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

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

[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

[DavidCBillen]

Until you want to do a distribution upgrade :(

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:FreeBSD

[uvajed_ekil]

FreeBSD is not Linux though.

Would this not be better asked as a poll?

[hermitdev]

Enough said in the subject.

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.

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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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.

[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:Slackware

[Orgasmatron]

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

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 ...

[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.

Cyanogenmod

[the_humeister]

Linux distribution? I'd go with Cyanogenmod.

Debian

[Randle_Revar]

Debian

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: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...

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: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.

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)