Best Linux Distribution (linuxjournal.com)

Linux Journal: We started things off with Best Linux Distribution, and nearly 10,000 readers voted. The winner was Debian, with many commenting "As for servers, Debian is still the best" or similar. One to watch that is rising in the polls is Manjaro (7 percent), which is independently based on the Arch Linux. Manjaro is a favorite for Linux newcomers and is known for its user-friendliness and accessibility. And, now for the top three LJ winners: Debian (33 percent), openSUSE (12 percent), and Fedora (11 percent).

Comments

Re:Umm.

[XanC]

https://www.linuxjournal.com/c...

Best Linux Distribution?

[Freischutz]

Best Linux Distribution?

Well, that's one way to start a, cough, cough *debate* ... now where did I leave my flame resistant suit?

Re:Best Linux Distribution?

[Z00L00K]

Slackware?

Re:Best Linux Distribution?

[jmccue]

I do not know why this is funny, but since we are doing meaningless polls, Slackware was rated the best server in LQ for 2018:

https://www.linuxquestions.org...

Best for what?

[sqorbit]

It's like asking what the best car is? Are you trying to transport 8 people, or 5 sheets of drywall? Asking what the best linux distro is silly and only adds to the confusion for those not familiar with linux. Personally I'm a huge fan of Debian and it's my go to unless I need some speciality distro. If someone asked me for a recommendation of install Linux for the first time they've ever done it on a laptop, Debian might not be my answer. I understand the need for Top 10 lists, and ranking systems in our lives. It makes for the best click bait. Best linux distro is just something not needed. One of the best things about Linux is the distro's can be drastically different and fit different needs. Why do we need to try to narrow it down to one?

Re:Best for what?

[dmbasso]

I helped my mother (74 years old at the time) install Debian in her new computer, through a voice-only call. I was surprised how easy it is to do it nowadays.

Too complicated

[Master5000]

Just use Windows. Choice sucks for the average user. Preinstalled is the way to go. People have no idea there is a difference between hardware and software and that you can choose to install your OS. Microsoft understood this. Why can't Linux world understand that?

Used slackware for 8+ years...and then Mint

[MindPrison]

...After Mint I never looked back.

Windows 10 gives me hurdles of issues.

Mint Linux? Works, and works - and works. Love it.

Re:Used slackware for 8+ years...and then Mint

[Major_Disorder]

Mint on the desktop. Debian on the server. Makes life easy.
They are alike enough that you don't need to relearn every time you need to do something, but philosophically they are different in ways that make sense.
Linux Mint (cinnamon) installs basically all the software you will need for a desktop, this gets you up and running quickly and easily.
On the other hand Debian installs just about nothing then you add the features and services you need. Making for a more secure install out of the box.

This is a winning combination in my book. I am even starting to get used to systemd.

Re:Used slackware for 8+ years...and then Mint

[Frederic54]

Same, started with Mint 13 or something, now at 17.3 with Xfce, I like it, it just works, everything works, nvidia GPU, wifi, BT, sound, etc

Re:Used slackware for 8+ years...and then Mint

[Major_Disorder]

You can install the Windows subsystem for Linux.

You can wack yourself over the head with a 2x4 as well, but a discussion of the merits of 2x4 wacking, does not belong in this thread either.

Re:Used slackware for 8+ years...and then Mint

[MindPrison]

Windows 10 isn't so bad actually.

But the thing is - Mint never let me down. I use Win 10 at work, and I even have a win 10 partition on a separate drive...which does get bluescreened once in a blue moon, but Mint? Never happens. I can turn Mint on every night, and it never fails me - ever!

I'm a pragmatic person at my age now, I'm in my 50's. I remember my days compiling Slack to my preferences, and not to forget ...lazing off with Mandrake and Red Hat linux, ah - those where the days. But Mint (Ubuntu essentially) has won me over, because I'm now too old for "shit that don't work". I just wanna come home, be comfortable, watch my shitty netflix series, play my steam games...and surf my silly youtube videos and whatnot...Arduino comes to mind (yes I use that....semi daily)

The thing is - Mint made everything work out of the box, no permission shit, no endless nerding around like I was 20 again... ...And still - it works SOOOO much better than any windows OS I remember messing around with for the last 25+ years.

Thanks Mint + Ubuntu + Linux people for your tireless efforts, you truly are the kings amongst men.

Re:Used slackware for 8+ years...and then Mint

[gfxguy]

And? My development over the years has gone from IRIX to Mac to Linux to Windows. The graphics software I use is Windows only, but I write web services for data integration - they run on Linux, but my local development environment runs under WSL so that I don't need to be connected to work in order to work on it - it's fully functional and recently, while on a remote operation, I just ran my web services from it so that I could continue working in Windows. I had zero problems and was very impressed. I had the Linux partition all up to date with my latest code just in case, but didn't need it. I've been a big MS detractor since before most slashdotters were born (I was in college during the DRDOS escapades), but when something works, it works.

Re:Umm.

[drafalski]

Honestly no link is needed - the summary is about all there is. It is a website poll result. No discussion or information. No real reason to look.

I can't wait to see linux journal's article on whatever slashdot's current poll is next week!

Alpine

[DaMattster]

My favorite is Alpine because it is systemd-free, light-weight, and security-focused.

Re:Alpine

[Stormy Dragon]

systemd moves various services that were previously provided by applications instead of the OS into the OS itself. This has various advantages and disadvantages vs. more traditional unix OS design.

In addition to people who don't like it for rational reasons, there is also a bunch of more militant OSS types are convinced this is part of a giant "flouride is turning us into commies" style global conspiracy, which is where most of the constant arguing comes from.

Re:Alpine

[mark-t]

http://without-systemd.org/wik...">Too many reasons.

Re:Alpine

[PPH]

Linux and in fact all Unixes are built around the philosophy of having a bunch of simple tools. Each one doing its specific job well. systemd inherited the Windows philosophy of being a hairball that tries to do everything.

Re:Alpine

[slack_justyb]

Quick but trying to be detailed explain of systemd.

The technical So systemd is an init for some Linux systems. When Linux or for that matter any UNIX like OS is done loading the kernel into memory (RAM), as it's last step it calls a program called "init". Typically this program is in the /sbin folder. There's tons of different init systems that have been written for all kinds of different *nix OSes. Your most basic init would need to call a program called "agetty" which basically loads a terminal for you to actually login. However, to have an actually usable system, your init needs to mount any filesystems that haven't been mounted (typically the root filesystem, the one containing the /sbin folder among other things, is mounted by an earlier phase called the ramdisk), start any services (like MySQL or whatever), and get your IP address/set it statically. That should give you an idea of what init "does".

Of course it should be obvious from this that there is a "this must start first before this" nature to this. Like you might need an IP address before you start up a web server. Each init defines different ways of specifying that order. Additionally, an init doesn't actually start these things up, it calls a program that does it. So init itself doesn't get you an IP address, it just calls the dhcp-client program and that program gets your IP address. Of course, calling these things one after the other is kind of slow, after your IP address is set, your MySQL starts up, and then your web server, and then this, and then that, and then finally agetty is started for a login. For some that's not their thing, but whatever, you can get the idea there.

Of course when you have an order in which things happen, you also have an order of things for when something changes. Got a new IP address? Might need to update your servers, etc... Also when you stop a service you might need to notify others that it's going down. MySQL stopping? Might need to notify the web server as well. All of this and we haven't even gotten to what happens when you plug in a USB device.

systemd tries to address a lot of this by making what was a lot of different programs, still a lot of different programs, but a lot of different programs that know about systemd (aka having hooks into systemd). These hooks into systemd allow programs to notify the init program, which is a lot more advance than just calling scripts, to pass messages between programs. So if your program wants to play nice with systemd, it needs to be made systemd aware. This is the big things that has a lot of folks up in arms. So you modify your program to use systemd and then the systemd folks change something and now you have to change your program to match. This is called tightly coupled and in the past it was discouraged in *nix communities. The upside of being systemd aware is that you'll receive messages via dbus (it's a type of communications channel that allows one program to talk to another program, another way of doing this might have been internet sockets which is what you use when talking to a web server, or you might use UNIX sockets which looks a lot like internet sockets but happens within the kernel, there's also signals which are the most basic unit of interprocess communication (IPC), or a named pipe, etc... all of these have pros and cons I won't go into.) At any rate, you receive messages via dbus and those are timely and have a wealth of information. So if your program relies on there being an IP address of some sorts, you can actually ask systemd if you have one and to notify you when you do get one. Again, the downside of this is you're now at the mercy of systemd to not ever change how you go about doing that. Additionally, the systemd folk have been making a lot of commonly used programs "systemd aware", which means those core programs now rely on systemd. GNOME uses logind, to get you logged in, track your seat on the system, etc... logind is systemd aware, which means

Mint for me as well

[HalAtWork]

An interface that never changes? Yes please.

WHAT? No Gentoo???

[halivar]

I guess I'll have to manually compile my own list...

/duck
/run

Best for what?

[bobstreo]

It all depends on what I'm trying to do with it.

Desktop, Laptop, Server, Router, DVR, NAS, Phone, IOT device?

Different strokes for different folks

[raymorris]

I don't see much to argue about. Different uses and different users have different needs and preferences. As sqorbit said, the question itself is silly. Like asking "what vehicle is best?" - kinda depends on whether you want to haul 10,000 pounds of cargo, race a slalom, or impress your date. Sometimes a semi truck is the right thing for the job, sometimes a motorcycle is.

I run different distributions for different roles, and other people will prefer other distros for those same roles because they have different preferences. For example my "default" distribution for general computing is CentOS. One reason I choose CentOS is simply because it's the one I'm most familiar with, having used that lineage for 15 years under various names. Someone else might choose Debian or Ubuntu for the same reason - it's the one they know best.

A major difference to consider for desktop / laptop use is whether you prefer cutting edge new features or stability and reliability. In the Redhat / CentOS realm, Fedora is cutting edge, Redhat / CentOS is stable. Neither is right or wrong, better or worse, it just depends on what you want. So instead of spending time trying to find "the best", spend that time asking "what are my needs and which fits my needs best?"

Ill-defined question. "Best for what purpose".

[ron_ivi]

The best Linux for

• datacenter nework switches is probably Microsoft's SONiC distro.
• cell phones is (god I hope it's not Android - but it's certainly not SONiC or Debian either.
• servers running open source software is almost certainly Debian.
• servers running closed source software (Oracle, etc) is probably Red Hat or some Canonical offering.
• my laptop - Debian.

Linux is in far too many places for "a" "best" distro.

But it's not hard to pick candidates for the best for specific purposes.

Best at what?

[jd]

Debian is a pessimized distribution. It's compiled for the worst possible case. It has a filesystem layout guaranteed to cause conflicts between packages and they've not bothered to resolve those except where it's "noticeable". The default disk layout is sub-optimal. It puts ideology over getting anything done.

I'm not impressed by the others, either.

Frankly, I'm horrified by the state of Linux distributions. That people voted Debian up is not a surprise, however, because nobody expects the best from their computers any more. I used to run three MUDs on a 16 MHz 386SX, in addition to a mail server, DNS server, modem pool and an instance of X. I could compile GateD or Perl in the background without interfering with anyone's work. Did it do less? Well, it had just as many fonts in LaTeX, so I could still do all the DTP that Libre Office can do. Admittedly, I couldn't WYSIWYG it but nobody does that with LaTeX anyway and anyone who does it for regular documents is paying far too much attention to presentation and not enough to content.

(I forget where I saw the article on PowerPoint, but it argued that this emphasis on presentation was endangering R&D, promoting really bad ideas over much better ones, and was responsible for endangering the modern economy and several western democracies. Ok, maybe they overstated the threat to the economy, since you have to have one to endanger.)

Modern Linux is not as fast because of poor design choices by distros. We have no Linux Desktop because of even worse design choices by distros.

https://itvision.altervista.or...

These problems are THEIR fault (and the fault of OSDL's closed-door meetings with vendors). Yes, in almost every respect, Windows is worse. But Windows has mindshare and enough money to afford to be worse. Microsoft should have been broken up in 1998 when it was ordered to do so by the courts, but the appeals court reversed that - probably under government pressure - and we have to live with the fact that we're competing against Sauron.

And, yes, GET OFF MY LAWN!

Whatever magic Mint uses

[future assassin]

It's working. Suse got me off Windows back in 2009 then I tried Mint a year later and been using it since and have had minimal hw/sw issues.

Not a pro. But Deb's da best, no contest

[cloud.pt]

I'm sharing my opinion: I think Debian is still king because of mostly 3 key areas it shines: simplicity, choice and community support.

Ubuntu thrived for some years on Deb's back, as it brought its simplicity front and center, all wrapped up in tried and true UI choices with Gnome (2) and Xorg (eventually birthing its own now defunct attempts at GUI - Unity, and dserver - MIR), and they spiced it up by pulling a RedHat on the support part: "hey, we got all the good things of Debian 6 months later, bicuzz pro QA and commercial level polish yadayada". Choice was, barely, still there, through different flavoured ISOs ranging from GUI preference to architectures and whatnot, and naming each individually for branding purposes, something typical from consumer-grade software.

It was well and good, until QA and polish stopped losing focus to marketing and stupid endeavours like dethroning Android or the tablet "market".

Like many, I was the kind who believed [insert letter]Ubuntu-like flavouring was essential in a distro. But now, in all honesty, I believe there are exactly 3 separations a distro really, truly needs - to GUI or not to GUI (Desktop vs server/headless), net-install vs 5 DVDs with all the internet in 'em bicuzz Africa and pacific Islands; and obviously, if you can live without compiling (most of us do), architecture. Release-wise, there should still be LTS, stable and, well, straight-from-the-chunk, but those are a matter of politics involved and not exactly "static" choices, such as the afforementioned architecture, server/desktop-bound or www-availability. Debian follows all these principles, and packs each flavour with exactly what they need.

The thing Debian makes best though is not their choice of flavouring, but the way they pass control onto you, the user. From the simply amazing installer:- you want a GUI? Pick from this not-so-verbose, yet essential list. You wanna continue this installation from ssh? Kewl, install ssh now, set up basic drivers, network and creds, and you're good to go. Do you want that graphical install instead? Maybe you want the ncurses one bicuzz you fancy them Nvidia GPUs which won't work until you can wget them from closedsource.nvidiacorp.bad.org ? Install gparted for all-you-can-eat partition choice. I'm not even getting on the REALLY advanced stuff.

Systemd, grub, dpkg, so straightforward, no complications. Aptitude and that god-send APT. Debian has the tools to get everyone NOT thinking too hard on stuff like dependency management, but still make an effort, ever feeling in control if need be. Updating, and UPGRADING are a breeze, both for individual packages and the distribution itself. Unnatended, or even hot upgrades work as intended and crash much less than most others - something only achieved with a very deep level of organization on the core development. Migrations to new releases are easy. Migrations to new machines are feasible without dedicated backup tools (although they are great if you can get them configured properly), and even when you have a problem, it's usually recoverable with a Google search or 2.

And the thing I love most about Debian, pretty much the same thing that makes me still love Windows: it doesn't fail on 95% the hardware people want to get it working. To y'all OS developers out there - packaging your distributions with the "bare minimum" of drivers is NOT that great a feature when you want your software to have the support a stable OS deserves (*cough* Archlinux*cough) - if you don't have a community large enough ABLE TO BOOT your OS effortlessly, there won't be a community to WANT to give back, and will end up with LACKING community support - read: death sentence in FOSS (well, unless you're RedHat).

It's that simply really. If a critical mass doesn't get to even install your OS successfully, you won't ever get the traction you need for it to be mainstream. But hey, maybe that's not what you want...

Getouttahere!

no love for the enthusiasts.

[nimbius]

Ive noticed this poll does not take into account Linux enthusiast community activity and for that im truly offended. How can you enjoy a debian or fedora properly if you've never taken the time to learn and appreciate the minutia of linux?

My personal setup --which i know slashdotters will find more than substantial in its refinement-- is a punch-card copy of Linux from Scratch operating on a 1986 Teddy Ruxpin with a custom 4.15 kernel, emulating the disk elevators from the 2.2 kernel, and of course operating within a Docker/Rancher/Kubernetes/Mom's spaghetti abstraction layer. Dont worry, I'm always keen to run the Ruby/node.js implementation of this kernel for mission critical applications such as my custom Teddy Ruxpin compiled drivers for the Ge Signa HD magnetic resonance imaging machine. Mouse support can be found in my Arduino/openRISC implementation using a small shopping cart packed with old Tamagochi's. as one would typically come to expect for performance, they run Go drivers sandboxed in a Rust framework. Teddy Ruxpin is, without a doubt, the only hardware true Linux fans should be using in 2018

SCO

[bigdady92]

Every other distro is illegal.

Let me put in a good word for Devuan

[shoor]

No systemd and it does all the things I want. In particular, it let's me run me-tv, which doesn't run well on ubuntu because of something to do with gui libraries. (Each side blames the other last I checked, which I admit was quite awhile ago.) Before Devuan, I had to run me-tv on Linux Mint, which is a very good distro (if you're comfortable with systemd, which I'm not.)

best?

[ohgary]

This is an easy question. People make it way to complex. The best Linux is the one you like.

Tried out something new on my newest Laptop ...

[Qbertino]

I got meself a refurbished ThinkPad X220 for college and portable web development, pimped it out with 8GB RAM and a 250GB SSD and thought I'd try something new off the beaten Debian/Ubuntu track.
Manjaro i3 seemed like a nice candidate. And sure enough, it holds up nicely. Rolling updates (manjaro is arch based) and i3 is a very neat tiling WM that's really fast and nice and easy to configure. The manjaro i3 defaults are nice as is the turquoise on dark-grey design. Technical but still modern and sleek.

Manjaro is the new kid on the block and might just be yet another passing distro-fad but for now it holds up and I'm enjoying it. yaourt is a CLI tool for installing non-standard packages and so far everything I've needed could be found on AUR.

Bottom line: Wanna try something new with i3 as default? Yours truly recommends Manjaro i3. Give it a shot,

The best linux...

[Your Average Joe]

It might be Mac OS X... Well if not that lets see how well it does what Mac OS X does:

1) easy way from the startup disk/usb drive create a Mirror system(all partitions)
2) easy way from the startup disk to install to a SSD/HD accelerated system
3) easy way to get WIFI working
4) easy way to get accelerated 2d/3d graphics working as good as Windows 10
5) easy way to boot the thing from UEFI
6) easy way to get chrome/Firefox to work
7) easy way to get a known/modern Antivirus to work

I am telling you the linux community is spinning it's wheels bitching about systemd/initd, iptables/firewalld, X/MIR and others when they should get the shit they have to work. VDI on VMware with windows is cake, remote usb works, remote 3d accelerated graphics, sound from the VM to the end station, linked clones and non persistent images. Doing it with Linux is a pain in the ass if not impossible.

For servers centOS with Webmin makes configuring any UNIX/Linux machine the same or VERY similar. Webmin supports as tier 1 OSes Solaris, BSD and RedHat/CentOS.

I like the fact that the year of the Linux desktop will be never. I am pleased to see Android on +2 billion devices. At one time in the win16/32 world you could never get a developer to look at any OS, they would say Windows outnumbers everything else 100 to 1. Now us Linux guys get to tell the Windows Developers that Android outnumbers Windows 100 to 1 and they better start learning Linux and Android soon...