Favorite Linux Distributions

Actually no. It was the default Ubuntu Unity load. I didn't even have any tweak tools loaded, and I only changed a few things in the standard control panel. It worked for a while (several months), but then I got an update that caused Compiz to freeze on occasion. I looked it up, and there was a bug report already filed for it under 12.04. Ubuntu didn't bother fixing it until the next Ubuntu release, and they never bothered to roll the fix back even though 12.04 was a LTS release and supposed to be supported until 2017.

 

On 12.04? Oh sorry... mine wasn't, it was based on Ubuntu Studio, with added KXStudio and MATE desktop, so I could well have been seeing something different.

That must have been my last "Ubuntu" before going for Mint. I always keep the previous install (In fact, I had them back to 10.04 before a recent clear out) and fired it up. I'd forgotten that it was not at all vanilla Ubuntu. Nothing like it!

 

I have Lubuntu 14.04 LTS on my second laptop. After W10 I had to make some changes.

I will go more open source in the future.

 

So while I love the look and feel of elementary, I started encountering periodic system errors and decided to try something with a reputation for greater stability.

Mint (cinnamon) is pretty slick! Had a helluva time getting grub and windows boot loader to play nicely this time around. Eventually it dawned on me that I could just pull the power on my windows drives, do a standalone mint install, set the bios to boot off the mint drive, plug the windows drives back in and then run grub update. Life is good again.

As an aside, what do you all use for ripping flacs in linux? I'm accustomed to eac and kinda hoping for something with a gui.

 

Mint is probably a bit more stable, so you should have an enhanced experience. Since this thread is about Linux Distributions, I would probably recommend starting a thread about Linux CD ripping specifically. Nonetheless, there are several apps that can be used for CD ripping with a GUI if that is required, but the default CD player application that comes with my distribution does provide a way to extract specific tracks. The default CD burner software for Gnome is typically Brasero I believe but will typically only rip the entire CD. Having said that, to replicate much of the EAC functionality without actually using a back end database validation such as EAC can use, I typically use an old school method in the CLI by using an app called cdparanoia, which was developed by the same person that invented the FLAC file format.

 

I always say it is 100% stable, never crashes or freezes, blah blah. But you know what happens when one always says something...

The system froze on me twice yesterday! But, honest, this is, for me, just about unheard of, and I rate Ubuntu/Mint as thousands of percents more crash-free than any Windows up to an including XP, where my experience stopped.

(The problem occurred when copying Gbs of data from one USB hdd, which I suspect to be failing, to another)

(and yeah! My computer was dead two days ago. I really suspected expensive MB/CPU problems, but an engineer traced the cause to a flat CMOS battery! I've given up doing my own hardware trouble-shooting; the guys who do it all day, every day, are sooo much better at it!)

 

This is an interesting article: http://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/878620-the-best-linux-distros-of-2016

 

Yes, very interesting. If I still felt like a techie, I'd certainly go for Arch.

Just what I would have wanted years ago. Even more years ago, I used to take the Unix Man pages for bedtime reading (yes, it was even on paper then!). But now... not so much.

I've found answers to problems on non-Arch systems in there. Very thorough, very complete. Somewhat in the spirit of that old Unix system documentation, which they took as much care over as they did coding the stuff.

 

Besides articles which can be useful, I also use www.distrowatch.com. It may not be the most scientific way to determine Linux distribution popularity, but its the only metric available and it does provides an idea if your distribution may be too obscure. There is a ton of Linux distributions. In fact, it truly amazes me the sheer number considering that Linux on the desktop only comprises of perhaps 1-2% market share. Linux has a big installation base of RHEL, CentOS, SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, and etc. on servers. Nonetheless, I do try to pick a distribution that is popular to a point so that you can find assistance if something doesn't work. Either someone knows how to fix it and/or a bug can be filed. If the distribution is too small, the problem might not be resolved or I have seen some of the smaller ones just disappear because of a lack of interest.

 

any 'puter nerds want to throw me a mouse? http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2311419

i bought this laptop 2 years ago with W8. upgraded to W8.1, upgraded to W10...and then everything went to shit. i couldn't even get any Linux distros stable - everything was crashing on me. as a last ditch effort i scrubbed the HDD with DBAN and now finally have a stable OS working. i'm guessing there were hidden partition components and/or a corrupted HDD from the numerous Windows upgrades causing me grief. unfortunately i can't get my wifi to gel now. i'm really digging Mate, although i have played around with elementary and Mint. Deadbeef>Doodlebug>Gungnir>Klone>HD600 sounds awesome.

 

The coolest thing I have found about Arch is that it lets you be as techie or non-techie as you want. You could manually compile your own packages, or use something like Yaourt to easily search all the repositories and install whatever you want without having any real knowledge. All you really have to do is know enough to decide what you want on your computer. You can choose to use a full desktop environment with all your utilities pre-packaged together just like a typical distro. At that point I'm not sure you are getting much advantage by choosing Arch over any other distro unless you have very particular preferences.

I know that article mentioned Lubuntu for old computers. I have Arch on my 10 year old laptop using just a window manager and it is way faster than Lubuntu was. I have been messing around using X without a window manager as well to be even more minimal. Its not like you are going to accomplish much if you have CPU intensive tasks on an old computer, but for basic things like browsing the web etc. it works fine.

 

I'm an Ubuntu with Unity guy, myself.

I went 'round and 'round with alternate DEs and distros. I used XFCE as my daily driver for a while, #! (OpenBox) for a while, Elementary for about half a year, and tried out a Gnome 3 workflow. In the end, I've defaulted to the no-hassle Unity setup back in stock Ubuntu. With a few tweaks, the keyboard shortcuts work how I expect and the workflow is 95% of what I'd heavily tweak it into with some other distros.

 

Fedora (modified Vortexbox) for music/file server, Mint on a USB key for live linux for when I need to get little things done, FreeBSD for web servers, and Win7 for most day to day stuff as much of the software I use is Windows only.

When I was younger, this appealed to me. Now I just want tools that work.

 

Sometimes it happens that there is some thing you really want, if not actually need, and the only choice is downloading the source and compiling it yourself. When the whole configure-make-make.install thing goes smoothly, it is just as easy as installing a standard package. One certainly never needs to read a line of code. However, when it doesn't, and one has to find what library is needed, install (maybe even compile) that library... and then another... and then another... there is only so far I'm prepared (or able) to go down that road and I soon give up.

Somewhat off-topic, but this week was hard-disk-failure week. Three cheers for Clonezilla!

But I now cannot boot any form of Windows. That could probably be fixed, but it is not worth my while to do so. The final microsoft thread got broken. Windows Free Zone! (ok, ok... except for XP Solitaire, running under Wine )

 

finally got my wifi card working. configured my dual band router with different SSID names for 2.4G and 5GHz, and replaced Network Manager with Wicd. i've never had a faster and lighter computer. my 8yr old Dell desktop running W7 is probably going to be replaced soon and i need to decide if i want to run Windows again.

 

If it is a case of want, rather than need, I suggest you'd be surprised by how little you'll miss it.

If you have to work, then things may be different. I don't, very often, but when the time comes that I have to fire up Libre Office, then I usually have less hair at the end of the day. Biggest mistake ever: base the thing on MS Office, but make it infinitely worse!

 

I use Debian as my OS for desktop, laptop, server (audio,video,ssh,torrent,dictionary,upnp,probably some other stuff I forget now) and also to run a couple of old Eee PCs each as a UPnP renderer and a Pulse Audio output for the audio server. My router runs another Linux based OS, OpenWRT.

My desktop is an ex-corporate Dell so it has a Dell OEM SLP license for Win 7 Pro so I retain one HDD with Win 7 Pro installed. My laptop is an Asus Eee PC 1011PX which shipped with Windows 7 Starter (a fairly horrible 32-bit version of Win 7). It now runs Debian primarily but I took advantage of the Windows 10 upgrade scheme to convert the Win 7 Starter to Win 10 32-bit. Then I did a clean install of Win 10 64-bit and the license key was validated. I was surprised to find that Win 10 can occasionally be unresponsive and laggy even when installed on a decent quality SSD.

Stuff I use Windows for:

Amazon Kindle for PC (so I can break the DRM with a Calibre plug-in and read my own purchased books in FBReader on my Android devices)

Adobe Digital Editions - as above, but for books I bought from Google Play.

Once in a blue moon I boot Win 7 on my desktop so I can play old skool games like Call of Duty and Far Cry (yes, the originals). Today was the first time this year in fact. I think people into games are mostly better off with Windows just for choice of games.

I occasionally use Libre Office and it seems OK to me but I don't do anything complex with it. My most resource intensive uses for my PCs are graphics editing (Gimp) and audio + video conversion (ffmpeg) and I am more than happy with the performance of 64-bit Debian. Win 7 on my Core i3 +8GB RAM desktop is also fine but I have no reason to use it except for gaming (I use a VirtualBox Windows 7 VM under Debian for my ebook conversions). Windows of any flavour is just frustrating on the Eee PC (Atom N570 dual core+hyperthreading, 2GB RAM, Sandisk SSD) whereas Debian 64-bit is very decent on it.

I think unless a person absolutely needs/wants some application that only runs on Windows then most difficulties/frustrations with Linux based stuff are essentially about familiarity and experience. It does take time to switch to different paradigm and that includes learning a lot more than just those new sequences or procedures necessary to accomplish tasks.

 

Ahhh... you have a lot more Linux in your life than I do. I see you like your operating systems like your tea: good and strong.

 

On my ancient Dell Inspiron desktop with 1GMHz CPU/4G RAM, I've been playing around with XFCE distros on a dedicated HDD. Unity and KDE are total fail. I really like Xubuntu. After disabling Light-Lock, it's been flawless, and mucho better than W7. I've been playing around with TahrPup as well - lightening quick, but the GUI is a bit cheesy.