Re:The Best Linux Distros of 2016
by SwellJoe on Tuesday April 26, 2016 @04:06PM
(#11575145)
I always come back to Fedora. I started using Linux in 1995ish, after not quite a year using Windows 95 (which I'd switched to from an Amiga 3000). Soon found my way to Red Hat Linux (which became Fedora). It's mostly been my desktop and laptop OS of choice for that entire time. I'm tried others, I'm familiar with others, due to supporting many other distros over the years. But, Fedora always seems to hit the sweet spot for stability, Open Source fidelity and contribution to moving the state of the art forward, ease of use, package selection and modernity, and the Just Works factor is historically very high (even without adding binary blob repositories, but some drivers have needed to come from third party repos over the years).
yum (now dnf, which is a name I hate) is also my favorite of the mainstream package managers. It nearly perfectly balances ease of use with advanced capabilities, and maintaining private repos is an absolute dream (stick signed packages in a directory on a web server, run createrepo; repository is done!), compared to anything else. apt is a great, but managing repos for it is just awful (though I haven't had a chance to try aptly, which appears to potentially resolve this issue, though it still seems to be vastly more complex than createrepo).
So, yeah, Fedora remains my favorite, through many years and many attempts using other distros. I've flirted with Ubuntu a few times, going so far as having it as my primary laptop OS for a while. Partly it was because of the popularity of it; it's sometimes easier to install stuff on Ubuntu because the developers are more likely to be using Ubuntu. But, it's not worth the other trade offs, to me.
Also, I like that Fedora ships a close to stock, very clean, version of the most recent Gnome desktop. It feels very nicely integrated, while some of the alternative desktop variants feel bolted together from different pieces. Lots of folks seem to want to revert to the old 2.0 style Gnome, but I don't dislike modern Gnome (except that it has some awful quirks for multiple displays, where both displays do the shrink-and-dim thing, which is terrible for use with projections, presentations, watching movies, etc.).
yum (now dnf, which is a name I hate) is also my favorite of the mainstream package managers. It nearly perfectly balances ease of use with advanced capabilities, and maintaining private repos is an absolute dream (stick signed packages in a directory on a web server, run createrepo; repository is done!), compared to anything else. apt is a great, but managing repos for it is just awful (though I haven't had a chance to try aptly, which appears to potentially resolve this issue, though it still seems to be vastly more complex than createrepo).
So, yeah, Fedora remains my favorite, through many years and many attempts using other distros. I've flirted with Ubuntu a few times, going so far as having it as my primary laptop OS for a while. Partly it was because of the popularity of it; it's sometimes easier to install stuff on Ubuntu because the developers are more likely to be using Ubuntu. But, it's not worth the other trade offs, to me.
Also, I like that Fedora ships a close to stock, very clean, version of the most recent Gnome desktop. It feels very nicely integrated, while some of the alternative desktop variants feel bolted together from different pieces. Lots of folks seem to want to revert to the old 2.0 style Gnome, but I don't dislike modern Gnome (except that it has some awful quirks for multiple displays, where both displays do the shrink-and-dim thing, which is terrible for use with projections, presentations, watching movies, etc.).