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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.
Enough said in the subject.
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?
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.
You are doing it wrong. Slackware isn't for gurus, it makes them.
See that "Preview" button?
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.
Linux distribution? I'd go with Cyanogenmod.