What Is Your Favourite Linux Distro, And Why?

jomyer · December 29, 2020, 10:02pm

Ubuntu Mate

I chose it because I wanted to use both 32 and 64 bit computers, which I now have done.

Mate is the first Linux I ever installed. I like it much more than Windows, once I have it configured, but it takes quite a bit of effort to configure to my liking.

I like the configurability of the panels.

I like the control of the keyboard - I put the CTRL key to the left of ‘A’ so that I can use a WordStar editor.

I don’t have any experience with any other flavor, so I don’t know what to mention as a unique feature.

pradipsagdeo · December 31, 2020, 2:39pm

Tried them all except CentOS. Settled on Ubuntu. Can’t go wrong with it.

FBClark · January 1, 2021, 4:13am

LMDE4 Cinnamon here. Wife and I used LM Mate from 2012 until March of 2020 and were very happy. Before that we used Ubuntu since our original jump to Linux in 2007.
As you can see, we’re not ‘jumpers’, when we find something we like, we stay with it. Oh, we’re retired now and we just browse, email, Zoom, etc.

Andy2 · January 1, 2021, 3:28pm

WOW - @pradipsagdeo Now that is impressive…

… using well over 270 distros, I’m so impressed by your Mammoth Tusk Er, Sorry, Task … What did you think of Bodhi, BSD, Tails and Qubes?

LOL Guess you have not looked at the hundreds of problems with that bloated ubuntu here at it’sFOSS forum and the many other Linux sites … raison d’être
Then you have never investigated the back door mega security issue associated with SNAP . . Oh Dear Nap time…

easyt50 · January 1, 2021, 3:39pm

I’m with you on this one. I really like Linux Mint. I been using Cinnamon now for a little over 2 1/2 years. I like it b/c it does what I want and is easy to maintain. Because of all the Distro hype, I have installed and tested several Linux. Some of them were, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Zorin, MX, Puppy, Manjaro, LM Xfce, LM Mate, and a couple others.

I had 2 requirements carried over from Win 10 being Truecrypt and Western Digital encrypted disk support. I found support for both of them on the forums.

@Akito said it somewhere in one of his posts that all the Distro do basically the same thing. It is software to run your PC.

Come to think of it we could have a similar conversation about a car. What brand, model is best and why. But all cars do the same thing. They get you from point A to point B regardless of the cost or features they have. I like the Honda Accord.

Andy2 · January 1, 2021, 9:59pm

Hi old timer and Happy New Year Wishes to you.
As I said earlier this kinda sends old timers like me comatose . never mind the new generations. I guess….

…says it all. Honka Accord Gah – I know each to their own or just follow the herd, but just how bland and boring can life get…? There is a whole universe of wonder, excitement to explore – to this end regarding just vehicle choice….

…… here I am in the Scorpion trike which sure enough has a mega sting in the tail. Not satisfied with this mega powerful fun machine I got the factory to install my invention (1990’s) of using active suspension to make it tilt into corners.
GM-Opel-Vauxhall have been trying to get their new all electric car, the Corsa-E to me so that I can play with it for a couple of days. It has been cancelled twice now at the eleventh hour due to Covid-19 restrictions – drat…! Still - something interesting to look forward to…

Just discovered EndeavourOS 2020.04.11 - light - highly responsive and the system was quick to boot and you guessed it NOT mainstream normality. Ah time for a nap again

easyt50 · January 1, 2021, 10:26pm

Thanks @Andy2 and a Happy Healthy New Year to you too and all my pals here on the forum.

I give this forum credit for my smooth cross over from Windows. It’s been with the help of many members both active and some in-active here on this forum answering questions asked a 100 times before that helped me the most. A grateful “Thank You” to all.

oulik.jan · January 2, 2021, 4:51pm

My favorite is PCLinuxOS. It works out of the box, lt is a rolling distro, rock solid and simply works.
Most of the time the latest software like LibreOffice Firefox etc.
There is no perfect distro, but so far this is the best that I found.
I am using Linux for 7 years now, and this is the distro I am using for the longest now

Andy2 · January 2, 2021, 8:49pm

Hey @oulik.jan Jan thanks so very much - your fist sentence got me hooked so had to take a look
Yes right up my street - the only independent distro described as “So cool ice cubes are jealous“

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20190408#pclinuxos

oulik.jan · January 3, 2021, 8:29am

I am using the Mate edition, a matter of taste I think. The KDE edition is impressive, but I prefer the Mate edition.

clatterfordslim · January 3, 2021, 10:58am

Hi Oulik.jan, indeed it is a matter of what suits you it’s that little thing I love about Linux the vast amount of choice of different environments that we can all try out, it’s through that, being able to pick the one that we can say we feel comfortable using.

I like the fact in their write up about PC-Linux-OS on their website, that they don’t do sudoers in the terminal. They want their OS to be free from using the terminal and keep away from the norm, of using terminal to install apps. I’m going to see if I can get Nemo installed in the XFCE environment of PC-Linux-OS. I’ll do it through VirtualBox. I love to tinker and it’s that I think the team behind this OS don’t want you to do. I prefer Nemo file manager than Thunar, because Nemo offers so much more, moving and copying files to different parts of the home folder, after right clicking file you want to move you have the choice in the drop-down list, as demonstrated in the pictures below.

This is something that Mate in Caja file manager is missing, or at least was when I last used Mate.

Andy2 · January 3, 2021, 2:36pm

Hi @clatterfordslim Mark, As expected you know I’m going to try to turn you from the Dark Side… .
As in my post #25 above where I demonstrated that MATE was the better tool for tweaking and could just as easy have transparent panels, clear time and date etc – I must correct you once again and demonstrate that even with the relative small footprint and now superseded by v9.0 Trisquel v8 with Mate and hence caja file manager; is the superior choice……

…. it is apparent there is even more choice in the right click menu on a movie file than whatever it is you are using.
Perhaps you should take another look at MATE – I will let you know if I install Trisquel 9.0 which is reported to be even more polished if you can tinker even more.
Footnote:- Quite amused by supposedly lightweight distros being tested and reviewed by experts that I’m currently looking at whereas Trisquel say they are a medium-weight distro yet under my testing use less RAM memory! Work that one out…?
Take extra care to Stay Safe – Best Wishes for an interesting New Year tinkering

clatterfordslim · January 4, 2021, 4:51am

Hi Andy2, Uh I don’t think so take a look at what we have in Nemo? Below are some screen shots from Nemo in Mint and Caja in Trisquel.
First up we have a context menu to pick and choose what we want in the right click menu.

I added Make Link from Context Menu.

We have copy to and move to with list of places to copy and move things to.

And now move to.

Here is your Caja move to and copy to.

As you can see in Caja the only choices of moving and copying stuff is to either your Home Folder or Desktop.
Here is picture of my Trisquel desktop in VirtualBox. I’ll leave a link for you to download the wallpaper if you want it? I made it last night.

I’m also using Ambiant-Mate-Dark-Blue which I made back in Ubuntu Mate 18.04, well just changed the color from green to Blue, though you have to go into customize in the look and feel preferences and choose from the list Ambiant-Mate-Dark-Blue, then save and rename it. I like Trisquel’s icon theme as it goes well with the above Mate theme.
Link to wallpaper shortened with tinyurl https://tinyurl.com/y7xscogd

I might install Trisquel on my old 32GB of Ram AMD PC I built back in 2015, it’s running Peppermint OS 8 at the moment which is based on Ubuntu 16.04. I use Icy Docks for my hard drives, four in total. They are Hard drive drawers which are mounted to the front of my PC, then connected with four SATA 3 cables and a power cable of course.

A lot of people make the mistake of swapping out the wrong drive, then wonder as to why their OS has suddenly frozen. With Icy Docks they are SSD compatible 2.5" drives and I love it. Great for dual booting too.

You take care too and Best Wishes to you too.

Ooh PS here is a photo of normal right click of a folder in Nemo, just in case you happen to notice that in the previous window-shots that you did not see paste into folder.

Andy2 · January 4, 2021, 2:19pm

Hey Mark – I never had such a challenge outside of engineering! Still so impressed by your tenacity and expertise to show better tweaking with your DE. Once again a splendid effort – I salute you. Great fun for this old git during lockdown; especially as I’m not a tweaker at all.
Hey, Julian might be freed from lockdown or lock-up in Bellmarsh prison soon and be able to use Tails+Tor and grapheneOS.
Firstly can I apologise on behalf of both of us for inadvertently taking over this post…? Perhaps @Akito can Start a New Topic for discussion Battle of the DEs or something groovy to attract more players onto the battlefield?
Secondly please accept my apologies as I cannot reply in a manner commensurate with your splendid effort as I am currently backing up for installing Trisquel 9 over v8. I have no confidence whatsoever in such matters let alone know what a SATA 3 cable is! Used Transmission app to grab torrent from Spanish uni and Brasero to burn a DVD as I didn’t want to overwrite any of my USB sticks.
So thirdly and very briefly; I deduce you accept findings in post #25…? Now; I can’t see the top three choices in your right click menu (3) or Open as Administrator (4) or Revert to a Previous Version (5) or Send To (6) or Add to Favourites (7)
Forth: Are you just creating choices of no worth or value – surely send to is actually very useful whereas I can see no use for Add to Downloads…?

I figure you are that guy in the basement with all those screens and drives – Die Hard…? . .
Take EXTRA care to Stay Safe – Best Wishes

Akito · January 4, 2021, 2:15pm

daniel.m.tripp · January 5, 2021, 7:38am

I don’t think Armbian is actually available for any of the RPi family platform…

Tried both DietPi and Armbian on a few different ARM SBCs (Pine64, Orange Pi, Banana Pi etc) - and settled on Armbian… Out of all those SBC’s the only one I’m still using regularly is an Orange Pi +2E, running Armbian, as my torrent server (transmission-daemon)… But I am still using all my RPi4 and my RPi ZeroW (running Raspbian)… got two RPi3B sitting around idle - but haven’t thought of a use for them… reckon I could try DietPi and see how I go…

As for my favourite distro - it’s probably Ubuntu 20.04 - mainly 'cause I know how to set it up for work, and for play (bought some Windows games on Steam for xmas and been playing the Linux native versions via Lutris) … But - truth be known, I’m lazy, and if Debian didn’t arse around during the installer about installing proprietary stuff, I’d probably still use Debian…

nurska · January 5, 2021, 7:45pm

Linux Mint: Beautiful, stable, gets the job done.
MX linux: Beautiful, stable, lightweight.

mrazster · January 8, 2021, 8:50am

For me it’s Arch with Xfce, I am however currently running Gnome and it’s really starting to grow on me.

Because I have the option to be in absolute control and set everything up exactly the way I want, from the ground up.

Before I “discovered” Arch I was an Xubuntu user for about 12 years or so.
I got the point where I installed my Xubuntu starting with a bare minimum netboot server iso. Just installing the kernel and basic cli interface. And from there I pulled down my own install script from github and executing it. Doing so I tailored my installs with minimum amount of meta packages needed. And only the packages I needed, nothing more.
After watching an Arch installationtutorial I realized I was almost already doing my installs "the Arch way"already with Xubuntu. So why not just try it out ?!

And here I am 2 years later, still rolling Arch and loving it.
But yeah, it is not for everyone.

easyt50 · January 8, 2021, 1:41am

Just curious, but have you tried Manjaro? And if so, your opinion. I installed Manjaro on a test disk, but that has been about it. I was impress with the ease of the install.

mrazster · January 8, 2021, 9:01am

Yes I have. I’m actually using Manjaro Xfce on my htpc/mediacenter.
It’s real a good one if you want to dip your toes in the “Arch pond” but don’t want to go through the hassle of installing Arch “vanilla”.

If you want to take it even a step further and land somewhere in between Arch and Manjaro try out the Manjaro-Architect installer. It’s purely textbased but still easier than Arch. With this you can install the base system and then chose almost exactly which packages to install and tailor your install to your needs.