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:FreeBSD

[uvajed_ekil]

FreeBSD is not Linux though.

Would this not be better asked as a poll?

[hermitdev]

Enough said in the subject.

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

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?

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: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 ...

[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

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.