embarrassing as the Mac zealots. Most software engineers I've encountered just want a working *nix. Whoever delivers gets their usage. Again, notice the popularity of Mac OS X at *nix conferences.

Back in the 90s when I was using a 486DX2 I brought home two CDs from the local computer swapmeet. FreeBSD and Yggdrasil plug and play Linux. Having grown up on BSD in college I first tried FreeBSD. It crashed during install. I tried Yggdrasil, it installed and configured just fine, that's why I used Linux.

Note, configuration includes **autoconfiguing** graphics, audio, and networking. It truly was plug and play. It was only later when I tried other Linux distributions that I became familiar with the absurdity of having to enter in the monitor timing values to get graphics to work. Other Linux distros were truly far behind Yggdrasil.

Today for desktop tasks where *nix provides the better solution I use Mac OS X's BSD environment. Linux is for the headless servers in the closet and for devices like a raspberry pi.

the best linux distro of 2014....

[Anonymous Coward]

....isn't a Linux distro at all.

http://omnios.omniti.com

Cyanogenmod

[the_humeister]

Linux distribution? I'd go with Cyanogenmod.

ElementaryOS

[certain death]

Beautiful desktop on a great OS. I wiped my windows 8 laptop and put the beta on it...very nice.

Re:ElementaryOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Beautiful desktop on a great OS. I wiped my windows 8 laptop and put the beta on it...very nice.

^^^ This. I'm hopeful that the Google Summer of Code project to port Pantheon, Mutter, and everything else over to pure Debian gets finished soon. Elementary's UI on a stable Debian core would be magic.

Re: ElementaryOS

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it too. It's a very nice desktop.

Re:ElementaryOS

[graphius]

tried elementaryOS, but found it a bit limiting and frankly kind of ugly. I have been using SolydK on my laptop (I am a KDE fan) for a while now. Great rolling release, but it is a bit small and the distributors are a bit overworked.

CENTOS until systemd

[Revek]

it sucks beta it and fix it and then foist it on the rest of the world.

Alpine Linux

[dalias]

No bloat and easy to customize for different needs. Focused on server use and virtualization but also makes a nice light desktop. Active development community.

Debian

[Randle_Revar]

Debian

Re:Debian

[RightwingNutjob]

Debian 6. Before all the shiny shit infected Deb 7.

Re:Debian

[BlackPignouf]

I'm not trying to start a flamewar, just asking a genuine question:
What are the main differences between Debian, Mint & Ubuntu now?
I took some time last month to install and test OpenBSD, Alpine Linux, Mint, Mint LMDE, Ubuntu & Debian.
I just wanted a basic graphical interface + terminal + tabs + vim + zsh + ssh
I was suprised to see that Debian wasn't that much smaller or faster than other Debian based distros.
Ubuntu UI sucked, but I really liked the speed and small footprint of Alpine Linux.

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Debian 5, Lenny, was perfection. Squeeze's version of cups had a whacked implementation of duplex printing/collating. Lenny's printing system never, ever broke with security updates, which is an absolute must for people with jobs.

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

They still missed a great opportunity to call the next one Carl.

Re:Which Religion is Best?

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD would be some old world Lutherans preaching minimalism and Linux would be some crazy snake-handling baptist that does astrology on the side

Qubes-OS.org

[hAckz0r]

If you are into system security then check this one out. Security by hardware isolation is very hard to crack. Even the NIC and its kernel drivers live in its own VM and protects your system via IOMMU.

Re:Qubes-OS.org

[badkarmadayaccount]

There a lot of not really thought out bits delving in, but yes, I think it's the only real security distribution (as in minimal attack surface). Fedora based, pretty neat.

who cares abt the distro? Pick one & stick wit

[Anonymous Coward]

Pick a distro and stick with it. The returns are immense. I say this as a debian user since potato release. Learning the nuances of a distro, learning where it keeps its config files, it's package manager, it's install process ... is sort of like riding a bike. I find this to be true of my experience with linux on debian, but I imagine it's probably true of any of the main branches of debian.

After trying to use linux on the desktop productively in the dark years of the early 2000's, I'm so relieved to see where it is at now - truly stable running modern software (not just a bunch of terminal windows) and truly hassle free. My 10 year old uses Wheezy on his laptop and he has no idea what linux is. It's insane how intuitive it is to use....

You've come a long way, linux.

For me the most significant distro has been...

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenWRT

Systemd distribution

[GodWasAnAlien]

The Systemd distribution (or GNU/Systemd/Linux as it is now called) deserves the Man of the Year award this year, because it has unified so many stand alone Unix style components into one unified quality program. By unifying everything into one program, we have eliminated redundant code, bugs, and rallied all of the Linux community behind the one user-space kernel. We can continue this trend of streamlining and eliminating waste, by merging in a compositor, a browser engine. We believe that molecularity will only allow the user to be confused with choices and that good incremental development is like making good stew. Throw everything in.

Re:Systemd distribution

[phantomfive]

We can continue this trend of streamlining and eliminating waste, by merging in a compositor, a browser engine. We believe that molecularity will only allow the user to be confused with choices and that good incremental development is like making good stew. Throw everything in.

But don't worry, like the pieces of a good stew, it's still modular!

Re:Systemd distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

But don't worry, like the pieces of a good stew, it's still modular!

And you are free inspect the various pieces on the sidewalk after your body has gone into reject-the-poison mode and it has come back up. Unfortunately due to partial binary digestion most of what you will see will be peas and corn (even if you have not eaten them recently), something resembling cat food, and some sort of smelly yellow goo. Not to worry, with a few tens of thousands spent at a good biomedical lab you can diagnose what made you ill. Did I mention the company the cook works for owns that lab and will provide you that support?

Re:Systemd distribution

[Gunstick]

is this from an old Microsoft presentation? Sound like it.
Yeah, systemd will make linux into windows, i.e. it will die. because if you want unmaintainable OS, just use windows, it has all the softwares.

Xubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

2014 was the year I discovered Xubuntu. Clean and very usable interface, small footprint great if you need a Virtualbox or vmware linux machine. It is ideal for a user coming from Windows because it defines a similar set of shortcuts and a start menu that provides a similar functionality than the windows 7 start menu. I like the small icon set that the default theme provides. And finally the ubuntu packaging (lots of packages and regular updates). I think it is hard to find something wrong with this distribution.

puppy linux

[Anonymous Coward]

puppy linux for bootable disposable uses, no idea why, just reminds me of my amiga 500 days. kubuntu for semi serious home use, the network manager allowed me to do as i needed to suit my needs.

Re:puppy linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Lighthouse Puppy 4.1.2rc1 with Mariner (KDE 3.5.10). And a doctored version (Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player removed via Puppy and oldschool Winamp 2.95 + newschool Media Player Classic Home Cinema replacing it, plus Opera 12.10, killed dead on the autoupdate with the latest purchased nondotnet version of Zonealarm that still works with XP, and stops all kinds of crap from acting like a server on this windows install, and can even hinder lsass LSA shell export version, Smss session manager, which, when killed trigger an automatic shutdown, unfortunately, which is why I throughly hate all recent post 2000 Microsoft shit, unlike in Linux, where you can kill and delete all kinds of stuff) Windows XP SP3 (yeah, SP3, unfortunately. I'd much prefer Win2K except for all the internet stuff that requires XP, but when XP dies off the internet, so will my main computing, or even Windows XP usage at all and I'm going back to DOS6.22, DOS7, Win95 and Win2K, together with Office 97 SP2 and VB6SP5 (sp6 fucks it up on purpose.)

Yours, &c,
Slashdot user sillybilly, with a terrible karma only getting 2 posts per day, more or less.

Time for anew distro?

[jd]

I have often wondered if it would be worth building a new distribution. The existing ones all seem to make weird design decisions, none have conquered the desktop (I blame OSDL), they're nowhere near as high performance as they could/should be, and Linux Base is not necessarily the most secure layout. It's certainly problematic for multi-versioning.

Re:Time for anew distro?

[aardvarkjoe]

How will jdLinux be different than the hundreds of other distributions out there?

Not saying that you don't have some ideas that haven't been tried, but it's not like there's exactly a shortage of existing distributions, so yours would have to have something pretty unique to gain any real traction.

Re:Time for anew distro?

[KozmoStevnNaut]

I was going to say that a purely desktop-oriented distro where everything is at least as slick and user-friendly as current OSX, but it seems that Mint and ElementaryOS are already trying to carve out that niche.

Re:Time for anew distro?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny... I often wondered what would happen if we collapsed distro's and people focused on building a few good ones instead of hundreds of fragmented ones? Resources are limited but it seems the number of linux distro's isnt.

Not a flame war.. most my house runs on linux
Content filter/firewall
Content server
3 kids PC's (12 - 16)
my two desktops.

Only windows PC's are the wife's desktop/laptop.

Here troll

[TuxWithoutPants]

Who wants a flame bait? Who wants a flame bait? Here troll, here troll. That's a good troll!

boot tails iso from Grub2

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what get my goat? I put in a feature request/bug report for booting tails from grub2. It only entered their bug reporting system because their forum has been shutdown for months. Their response to my request.. not supported. Two days later I figured out how to structure the grub entry so it boots the iso with everything working, ie: networking, tor. It kills me that they felt nobody would benefit from using the district in this way. This is what seems to happening more and more in the community. A slow death where the fun of getting things to work is no longer worth sharing.

Great news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Paying for Windows to deliver a Blue Screen of Death seemed a common dog.

Nuff said is a conversation stopper.

[lucm]

n/t

Stali

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm waiting for Stali to come out

http://sta.li

Arch? I was on Arch for more than a year

[koinu]

First... Arch is ok (probably for many people). But it is not good. In my opinion, Debian is still the best option as universal solution.

Why NOT Arch? I quit because of the early adoption of systemd (yeah, sorry, please read on... this is not the only reason... it was the last thing that annoyed me much). My system could not boot up and shut down anymore (could not power off, ATX switch behind my PC was the only option; 5 secs power switch holding was not switching off, but rebooting... don't ask me how this is possible!! I always thought that this is hardware power-off, but I confirmed that booting init on Arch made everything work again). Arch followed the systemd path and did not let anyone decide, because of complexity reduction. I was forced to quit, because there was a dangerous tendency that my system would not work anymore (there are still race conditions that affect me in random patterns on systemd; I try it sometimes!).

The more important reason are the packagers. This is a unholy mess with them! I posted a bug report for a piece of software which was auto-assigned. The person did not want to care about it and unassigned. A core developer assigned him again and once again was unassigned. I mean I posted a FULL PATCH! Very trivial and it was confirmed that it solved many problems with the package by 2 people. I wondered wtf they were doing there. I never have seen such weird behavior. The small fix that takes about 5 mins to integrate was for several months unsolved.

I also looked at AUR, because Arch itself is lacking many packages that are interesting for me. AUR is a security catastrophe, of course, you need to take a look what you compile and install there (basically everyone can distribute anything without supervision). But it's not that bad, because you have at least an idea how to install something you need. The most annoying thing is that it is a mess. Old stuff that does not work, packages installing binary distribution from servers without any guarantees. AUR is a very dangerous facility and highly unstable.

Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo is left out of the comparison in the article!
I think Gentoo is the best distro both for Performance and Documentation: there is no single aspect of a linux box that is not addressed by some gentoo docs. And the time_to_login is embarrassingly faster than any other distro (with a good kernel customization you can load a thin kernel and the handful of modules you need, nothing else!)

systemd

[Spacelord]

I like Arch and its minimalistic DIY philosophy, but that's despite the fact that it uses systemd, not because of it. As a matter of fact, if they got rid of systemd it would be close to my perfect distro.

At the end of the day, an init system only matters so much though. Once your system is booted, and your running your software, you don't see it anymore. The times that I did have to deal with systemd, it was a damn pain in the ass though.

Any distro you pick

[aaaaaaargh!]

I tend to mess around with them so much that it doesn't really seem to matter with which one I started anyway.

Not a seriouse review

[Jawnn]

The word "codswallop" appeared in the first paragraph of TFA. I figured right then that this was going to be superficial review. Then again, I should have known from the summary that anything purporting to determine "The Best Linux Distro" is probably not worth my time. Yes, I read TFA. Yes, it was a waste of my time. The meaning of "How long is a piece of string?" still escapes TFA's author.

who cares abt the distro? Pick one & stick wit

[Spacelord]

I think there is value in learning how other distros do stuff. It teaches you to not make certain assumptions.

Re: Which Religion is Best?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux supports snake handling in userspace, if your system has serpentd support (if you see /proc/serpents yours probably does); but it does not "do snake handling on the side". Asshole.

Linux Lite

[spaceman375]

Every distro I've ever installed required lots of post-install personalizations. Changing the default editor, mail client, and media player, installing "restricted" codecs and other software, adjusting which services launch when; there's plenty to do before you can call it finished. The one distro that saves me the most of that time is Linux Lite. It's a pleasure to install and to use.

Crunchbang Linux!

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried Ubuntu and it runs even slower than Windows XP. This is TERRIBLE! I switch to #! and it boots in 70 meg and races! Beside, I have such fun telling everyone that I go home and Crunchbang my Iceweasel!

Re:Crunchbang Linux!

[Tempest_2084]

Really? I guess I never compared Ubuntu to XP, but it boots soooo much faster than Windows 7 that when I'm forced to boot back into Win 7 for something I can't believe I used it for so long. It's unbearably slow these days, even with the stripped down version I'm running.

Desktop use and DVD playback

[chrish]

Honest question that I haven't been able to find an answer to...

Is there a desktop Linux distro that will play DVDs "out of the box"? Specifically, you stick it in the drive and it starts playing.

I've got an olde Pentium 4 system that's currently running Windows 7, and I wanted to put Linux on it... the main use case for this machine is playing DVDs during workouts.

Re:Desktop use and DVD playback

[CronoCloud]

I think Mint does, perhaps Ubuntu.

But a standalone DVD player might be better for that use case.

Re:Desktop use and DVD playback

[mu51c10rd]

I would pick 1 of 2:
1. Ubuntu
2. Fedora

Re:Desktop use and DVD playback

[steveha]

This is a little bit tricky because it is, in theory, a violation of the DMCA to play DVDs without a properly licensed DVD player program. (Specifically, a program that has licensed the dread secret of CSS.)

Both Ubuntu and Mint have packages you can install to play DVDs.

If you don't mind paying some money, you can get a properly licensed DVD player from Fluendo. I bought this, and it Just Works.

http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/oneplay-dvd-player/

I wish Fluendo would also offer a Blu-Ray player, but as far as I know the only legal-in-the-USA way to play Blu-Ray on Linux would be to install Windows in VirtualBox or some other VM, and then install a Windows Blu-Ray player.

Re:Desktop use and DVD playback

[graphius]

didn't Mint conquor this quite some time ago? I use SolydXK (the KDE version) on my laptop and have no problems. With Ubuntu it is just a matter of adding a repository. I have not used many other distos enough recently to say one way or another...

Re:Desktop use and DVD playback

[davesays]

Linux Mint - DVD support out of the box. Linux Mint Cinnamon is basically a straight Windows desktop replacement. Installation is as straight forward as it gets. I have moved a ton of family, of all ages, to it and get hardly any user questions. It just works.

Re:Desktop use and DVD playback

[chrish]

Luckily I don't live in the US, so I can happily ignore the DCMA.

Consensus seems to be Mint Cinnamon, so I'll give it a go!

Re:Desktop use and DVD playback

[ChrisMaple]

Fedora is GPL purist and stays away from any hint of proprietary solutions and possible copyright violations. That not only means no DVD video "out of the box", but also additional repositories must be used.

Ubuntu Studio

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried em all and ubuntu studio has had the least breakage, best base, low latency kernel, non excessive bloat, decent package selection. It just works and I don't have to fix anything , the reason I often use windows. This is the first distro I have left permanently installed on a high end machine cause I enjoyed the experience. The USB worked well, I prefer XFCE, good dock, bar, applets. Everything where you would want on a full desktop, menus, flie managers, gnome terminal, defaults, default operations, where and how you would expect it, old school.

Debian

[Vlijmen Fileer]

Debian. But of course not just in 2014, but since it's inception.

Practical Use

[alex4u2nv]

For personal: Ubuntu seems to be the most convenient
For work: CentOS as it's a very close experience to Redhat Enterprise. This is helpful when testing deployment strategies into work environment.

Does it really matter? It's still Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but for enterprises, Linux just doesn't cut it. Solaris wins in all regards over Linux any day of the week and in every aspect.
More stable, more scalable, faster, cheaper to implement, cheaper to support, yeah it's not opensource anymore, but it's still the best UNIX OS available.

Re:who cares abt the distro? Pick one & stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares about variety.
Whenever I go to a restaurant I always order a sirloin steak with pepper sauce, fries and a Caesar salad.
I picked it when I was 14 and I'll never need anything else.

Debian

[lourd_baltimore]

DBF (Debian Boxes Forever)

The LinuxVoice Scoring is plain wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Best for beginners...Why only Ubuntu? I'd say that ALL distros are fine that have with:
- an easy installer
- a good graphical dekstop environment/ window manager, such as XFCE, KDE, Unity, Gnome...
- not too much complications with free/ non-free packages
So, Mint, Ubuntu, openSuse are fine. Maybe Fedora as well (haven't seen it for a few years).

Best looking... only Elementary? Sure, it looks nice, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. what about Linux Deepin? Or Voyager (an XFCE spin of Ubuntu)? Or what about the people who find minimalistic desktops beautiful, like an Awesome Windowmanager desktop? Besides, what has a distro got to do with the window manager? You can change those, right??

Most packages...?? Although I use archlinux myself, I would never mention them as "most packages" as many packages in the AUR are poorly maintained. I'd say, most packagaes (for most architectures) are in Debian and Gentoo.

Best performance....Slacko ? wtf? Performance depends on what services/processes/daemons are running. If the same are running, distros will perform roughly the same. And looking at RAM used is a poor metric. RAM is there for using it.

My list for 2014 would be as follows:
- best documentation: Arch
- best communities: Arch and Gentoo
- most technical advances: RedHat (-> systemd and so on, whether you like it or not); Nixos (packagement)
- best looks: Deepin Linux, Elementary, Voyager

If you want overall "winners", I'd pick winners per category:
- best for non-tech beginners: Mint, Ubuntu, openSuse
- best for beginners with a tech background: Arch, Fedora
- best for tinkerers: Gentoo, Arch, Slack
- best for state of the art: Nixos, Exherbo
- best for production: Debian, RHEL (+spinoffs), Funtoo

Re:The LinuxVoice Scoring is plain wrong

[DoomSprinkles]

I dont think you should have gotten down modded because you make a valid point about their apparent scoring system and then you give a nice opinion based input that all make good sense.

Re:The LinuxVoice Scoring is plain wrong

[CronoCloud]

- not too much complications with free/ non-free packages
So, Mint, Ubuntu, openSuse are fine. Maybe Fedora as well (haven't seen it for a few years).

Non-free is an issue with Fedora. There are stickies on the Fedora Forum directing people to RPMfusion. Sure it's an easy install...once you know about it, but new folk by definition don't. Which is why every now and then newbies show up asking how to play DVD's/mp3's etc etc.

My two cents...

[DoomSprinkles]

This is just my personal opinion and im not saying this is the correct answer. This is my answer... Best distro overall of 2014? Arch Linux. The distro's affinity for clean and clear scripts on top of the way you build your system never ceases to teach me new things all the time. Best distro for the new user of 2014? Mint. Clean and simple package management. Best distro for business servers of 2014? CentOS 7. It is very well polished, rock stable, and dead simple Windows Active Directory integration. I lub Linux =B

Mint Cinnamon

[BrendaEM]

Mint Cinnamon.

The GUI scales for 3K laptops better than Windows or Mate.

systemd

[DrYak]

It's being touted as The One True Way.

huh... no. It's just reported that it's a useful piece of code which actually solve lots of problems.
it's being adopted in lots of place because of this, even in distro that don't necessarily depend on Gnome.

Nobody is trying to force you to use it. You're free to use something else.
You'll just be missing about tons of features which are really useful and come for free with systemd.

But if you don't want it. Fine. Keep using your kludged together scripts. Or move to something else (openrc, the spiritual successor of sysvinit done in a modern way. Or anything else).

Simply accept the fact that systemd is useful enough that tons of distro are picking it up.

The problem is that, instead of just doing that (use something else), each time something is announced about the systemd project (not even necessarily the systemd daemon running as pid 1) there are tons of trolls comming and screaming "systemd cancer!" and not doing much.
Whereas the correct reaction would be just "meh.." and keep on using whatever they like. And perhaps, if they are unhappy that most of the distro are moving toward systemd, they should start a new spin of Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu based on some other alternative init system.

But no, all you here is only whining and very few actual work (like systembsd or uselessd, or adapting launchd so it can serve as systemd replacement, etc)

Then don't

[DrYak]

Systemd gives me nothing I need. So tell me again why I need it or should want it.

Then don't. Stick instead to whatever pleases you. It's not a problem per se.

But accept that lots of other people DO find systemd useful enough to be worth the switching.
Including distros that aren't entire organised around Gnome.

If you don't like this situation, either move to a distro like Gentoo where that is still an option.
Or gather enough people and create your own spin of Fedora/Debian/Ubuntu (whichever is your preferred starting point) but organised around your preferred init system (with blackjack! and hookers!)

The problem is that, instead of doing this, most of the time, you only hear trolls spouting "Systemd is cancer!" and not doing much.

Dislike Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience is very similar. I went with Arch initially, mainly because they had great documentation. I spent a good weekend installing it and configuring everything the way I wanted. Then, the first time I performed a system update, it completely broke. I could not even get my system to boot. That's when I realized that Arch's rolling release schedule was not worth the frustration. I switched to Ubuntu LTS and I have not had a single problem since.

NixOS

[Warbothong]

Whenever I tried other distros, I'd always go back to Debian in the end, since its package management seems a lot saner than most.

NixOS is refreshing, since it package/configuration management seems to be an improvement over Debian's. It's still a little rough around the edges, but perfectly usable (as long as it loads emacs, conkeror and xmonad, it's usable)

Systemd uses

[DrYak]

Few random exemple where systemd helps:

- if you look at it probably 99% of all service on linux are just about starting an executable, with a few parameters.
-- with systemd, you do exactly that: write a service file that gives the name of the executable to run. and that's it. done. much more easy to maintain
-- with sysvinit, each distro has it's own local variant of boiler code that need to be copy-pasted around, and each service needs a whole script in /etc/init.d.
Whole script with duplicated lines vs simple text file.

- become a daemon requires some work.
-- either the developper must do a whole dance inside the code (double fork, sanitizing environment like closing descriptors, etc.)
-- or you need to take care of it from the outside (startproc, etc.)
systemd (like also daemontools and several other such "successors of sysvinit") can automatically take care of that. just run the soft in immediate mode, systemd takes care of the daemonisation/sanitization. In fact you can easily run as a service things like scripts.
So you want to have a daemon that is basically just a gawk 1 liner ? feel free.

automatic handling of modern kernel features. Cgroups, brokering capabilities, etc. Classical sysvinit has no concept of these (of course, they didn't exist back then).
- You would need either more kludge in you init.d scripts
- or use a modern system that can take care of that. systemd is one of them.

very light-weight container creation: other parts of systemd take care of state-less systems (basically you only need /usr for a system to work, /etc and /var can be automatically rebuilt with default settings from /usr if they are empty), various daemons under the systemd project can take care of the basic initialisation step (you don't need a full fledged dhcp server and client/pair compatible with every possible corner situation and supporting every option under the sun when all you need is just quickly hand out an IP to a LXC container - similarily to how one would use dnsmasq, systemd has its own micro dhcp implementation).
that makes possible to use LXC-style container (and thus much higher level of isolation) for anything that you don't trust and would like to run in its own container.
You don't trust skype, specially since microsoft did take it over? LXC container combined with SELinux and AppArmor (which LXC supports) would be a way to isolate it. Systemd (not the pid1 daemon, the whole project) is a project that can help generating such containers on the fly without any administrative intervention nor any configuration required.

You might not need these. And you're free to stick to old sysvinit if you want. Or at least move to a more modern spiritual successor of this (openrc)
(Gentoo give you choice of system. Or you could gather people and start "Rubuntu, an openRC spin of Ubuntu")

Or you might want these features. And systemd is then a nice single stop for all this plus more. (Though you could find similar daemon giving similar functions spread over 20 different projects).

It's a bit like the situation with TeX (nice single stop to get a ton of filters for text processing and typesetting) Ghostscript (printing) Pnmtools or ImageMagick (single suite of tighly integrated image filters/processing), etc.
Systemd is a similar suite containing all the necessary building blocks for taking care of system initialisation/process starting, etc.

Systemd has tons of useful funtionality, and thus lots of distribution decided to pick that one up as an openrc successor.
(Including distributions not depending on gnome)

Re:Systemd uses

[Anonymous Coward]

And now a random example where systemd doesn't help:
- when you want to throw your computer out of the window because, although you have 15 years of professional experience with Linux, BSD, AND AIX, you cannot get the goddamn thing to boot your system within 5 minutes. Where this would be easy to debug with init, but with systemd it's impossible to figure out what process or device is causing the trouble because all crap is started/waiting in parallel and there's no way to login in in the background to see what is going on in the system.

(It's probably luks that makes the I/O slow. But there's no way to prove it.)

Re:Systemd uses

[TangoMargarine]

Being able to successfully boot your machine tends to be important to being productive.

Re:Systemd uses

[Anonymous Coward]

15 years of professional experience with Linux, BSD, AND AIX, you cannot get the goddamn thing to boot your system within 5 minutes

With 15 years of experience you cant get a system to boot?

Re:Systemd uses

[ChrisMaple]

For example, automatic update screws up a config file necessary for the GUI to work, and screws it up so badly that the system crashes. systemd starts part of the graphical services before login (at least that's my impression, I could be wrong.) This was never a problem with sysvinit.

With sysvinit, it's easy to start at runlevel 3 always, then type startx to get the GUI.

Re:Systemd uses

[Zeromous]

The assumption that I am free to choose what platform I support is bonkers. I am asking to choose the init system. I make multiplatform software. I need to support every distro, and it has fractured in to SysV and SysD. It will fracture again further in the future. Locking in is stupid stupid stupid and anti-UX

Re:Systemd uses

[Zeromous]

Thank you, this is my every day as systemd's birth has been painful to say the least.

OpenBSD bitches!

[pigiron]

nt

SYSTEMD

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

B3ST! It's JUST LYK WynD0z3

Best distro

[horza]

I would say the winners of 2013 would have been Mint and Ubuntu Unity. The former kept up its head of steam from the previous year, and the latter became so polished it was winning over a lots of haters.

In 2014 Unity got shotgunned by insisting on sticking spyware in the desktop by default and veering towards mobile. Definitely the big losers of 2014. KDE came up with their latest distro based on the new QT but lack of polish on the desktop meant they didn't get much traction.

Gnome desktop has probably made the most progress, but screwed themselves by being the best on minority distro Slackware and the most popular distro Ubuntu running an old buggy version.

So I would say the winner would be Mint due to being the only one not to fuck up.

Phillip.

Systemd distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

Text logs which don't become corrupted, which you can read with less and on which you can grep are obsolete: https://www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=64116
Apache is obsolete: http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-journal-gatewayd.service.html
Making sense of the Linux distro you're used to is obsolete, (-mother-) systemd knows better.
Let us add java and adobe flash to systemd. Banish the shells, all you need is the mouse!
Sit back and relax while systemd takes control of your Linux distro.
Let us all bow down to our beloved leader, master of PID 1!
All hail systemd!

Debian

[Trogre]

Debian was going to be my choice for delivering a consistently stable , if not bleeding-edge, operating system.

Two brain-dead decisions this year have made me question their overall direction. Those decisions are somewhat inter-related, and are the following, in order of most to least disruptive:
The move to systemd as the operating, sorry, init system.
The move to GNOME3 as the default desktop

Debian flavoured MINT

[Brad_McBad]

No bullshit, just what i need.

SliTaz

[Bent Spoke]

How good you a distribution is for you really depends upon what you want to do with it. In my case, I'm becoming increasingly fed-up with distro-bloat. They all seem to take 2.5 Gig of disk space, have big memory footprints, are slow to boot, enslave you to their repos, and are built on bloat-ware like pulse audio and systemd.

In the case of SliTaz:
  - The ISO boot image is 36Meg.
  - A bootable ISO with the complete packages is available (3 Gig).
  - After installing in VirtualBox, +gcc, +guest-additions disk usage is under 500 Meg.

As I am increasingly interested in running my OS's under VM's, efficient resource usage trumps everything. (eg. I don't need man pages as they're on the net).

Android

[Anonymous Coward]

it's clearly the best. it's the one with Angry Birds.

It will be...

[Duncan J Murray]

ubuntu-mate.

There's a reason ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 were seen as high points of the ubuntu story. I've been using unity, gnome 3 and crunchbang since then, and was worried that returning to a gnome 2 style interface would be like trying to recreate a particularly great drunken night out when you were a student - best left as a good memory. My worries were unfounded. Ubuntu-mate is fast, effective, efficient and looks great. I don't find I miss the extra gimmicks unity and gnome 3 have, and I appreciate the well-developed window and workspace management, file manager, even the simple places menu and add launcher functionailty with kupfer.

LXDE

[NewYork]

I'm happy with LXDE

Debian Stable

[mrflash818]

I use it. I recommend it. It gets my vote.

OpenWRT

[Anonymous Coward]

'nuf said

Re: Which Religion is Best?

[dl_sledding]

Excellent response.