What's your preferred flavour of Linux?

Back in the day I tried Ubuntu. Great for running a non-GUI server but didn't play nicely at the time with the hardware I had.

I've been a long-term fan of CentOS ever since it was shipped with Asterisk back in the day. Always liked it's clean and simple look and feel but decided I wanted to try others.

I did try Mint, albeit in a virtual machine but it kept hanging (Cinammon, if I recall correctly) and at the time, there were lots of forum posts about the same issue but no fixes and as it was only in a VM to test, I gave up on it as I didn't need it badly enough to try and spend the time fixing it.

These days when I'm forced by the work I do to use it, I quite like Zorin - it's another one that's quite similar to the look and feel of Windows. Again, though, I've heard that 12.x can be temperamental (not that I've experienced that yet, touch wood).

Occasionally (work, again, though thankfully this is an ever rarer event nowadays) I am forced to boot into Kali or TAILS and I have live USB's for that very purpose but neither are exactly what you would call user friendly or welcoming.

Windows is still my 95% day-to-day use OS simply because of the tools I use most frequently and plus the odd game I play isn't available outside of Windows. Also, many don't work in Wine or the backend servers don't allow any kind of access from a non-MS workstation.

I don't boot my PCS machine to Linux either - I have a nice (at the time new) Lenovo X1 for that purpose - less cutting edge stuff on it and more predictability back when it was new.

So, just curious for the aficionados on here what your poison is?

Ubuntu for the majority of the time, simply because I like the desk top, although that will be changing soon as they are dropping Unity, so I may move on. There is already a project to keep the Unity desk top alive, at the moment it seems only for Debian but that may change.

I like Fedora but it is a pig for working alongside other systems if you are dual-booting and do not put it on first.

Zorin is good for people migrating from XP but they had started charging for some versions and while it is good I do not think good enough to pay for.

TAILS is a life saver, literally, I used to do a bit of TEFL teaching and we often had students from countries with oppressive regimes and I often helped them with TAILS as it was very useful when they returned home. Nothing is totally safe from a prying state but TAILS is good. I would not use it for day to day work but that and the TOR browser provide some safety.

I have an old Compaq Presario machine which I use as a third back up or when i am having to stay somewhere where my stuff could get pinched and use Salent on that, it is a good lightweight distro designed for older machines with not a great deal of RAM and CPU power.

I have a few musician friends and they are happy with most of the Studio distros with low latency for music production.

I have used Open SUSE a fair bit and that is another option if I move on from Ubuntu.

Finally, the worst. React OS is not actually Linux but a new built from scratch Unix distro that is aimed at people leaving Windows and it is absolute pants. To be fair I have not looked at it for many months and it is very new so things may have got better but having seen the early version am in no hurry to try the latest.

I looked at React recently (I think) and if it's the one I think it is, it was a real WTF? moment. They've tried to replicate the Windows NT 4 GUI?!?

I didn't buy the ultimate version of Zorin as to be honest it had nothing worth paying for over the free variant but I like the layout and the similarity to Windows. I know...but when you're in the Windows environment most of the time anything for a bit of similarity is welcome.

I've never tried Salent or, if I am honest, come across it in use. I might have to give it a nose and see what it's like.

I have used Linux Mint for couple years. I just how cinnamon looks and feel. For me it looks familiar to what i used on Windows, i do not now but i just get used with that feel. I already tried Ubuntu and Arch, but Mint is always my favorite.

I prefer Archlinux. I literally can't stand Windows. That thing is a recording spying machine and I don't want that. When I used to use Windows, there were always programs that I was like wtf is this crap & why does it need to run, type questions. I also can't stand some of the features, as well as the look and feel of the newer Windows OS's. It also natively uses stuff like SMB for file sharing, which I can confirm as a network engineer, is a complete dumpster of a file sharing program (in terms of speed & performance). What's most annoying is that I would have to pay to use that OS, along with Windows proprietary crap like office lol.

I've used Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch. My experience is Debian and Ubuntu are more friendly, but too slow to roll-out updates. You'll never get the latest Kernel to support the latest hardware and software using those OS's. So my preferred choice is Arch.

sg4rb0sss said:

[...]My experience is Debian and Ubuntu are more friendly, but too slow to roll-out updates. You'll never get the latest Kernel to support the latest hardware and software using those OS's. So my preferred choice is Arch.

Click to expand...

Perfectly valid option. Debian is aimed at servers, where stability is key.
I must admit that I loved Debian back in the day, and I was more than happy to compile a lot of stuff from source, including the kernel.
Here's a quiz: if the 2.0.12 kernel needed 45 minutes to compile on my Pentium 100MHz machine, how old am I?

Yardem said:

Perfectly valid option. Debian is aimed at servers, where stability is key.
I must admit that I loved Debian back in the day, and I was more than happy to compile a lot of stuff from source, including the kernel.
Here's a quiz: if the 2.0.12 kernel needed 45 minutes to compile on my Pentium 100MHz machine, how old am I?

Click to expand...

Too old

sg4rb0sss said:

I prefer Archlinux. I literally can't stand Windows. That thing is a recording spying machine and I don't want that. When I used to use Windows, there were always programs that I was like wtf is this crap & why does it need to run, type questions. I also can't stand some of the features, as well as the look and feel of the newer Windows OS's. It also natively uses stuff like SMB for file sharing, which I can confirm as a network engineer, is a complete dumpster of a file sharing program (in terms of speed & performance). What's most annoying is that I would have to pay to use that OS, along with Windows proprietary crap like office lol.

I've used Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch. My experience is Debian and Ubuntu are more friendly, but too slow to roll-out updates. You'll never get the latest Kernel to support the latest hardware and software using those OS's. So my preferred choice is Arch.

Click to expand...

SMB 3 fixed a lot of that.

Use Google or Facebook? Buy off of Amazon? Use android or iOS? They're as bad or worse in some cases.

If you're going to throw stones at least throw them at up to date problems.

Not seen SMBv3, just searched or it, and it was released in Windows 10. So yes I haven't tested it on Windows 10, thank's for the update. In regards to other questions, yes google and amazon, others are no. With gmail I don't have any personal contacts or details, I use it for forums only, otherwise I use tutanota for emails. Amazon yes. I am happy to share what I brought. I take each company with a pinch of salt and work out what data I'm are willing to give, to whomb and for what reason. However with Windows 10, your whole OS is flawed, it's even default shipped with a keylogger. And as much as server admins and Mirosoft guys won't ever admit that Microsoft has these kinds of features, they do. There is 10000 problems with Microsoft, related to privacy, and I've never seen more guides on how to "turn off" these privacy problems on the web. So yes, my reasons are up to date thanks. And it's also valid to say I wouldn't want to PAY for an OS that would have these privacy problems to begin with.

Might see if I can get SMBv3 for Linux, and test it.

sg4rb0sss, one of the main reasons for me getting an Ubuntu phone was the privacy, it is a pity Canonical are discontinuing the project, although I have been reading about other Linux phone projects so there is still hope of getting a new one. I stopped using Google ages ago and find duckduckgo to be a very good search engine and I think everyone knows using Facebook is about as sane as posting your bank and other personal details on a massive billboard.

My favorite is currently Kubuntu (I'm currently running 17.10 Beta). I like that it's Ubuntu, but with a KDE desktop. I have found it to be rock solid - even 17.10 Beta.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vjQiZAKZW8&t=5s

I am still running an older version of Ubuntu MATE on my good old Acer Aspire One laptop, that's hopefully soon going to be replaced by the Kaby Lake R successor of the Lafité III and for which I am currently looking into other Linux distributions. I very much like the approach of Manjaro and Antergos with Gnome, but I'm bothered by the lack of font clarity and inconsistency in font types and sizes setup. I don't know what the deal is, but no other distributions come close to the font rendering and setup in the Ubuntu world.

I've been using Fedora since it was Redhat and distributed on 3.5" diskettes.

• Fedora works well on PCS laptops, I've used it on 4 varieties (mirage, Skyfire IV, Ultranote and Ultranote LE)
• Fedora is great if you are software developer; AWS uses Redhat based Linux as does just about every corporate
• I use the KDE spin, but also run the odd GNOME application (e.g. I use Evolution and not Kontact for email)
• Fedora is always a bit edgy, you get the latest software

The only things that don;t really work well are:

• Webex for screen sharing etc: I use Gotomeeting in chrome that works well including video conference
• Skype: you have to use the crappy web version and not the thick client

Depends what i'm using the system for really:

If I just want a day to day Desktop OS;
Linux Mint -- I like both Cinnemon and Mate, does everything Ubuntu does but comes with awesome wallpapers, stable, regular updates.

For pretty much anything which doesn't require a desktop:
CentOS 7 -- As I work with Linux for a living, one thing I quickly realised is pretty much every company will use a RHeL based Linux as it is renowned for security and stability (basically updates are less frequent than Debian), and Red Hat specifically has an enterprise support network most companies seem to love paying for.

So day to day GUI stuff... Debian based. Anything server related (including my server at home), RHeL based. This helps keep things like the differences in package managers, networking stack.etc up to date in my head.