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Which Linux distro do you use?

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Halcyon:
There has been a lot of talk about Linux (particularly as a replacement to Windows 10). I'm curious as to what people here use and why.

Personally, I'm running Arch Linux as my daily driver. But have previously used Mint, Ubuntu Desktop, Fedora Workstation and CentOS. All have their strengths and weaknesses. Ampera (on the forum) helped me set up Arch (as it doesn't have a GUI installer) but it's very powerful.

More recently I've been considering Manjaro (which is based on Arch) as it seems quite popular; 2nd most popular on Distrowatch in the previous 12 months.

eugenenine:
I'm the only (first) other... Slackware

But anything is better than windows 10.  Wife and daughter have windows 10 and we switched ISP and both of theirs will randomly say 'no internet' when connected, despite every other device in the house working fine.  Thats just the latest issue with 10.

Ampera:
Manjaro isn't really useful if you already run Arch with no problems. If there's a specific feature it has, like the graphical pacman frontend, then you can always just install that on normal Arch Linux.

Manjaro tries to be Ubuntu with Arch, in that it packages up simplification tools so that it's easier for non-linux people to use. My few moans with it are the desktop environments available to choose from (which is fine, they're easy to change, but it's packaging high weight environments, which I personally am not a fan of), their using separate repos for packages (somewhat understandable, as Arch has strict guidelines as to what ends up on their repos), and just not lining up with my personal theory that Linux is best used when you understand how it works, not when you're relying on someone else to understand how it works.

I obviously use Arch, and I think it's one of the best Linux distros for people who want to learn Linux. It has one of the best implementations of modularity in the Linux world, with an efficient and pretty hard to screw up package manager (let's not talk about the AUR though). It has better out of the box hardware support than most other distributions, given that it does not come with X, and the Linux kernel supports terminal modes going back to pre-VESA BIOS modes if you really needed it. This means it's possible to better understand your hardware and get the right drivers while you're installing X. It encourages people to keep it simple, stupid, and understand how your machine works so you can get the best out of it.

In my opinion the only possible switch I would make is to FreeBSD, which has much cleaner implementations of a lot of things, and it already runs on my server. Its only sin is that it has no usable linux binary support (doesn't support latest glibc). If it did, I'd love to have hybrid pacman/pkg package management (or both in the style of PacBSD) for Linux/BSD binary package management. If I can get all my Linux stuff, and all of my BSD stuff in one place, I would be in heaven.

edy:
The poll asks obviously some basic distro questions but it is important to note that there are sub-flavors for each of them. It would be impossible to list them all, so I understand why the poll has to be more general. As far as I know, Ubuntu is branch of Debian. However, even within Ubuntu there are a bunch of different types which I use depending on the situation....

- Lubuntu for my older laptops, light-weight and fast
- Ubuntu Studio for my main working productivity machine

I try not to use the regular Ubuntu "GNOME" type distro because the UI is too graphic/processor intensive for most of my older machines. I like the interface but I don't need all those bells and whistles. I know you can install other GUI's on top of standard Ubuntu but I just go straight for the distro that is already either bundled with XFCE or LXDE.

legacy:
Our hobby-projects at DTB are based on Gentoo Linux/GNU. We do support Gentoo/PPC, Gentoo/HPPA, and Gentoo/MIPS on EOL hardware { Apple/PowerMac-G4, HPPA-C3xxx and C8xxx, SGI/MIPS-IP30 and Atheros5-9 routers}, while our dev computers run Ubuntu, simply because it does what we need and it's ready out of the box without the need to dig deep into dependencies, broken packages, and all the problems that emerge with Gentoo.

Our Windriver dev-machines are based on Ubuntu for the same reason, but some are based on Debian due to our customers' preference.

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