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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.
It's so close, can you feel it? https://www.freebsd.org/where.html
Minimal install footprint meaning no bloat. Install only what you choose plus no systemd bullshit.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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.
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Enough said in the subject.
Clean, light, beautiful, fast.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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
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?
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.)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
"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.
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They do seem to like Arch an awful lot, but their case is less than compelling.
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"Which Religion is Best?" ...sound familiar?
No. Please explain. (Or, even better, don't.)
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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.
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.
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...
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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".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
For me it is only those that are not planning to. The others will be screwed in the not too distant future.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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?"
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.
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.
Linux distribution? I'd go with Cyanogenmod.
Beautiful desktop on a great OS. I wiped my windows 8 laptop and put the beta on it...very nice.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
it sucks beta it and fix it and then foist it on the rest of the world.
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
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
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.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
FreeBSD would be some old world Lutherans preaching minimalism and Linux would be some crazy snake-handling baptist that does astrology on the side
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
n/t
lucm, indeed.
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 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!)
Ubuntu server with xfce works well for me.
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
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.
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.
I tend to mess around with them so much that it doesn't really seem to matter with which one I started anyway.
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.
I think there is value in learning how other distros do stuff. It teaches you to not make certain assumptions.
Systemd gives me nothing I need. So tell me again why I need it or should want it.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
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.
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.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
You honestly do sound like an angry neckbeard. You might want to get some therapy or something. That rage isn't helpful.
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.
- chrish
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.
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.
-Alex. http://bit.ly/1iVPtfA
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!"
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
DBF (Debian Boxes Forever)
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
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.
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.
The GUI scales for 3K laptops better than Windows or Mate.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
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)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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)
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. /etc/init.d.
-- 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
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)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
nt
B3ST! It's JUST LYK WynD0z3
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
Property for sale in Nice, France
"Those who do not know UNIX are doomed to reimplement it, poorly."
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
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.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
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?
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
> 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.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
No bullshit, just what i need.
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).
it's clearly the best. it's the one with Angry Birds.
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.
I use it. I recommend it. It gets my vote.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Excellent response.