DEV Community

Choosing a Linux distro

George on August 17, 2018

Recently I decided that I wanted to switch from Windows 10 to a Linux distro as my primary operating system. Mainly because I've always found that ...
Collapse
 
chajath profile image
In-Ho Yi

While Arch is a pain to install, it's worth noting that it's a very rewarding experience and the wiki documentation and community support is generally pretty good. You can also find most packages in aur collection

Collapse
 
aggalex profile image
aggelalex

Well, for someone new to Linux I would definitely recommend Antergos or Manjaro instead of Arch.

Collapse
 
naltun profile image
Noah

I have been using the GNU system with Linux for some years now, and for roughly a year I've been an Antergos user.

Prior to that, I had tried Manjaro, and prior to that, Linux Mint.

I switched to Linux Mint from Ubuntu, because I loved Cinnamon. I switched to Manjaro from Linux Mint, because I love the rolling release model (although Manjaro can't fully use that term).

I switched from Mint because I had full disk encryption, and a bug in the OS lost where my decryption key was located on the filesystem, ergo my system could never boot into my environment, and I lost everything. Needless to say, that's a pretty bad bug.

I switched to Manjaro w/ Cinnamon (Community Edition) because of rolling release. Back when '17, the Cinnamon CE gave me headaches from bugs... I couldn't stand it. So I decided to try Antergos, which is Arch w/ some preinstalled software PLUS with a GUI installer.

Antergos is very slick, and very flexible & powerful. I get all the benefits of Arch without any of the headache. Plus, I get a more true rolling release model than Manjaro. Also, the sponsors for Antergos are phenomenal (eg. JetBrains).

I highly recommend anyone, both beginner and experienced, to try Antergos. It uses the pacman tool which is very different from apt, BUT you get access to the Arch User Repository (AUR), which, for me, is the biggest benefit of the Arch family.

If anyone has any questions about Antergos, or how to use pacman, etc., feel free to contact me. :)

Collapse
 
ikemkrueger profile image
Ikem Krueger

I tried Manjaro. I was constantly fixing the system, because of issues with packages. Was not fun. After that, I decided to opt-out for Manjaro and the like. That was years ago.

Three days back, I fixed a Manjaro of a friend. That took me half an hour to get the package management back to working.

You get the newest packages. You pay it with an unstable base. It is constantly destructing itself. I can't recommend Arch and the like for anyone.

Thread Thread
 
aggalex profile image
aggelalex

Not all rolling release distros are unstable. Solus OS, a fairly new rolling release Linux distro not based on anything, is quite stable.

Collapse
 
nikican profile image
niki

That pain to install and initial config of wi-fi and touchpad etc. was entertaining. I've devoted some time to tinker around and all is good, but then I just want to plug in a flash drive or use network printer... gah!

Collapse
 
kritoke profile image
Matt

I'd recommend checking out Solus, works pretty well, does some innovative stuff,easy to use and install. They also support snaps so even if no package available, you can install. Though that seems less of an issue these days. If you kind of like arch but want something interesting that makes it easier to replicate your install, check out nixos. It has a learning curve, but it installs everything based on a config file or two, which is kind of what arch used to do years ago.

Collapse
 
shostarsson profile image
Rémi Lavedrine

Yes, you should have a look at Solus.
I installed on my computer a few months ago and reallt loved it.
But at the end I came back to Ubuntu Budgie, which has the best of both world.
The Budgie (Solus) desktop on an Ubuntu distribution. So you can install everything that works on Ubuntu.

Collapse
 
ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

illumos was born as SunOS in the early 80s)

The SunOS that Illumos was born from was SunOS 5/Solaris — originally a SysV-derived OS. The 80s SunOS that was derived from BSD was SunOS 4.

Illumos was one of the projects I played with late in the part of my career where I was Solaris engineer for a a global ISP. A number of us looked at Illumos and Nexenta because Oracle kept throwing the viability of OpenSolaris in doubt ...before eventually killing it altogether. Both were options where we could have Solaris-y systems at home, keeping our work-related skills up, without having to pay to run Solaris.

and a loyal fanbase without the init system war.

Mostly because all of the people that slit their wrists over Solaris's SMF left the field. And, let me tell you, when Solaris 10 (SunOS 5.10) came out, the hue and cry about SMF was similar to that around systemd. ;)

Collapse
 
gabrielcoelho profile image
Gabriel Coelho Soares

What about OpenSuSE ? Both (Tumbleweed and Leap) are good options for those who want to migrate!

Collapse
 
rapidnerd profile image
George

OpenSuSE both Tumbleweed and Leap are excellent, I didn't necessarily explore them as much as the others as i haven't had too much experience with them, the ones in the tables are distros that I have the most experience in.

Collapse
 
ikemkrueger profile image
Ikem Krueger

OpenSuSE was a mess. It was the Windows of the Linux distros. Thousand little tools to configure the system. And the gui and the text version of YAST where constantly fighting. That plus the horrible slow rpm package manager threw me away. What I HAVE to thank them for, is the OpenSuse Build Service! That's a VERY good invention of them!

Collapse
 
andreanidouglas profile image
Douglas R Andreani

I would recommend Elementary. A new player on the scene with a warming desktop environment and huge community support. If you are interested you can help fund the development effort on their Patreon page

Collapse
 
rapidnerd profile image
George

Seen it mentioned a few times around the thread, going to have a little play with it.

Collapse
 
ikemkrueger profile image
Ikem Krueger

The development is really slow. And on low end systems, with a crappy graphic card it's not smooth.

Collapse
 
benmilliron profile image
BenMilliron • Edited

I run Ubuntu exclusively. At work I work on RHEL servers. I tried Fedora at home and was plagued by a login loop. Honestly if you want a Linux OS that just works, and has a huge repository of packages for just about anything, consider Ubuntu or Debian. Currently there really isn't anything I need that I don't have (Atom, Eclipse, python/python3, perl/perl6, rust, FileZilla, PgAdmin3, Dropbox client, Skype, LibreOffice, Chrome, Firefox). I am probably missing something. Another thing I will add is on older hardware Ubuntu installs without issue. My laptop is an old Levovo Thinkpad T series and I have had no installation or performance issues running 18.04.1 LTS.

Also Ubuntu now does not use Unity anymore, now the desktop is Gnome.

 
ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

Sounds like you missed the joy of the post-Berkeley FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD days. In the waning years of my time at college, those BSDs and Linux were all beta-level offerings. Post college and jonesing for my own UNIX-y system to run at home, I tried all of them. Eventually settled on Linux (with forays into IRIX and Solaris in the mid-90s and then Solaris, AIX and HPUX in the mid-2000s). These days, mostly RHEL/CentOS ...because it's what pays the bills. =)

When SMF first came out, it had a lot of teething pains similar to systemd's. Then again, so did a number of technologies in Solaris 10 (and OpenSolaris). ZFS, LDOMs and Zones all had their joys. Being a tinkerer, I ended up finding a lot of "edge cases" (as their Support group liked to call them). Fortunately, the most frequent "edge cases" happened at home. That said, during my (third-part vendor-partner) consulting days, I had to help one large financial institution that got bit pretty bad by a scheduler problem on a SF25000 attached to a large EMC array presenting a few thousand LUNs.

At any rate, haven't really touched Solaris since I sat for my Solaris 11 SA test. Sun had offered me it, at the time, as a beta test-taker as part of their efforts to get people to adopt Solaris 11. Other than helping customers move from Solaris to RHEL/CentOS, haven't really had to deal with Solaris since 2008.

Collapse
 
stilldreaming1 profile image
still-dreaming-1

All Linux distributions are terrible for their own unique reasons, but they are generally slightly less terrible than Windows and Mac/OS XYZ. I tried Ubuntu first and hated unity. Tried Arch, but was disappointed with the very incomplete installation documentation and eventually gave up. I tried other distributions of Arch, but gave up on them when I found out the Arch community will not help you if you are not using actual Arch. Used Mint for a while, but eventually got really frustrated with how badly Ubuntu maintains the official repos, all the software is super old. Used Solus for a while, but then went back to Unity Ubuntu in order to have a development environment as similar as possible to the production server I write code for. I don't hate unity quite as much as I used to and I am less bothered by having to use PPAs for everything. I was able to make many needed tweeks to my Unity configuration to make it actually pretty decent. My biggest complaints now applying to all distributions I have tried is Android Studio is only not buggy in Windows, multiple desktops don't actually keep running apps separate enough between them, and no I don't want to us a crazy windows manager like awesome or Xmonad to fix that.

Collapse
 
chromadream profile image
Jonathan Nicholas

Arch's installation process is painful, but there are a lot of installers that can be used to install a working Arch setup, such as Arch-Anywhere (now Anarchy Linux) or Antergos. Both use Arch's repo, unlike Manjaro, where it uses its own repository.

Collapse
 
pawda profile image
Memoria

I love BSDs, actually started programming on it with fluxbox as minimalistic desktop manager but now when considering a new OS I have to rule them out because the lack of docker support.
By any chance, do you know if anything has changed (or planned) on this matter ?

Collapse
 
csuszka profile image
csuszka

I had issues with Mint.
It was super slow on a very potent hardware.
Switched to ElementaryOS, which could handle it much better.

Collapse
 
rapidnerd profile image
George

Haven't had any issues with Mint being slow yet, was there something specific you found that was slow? Or just in general?

Collapse
 
csuszka profile image
csuszka

Nothing specific.

At first it was fine, and then started to slow down very fast, and then froze after an hour of use or so.
We restarted a couple of times, sometimes it loaded fast, sometimes really slow.
We wiped the drive clean, re-installed it, had the same issue.
Then again, and got the same issue.
Tried to look for log files for an explanation, but nothing special came up.
This is where we gave up and installed ElementaryOS.

We believed it may have been something like incompatibility with the hardware, because we had installed it to a Macbook Pro, and Mint worked totally fine on our PC at home.

Thread Thread
 
rapidnerd profile image
George

That sounds really weird, could be an issue with mac compatibility yea. Out of curiosity which version of Mint did you use?

Thread Thread
 
csuszka profile image
csuszka

Version 19 (Tara, Cinnamon 64 bit)

Thread Thread
 
rapidnerd profile image
George

Running the same version, weird. I'll look out for the issue. Haven't seen anything reported on it.

Thread Thread
 
csuszka profile image
csuszka

It would be interesting to know, and it may help others who run into the same problem.

Thread Thread
 
rapidnerd profile image
George

I'll make an update on the post if i come into any issues, thanks for your input!

Thread Thread
 
csuszka profile image
csuszka

Thank you for looking into this

Collapse
 
ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

Might want to update your table a bit:

  • Fedora is the upstream, comminity-driven project for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not everything you see in Fedora reaches RHEL, but it's where many of the ideas that end up in RHEL come from. Translation, your "Based On" column is inverted.
  • CentOS, as with Scientific Linux, Oracle Linux and a few others are based on RHEL. CentOS (and SciLin) both create themselves from the Red Hat published source-RPMs and don't really otherwise deviate from RHEL other than by "branding" and support models. Oracle takes the RHEL sources and makes so "strategic" modifications - most notable being their Oracle Unbreakable Kernel (which, among other things, implements the KSplice functionality that they bought and took closed-source).

In general, "expertise" for a given distro depends heavily on what you're trying to use the OS for. If you're supporting an Enterprise application or a workload that isn't well-aligned to a given distro's design-philosophy, the expertise-required goes way up (e.g., if you're trying to maintain a bleeding-edge development environment, RHEL/CentOS can be paaaaaaainful when trying to to keep your language packages — and the like — something resembling "current"). If you're just using a given distro as a casual-use system, the expertise required generally trends markedly downward.

Another thing that ought to be a point of consideration for a distro-choice is, "how much of what I learn about this distro can improve my employment options and potential salary". =)

Collapse
 
msal profile image
Mohammed Salman • Edited

*Ubuntu uses Gnome

Also I use Linux Mint it's a great distro. Good luck!

Collapse
 
surajrao profile image
Suraj Rao

True. From 17.10 onwards. The older supported ones still use Unity.

Collapse
 
rapidnerd profile image
George

Very much agreed, I did look into BSD or Illumos but didn't end up taking a liking to either (I'm incredibly picky). I've always loved Linux and used most of the ones above, but finally setting with one was a tough challenge. Don't necessarily need complete freedom I just tend to mess around with things quite a bit when I feel like doing so. Even though they're older Kernels they are great to use if you want to do so.

Plus I found the Mint look really pretty.

Collapse
 
rapidnerd profile image
George

Thanks for you response swtpete, at the moment I'm only keeping windows on my drive so I can safely transfer over everything I need to Mint, from there if nothing failed (fingers crossed) It'll be going straight in the trash! Have looked into running Oracle VB if I ever need to run Windows again, it's on the giant list of things to add in before. Glad you liked the article!

Collapse
 
matt profile image
Matt seymour • Edited

I personally use Debian. Its solid and stable. I dont care about the bells and whistles; i just want something that will keep working.

Collapse
 
rapidnerd profile image
George

I 100% agree with you, Debian is fantastic!

Collapse
 
nuwannnz profile image
Nuwan Karunarathna

I also use Debian on my old ThinkStation S10 which has a Quadro card. Debian is the only linux distro which runs on it without any problem. Super solid and stable.

Collapse
 
ikemkrueger profile image
Ikem Krueger

I do care about the bells and whistles. Hence I use Linux Mint Debian. :P

Collapse
 
cycle337 profile image
Vlad

I would be the rabbit in search of distros and monthly installing a new one. Then I found Fedora and went 2 yrs without reinstalling it or ever wanting to change it. And it loaded still super fast and didn't need a fixup. I one would always choose Fedora.

Collapse
 
rapidnerd profile image
George

Yeah this is the issue I had, I found one I liked then oooo another one i liked and repeated the process for quite a while until I finally settled with Mint. I do like Fedora, just found that I liked Mint more.

Collapse
 
gazzonyx profile image
Scott Lovenberg

If you really want to understand Linux and become fluent between distributions, you should try Slackware. In fact, once you use Slackware, the BSDs make more sense. The learning curve is steep, but after you climb it, you'll be familiar enough with enough concepts at a low level that you can take on just about any task in your Dev or server environment confidently; your toolset will be diverse and powerful.

Collapse
 
ehudon profile image
ehudon • Edited

I've made the switch from macOS to Ubuntu 18.04 (for development only). I'm not an open source purist though. I still use proprietary tools like Intellij IDEA Ultimate, Dropbox and Spotify -> I do consider Spotify a dev tool... ;)

I chose Ubuntu because they have made the switch to Gnome which is my fav GUI. Also it just works well out of the box with the hardware I have.

While I like Apple, I came to realize that GNU/Linux gives you more freedom to pick your favorite OS using your favorite hardware.

Collapse
 
tunaxor profile image
Angel Daniel Munoz Gonzalez

There was a time when I was in the university I tended to format my laptop every 3 days testing Distros, eventually I realized that I always ended up going for ubuntu based distros because it suited me better, but also I realized that I ended up dual booting Windows 10 all the time, I sorted tons of mistakes and errors when it comes to partition and dual booting, it was a fun ride, specially when exams were close.

Now days I use Windows 10 with Powershell instead of cmd, that improved greatly how I worked on my dev envs, also thankfully many of the tools I used have vastly improved and they work as close as possible in linux and windows, so I don't have any problems/differences on my Linux machines and Windows machines.

I do use Linux too, I use Ubuntu budgie, which is a really neat distro with what I always use under the hood, when I don't use Ubuntu budgie, I use Manjaro, which is complicated sometimes when it comes to my dev setup, because many tools expect a debian/ubuntu based OS (though Manjaro does have an amazing community ensuring that stuff just works on it)

Collapse
 
aggalex profile image
aggelalex

You should definitely try Zorin OS and elementary OS. They are true diamonds.

Collapse
 
dhollinger profile image
David Hollinger III

I'd also recommend Pop!_OS

It's maintained and released by System76, is based on Ubuntu, but is targeted at Developers and creators. It comes with less secondary software pre-installed, but also ships with things like the Nvidia drivers installed out if the box

Collapse
 
selectiveduplicate profile image
Abu Sakib • Edited

I've been a Linux user since 2016, started off with Mint, but I never could find a distro where I could stay more than a month or two...

Until Bionic was released this year, and I'm happily using Ubuntu MATE since then...

For any newbie user I'd definitely recommend UM, and then MX Linux...

I found MX very very well crafted and prepared, with Debian's reliable stability- the most complete distro I've ever seen and tried...

If I had another machine I'd definitely run that...

Collapse
 
lysofdev profile image
Esteban Hernández

Debian is my go to for any basic installation. My personal laptop is Arch and the one from my employer is Cent OS. Debian and Cent OS are hard to mess up. If there is a package for it Debian probably has it in the repos but might be a few versions behind. Also, check out tiling window managers like i3 for more productivity.

Collapse
 
sebbestune profile image
Sebastian Lindgren

Some years ago I used Ubuntu, I have used MacOS to and forth and nowadays I mostly use Debian... After seeing this table I think I'm more and more gravitating towards higher expertise systems. Well for now Debian feels nice and familiar for me, but maybe I should try Arch one day.

Collapse
 
andrewdtanner profile image
Andrew Tanner 🇪🇺

I recently went the other way, Linux > Windows.

I love Ubuntu and the Linux kernel but didn't want to partition my new laptop. I also want to see how far I get using Docker with Windows.

Collapse
 
matt123miller profile image
Matt Miller

Unless you have windows 10 Pro, I believe the answer is basically "nowhere" unfortunately.

Collapse
 
andrewdtanner profile image
Andrew Tanner 🇪🇺

Nah, there is still legacy support for using it with VirtualBox. I will probably upgrade to Pro in the future if current support starts lacking.

Collapse
 
paroxallax profile image
Triston Chavez • Edited

Debian is very nice and low bloat. I use it on my Chromebook it out performs Ubuntu and is great for my usage (basically just live in Terminal and vscode)

Collapse
 
rapidnerd profile image
George

Interesting, most of the distros listed (with exception of a couple) have worked perfectly from install, granted I've had to install the packages I need but that's obvious. WiFi, Bluetooth and 4k screens haven't been an issue. I currently work on a tower machine based of AMD architecture, I haven't yet looked into replacing my Macbooks OS. Is it only laptops you've found to have issues with?

Collapse
 
renich profile image
Renich Bon Ciric • Edited

Respectfully, I disagree with your table.

Fedora's installer is as easy as it gets to install the distro. Also, the community is developers first. I don't understand why would you catalog it as a medium expertise distro. There is, hardly, a better distro for developers, not to mention the awesome and knowledgeable community surrounding it.

CentOS, on the other hand, is a binary copy - branding from Red Hat Enterprise Linux; which is downstream from Fedora. It's a bit older and considered stable. Why would you catalogue it as a high expertise distro? It makes no sense to me. Try Gentoo or Arch for that matter. That said, nothing helps you grow in knowledge as using one of the aforementioned, IMHO.

I think your article is misleading and uninformed. Please, do the homework before writing something to "guide" other users. :S

Collapse
 
rapidnerd profile image
George

Well you're entitled to your own opinion. The table is based on my personal experience with the distros listed over a long period of time (ranging roughly 5 years give or take). Yes some information has a little of because obviously things change with time and Linux changes a lot, the information found is what I found and had personally written down, hence why I've been making small edits in places where I was wrong. I'm not sure what you're on about with Fedoras installer though? I didn't mention that it was hard to install, that was only on Arch. While Arch is a pain to install there has been a few new solutions released recently to help with the process. As for CentOS while I liked the OS I had a lot of issue working with it, and speaking with colleagues that have used Cent for a much longer period than I have they had similar and other issues either previously or currently. The table is there to give people an idea of my mind set when I decided to fully switch from Windows, and it's just my personal opinions. Hence why I linked another resource to assist in choosing a distro.

 
pawda profile image
Memoria

Yes I'm familiar with jails and chroot. I find them way better at what they do but this is another topic. Unfortunately it had to be Docker because of external "reasons" that are not giving me much choice :)

Collapse
 
thecodetrane profile image
Michael Cain

I switched to Linux mint myself about three months ago from OSX. It’s great.

Collapse
 
v6 profile image
🦄N B🛡 • Edited

Don't forget backups! That's one thing I wish I'd paid more attention to when I first made the switch.

Collapse
 
safinsingh profile image
Safin Singh

Arch is definitely NOT a pain to install. It's been over-hyped by those who simply don't understand Linux. Additionally, any desktop environment can be installed on all of these distros, and limiting each machine to one is inaccurate.

Collapse
 
travisdh1 profile image
Travis Hershberger

You realize that all Environments are available on all OS from that chart, right?

Collapse
 
jumpkick profile image
jumpkick

KDE Neon.

Collapse
 
rapidnerd profile image
George

Ah that was a mistake on my end, will fix. Thanks!

 
rapidnerd profile image
George

I heard the same thing, I believe it's not all from one other distro. But the end layout of it is very nice.

Collapse
 
curiouslychase profile image
Chase Adams

I've been running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my Chromebook for two years and I ❤️ it.

Collapse
 
mikeschinkel profile image
Mike Schinkel

You missed Alpine Linux, which is the preferred choice for building Docker containers.

Collapse
 
chathula profile image
Chathula Sampath • Edited

i would like to share what i wrote few months ago for linux beginners.

medium.com/@chathula/as-a-beginner...

Collapse
 
bennypowers profile image
Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦

no Gentoo love?

Collapse
 
buinauskas profile image
Evaldas Buinauskas

Manjaro* 😉

Collapse
 
ikemkrueger profile image
Ikem Krueger • Edited

I opted for Linux Mint Debian with the MATE desktop environment. :)

Collapse
 
alpinus4 profile image
Mateusz Grzonka

Manjaro *

Collapse
 
caseywebb profile image
Casey Webb

NixOS really deserves a mention. The ability to duplicate your system anywhere on a whim is extremely valuable. As all things Linux it has a learning curve, but it's very much worth it.

Collapse
 
irongomme profile image
Jérôme

I'm using OpenSuse since 2002 !! Very good distribution, you should try it.

Collapse
 
ikemkrueger profile image
Ikem Krueger

PC-BSD was very interesting. But everytime I tried it, it didn't boot to the gui. Because of that I sticked with Linux.