So, is the Linux distribution market now ripe for disruption?<p>I wonder who out of today's major players could be the next big thing. OpenSUSE seems the closest to Ubuntu in terms of user friendliness (Linus' comments notwithstanding) due to tools like YaST [1] and a PPA-like mechanism called the openSUSE Build Server for extra prebuilt software [2]. People certainly have speculated about it online for a while but we're yet to see an exodus of Ubuntu users to openSUSE.<p>On a related note, a major thing Ubuntu and its derivatives have going for them is the great font rendering out of the box. I wonder why other distributions haven't yet adopted it, or the Infinality patches [3], as defaults.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaST" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaST</a><p>[2] That said, although I've been following their releases lately I haven't used a SUSE distribution as a daily driver since SUSE 9.3, so I don't know how the quality compares; any openSUSE users here that can chime in with a comment?<p>[3] See <a href="http://www.infinality.net/blog/" rel="nofollow">http://www.infinality.net/blog/</a>.
I also moved away from Unity after about a year or so of using it (some good ideas, but too unstable for my taste), and instead of going Debian, which was my initial impulse, I decided to give Ubuntu Gnome a try. This is a Ubuntu variant that isn't talked about much, and it's still early days for them, but it shows some promise.<p>You basically get the same Ubuntu base you're used to with all the repositories and PPAs intact, which if we're being honest are probably second to none in the whole Linux landscape, with a pretty vanilla GNOME 3 stack.<p>The devs just put out a call for more contributors today (<a href="http://ubuntugnome.org/urgent-need-for-more-contributors" rel="nofollow">http://ubuntugnome.org/urgent-need-for-more-contributors</a>), and I'd love to see this distro take off. I'm also interested in seeing how they'll handle the whole Mir situation.
I left Ubuntu just because I don't trust them (issues 2 and 3), but I don't understand why people make a big deal about the default DE. I switched to Mint because I know everything "just works" with my laptop on it, and just changed the DE to i3. I previously used i3 on Ubuntu with no problem, I can't imagine it'd be too hard to use xfce or whatever else you wanted on Ubuntu.
I consider myself a power-user, I have used a myriad of operating systems, from Slackware to Gentoo, OpenBSD or Plan9.<p>Yet I like Ubuntu, the desktop works just fine (Believe it or not, I find Unity a nice DE) I can find practically any application in it's repositories (Or by PPA/Deb) and I can install an LTS and forget about upgrading for years.<p>Is there anything wrong with this? I find the new Dash Amazon search stupid but it's one click away of being disabled, and I'm not happy with Mark's opinions but that doesn't affect directly my experience with the OS.<p>So I don't see what the big fuss is about, many people say Ubuntu is not Linux anymore, and I agree in some sense; but I like what Canonical is doing with Ubuntu.<p>So until I find another distro that suits me, I will stay with Ubuntu, that doesn't mean I don't love Gentoo or Arch anymore, but lately I need to get work done, and my parents are using this PC therefore it needs to be available 24/7 without any kind of breakage.
I've also switched to Debian, back in August. I don't like Unity, but the deciding factor was the rolling update characteristic of Debian Testing. Ubuntu just plain breaks in every semi-annual update, and I missed the rolling aspect of Gentoo (which I used before Ubuntu).<p>Debian testing is reasonably up to date, updates continuously and requires much less maintenance than Gentoo. It's about as hassle-free as Ubuntu. Ubuntu does have some useful PPAs, but if you pick the right version, you can just add an Ubuntu PPA to Debian and it will work.<p>I could live without some of the political aspects of Debian (there's no Firefox in the default repos???), but they are really just minor hassles. Import a couple PPAs, and you are rolling.<p>For those of you looking for an alternate distro, my shortlist was Debian Testing and Arch Linux. Arch does look like it has a killer community: techie and helpful, lots of available documentation, much like what I remember from Gentoo. Debian won because I'm less inclined to workstation tweaking and more inclined to real work nowadays.
It would be much more informative to hear from people who use Debian for things that require 3D acceleration -- Minecraft, running Windows games under Wine, Blender.<p>I have a laptop with nVidia Optimus, so I use Bumblebee. Ah, I see this is in the Debian repos [1] -- maybe I should give Debian a try!<p>[1] <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/Bumblebee" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.debian.org/Bumblebee</a>
I have both installed for a few years now (Debian on Desktop and Server, Ubuntu on Laptop). First of all every article mentioning something like "I switched recently and everything is fine" just gives me a little sad smile. Yes - every Distro after a fresh install will usually work pretty well by now. Problems tend to show after using it daily for a few months.<p>My experience is that new Ubuntu versions tend to mess up things often, but I also notice that stuff gets fixed rather often within days. And otherwise one can find lots of workarounds and help thanks to a large and active community. That includes a workaround to disable the internet search for everything in the dash for example.<p>Debian is fantastic on the server and updates just worked there for me so far. On the Desktop on the other hand the situation is a lot more problematic. Old desktop software is generally just worse than newer one. And software on Debian tends to be outdated so much that I run constantly into old bugs which are solved often for months or even years in current application versions, but not yet in Debian. Pretty much every Desktop application where you want newer versions is simply not available. And applications generally won't get updated between release cycles because that's just not what stable does (except for security fixes). Even finding a browser which simply runs on all websites tends to be a constant pain. So you start trying to work with backports, custom compiled versions, installing packages build for Ubuntu and whatever you can do to get applications you need running - which can cause more and more problems in your system and you will get less and less help from the Debian community because those are (understandably) not "their" packages.<p>When you bring up those problems the community often recommends using "testing" or "unstable" and while those generally have newer apps they are still mostly outdated. Also while most updates on testing and unstable work most of the time they did mess up my system once in a while on updates so badly that I tended to only update on weekends after a while to have enough time to fix my system before I had to work with it again for the week (which is why I switched to only using stable now for the last 3 versions, maybe unstable/testing have gotten better since then, I can't tell about that).<p>I still love Debian for it's policy and community. And because I can fix problems often myself (or with the help of the community) and hope that my feedback is useful once in a while and will improve it in the long term I still continue to use it despite the pain. But unfortunately I can't recommend any Debian version right now for the Desktop for people without good Unix knowledge unless they work only with a very restricted set of desktop applications (so might be fine for company desktops where users are not allowed to install anything anyway).
For me there is a more mundane reason why I think about switching my servers over from Ubuntu to Debian.<p>"Graphics"<p>That's right. It seems that Ubutu even on servers starts some high-res console or does other stuff that causes a black screen during boot. It requires fiddling with alt-fx keys to get a console. I never had such issues with Debian.
I switched away from Debian because so many software was out-dated and an installation has max 3 years of support (Love the Ubuntu LTS versions), which I care about because I don't have a fully-automated server/service deployment environment using Ansible or something and manual reinstalling a server is a chore, especially if it's not really necessary.
I recently switched to Ubuntu from FreeBSD because of driver support problems (i.e. not willingly) and here's my take:<p>* Unity: I don't see what the big deal is. Granted, it's a subjective thing. As someone who generally dislikes DEs and would normally use just a tiling window manager maybe I don't appreciate the finer points in DE wars. I've been reluctant to install Xmonad because of the fear of what might break, and I have to say I've had no particular annoyances with Unity which I wouldn't have with any other desktop environment. Indeed, all the annoying stuff actually comes from GNOME components that they left. I find the Dash and HUD quite nice.<p>* Online scopes and advertising. In recent years I've come to the conclusion that a free (as in beer) general population friendly OS just isn't going to happen. The work needed to polish things to compete with Windows and OS X in this aspect is extremely boring. No hacker (or even average programmer) is going to spend his free time doing that. You have to be paid to do it. The money has to come from somewhere, thus advertising. I'm not a big fan this, but what Canonical is doing is at the moment our best shot of having a viable desktop OS which just works and lets you get on with your life (and even Ubuntu isn't there yet). And you can disable it with a single switch. Big deal.<p>* Shuttleworth trolling people... Well, it's certainly legitimate to not want to use an OS developed by a company owned by a person who says controversial stuff, but I don't see the technical angle. For example, is OS X better of worse because Jobs was a strange type? And as for Mir (that's what the issue revolves around), if Mir is a bad idea Wayland is also a bad idea. You just can't think Wayland is all peachy and Mir a horrible thing because they both basically do <i>the same</i> thing. All the talk about splitting the community (what community would that be?) makes no sense -- if Canonical decided they need complete control of their graphics stack it's a legitimate decision, and no one has any moral ground to attack that decision. In developing Mir they are not interfering with Wayland in any way, they are simply not participating. (BTW, I don't think either Wayland or Mir are good ideas, we'll end up with the situation we have in OS X, where X can be tacked on when necessary, and it is often necessary, with who knows what kind of crappy support.)<p>I'm no fan of Shuttleworth or Ubuntu, I really just don't care about either on any emotional level, but I'd like a FOSS OS which is also free as in beer AND just works on the desktop and lets me get on with my work and life. After you get to a certain age in life, fiddling with the OS gets old real fast.
I'd like to see CentOS, but with the desktop environment stuff kept more up to date.. Would give you solid underpinnings that lasts for years, then a modern UI on top (Gnome 3, KDE what have you, Chrome, Firefox).. I know its mostly doable, and did use a CentOS 6 desktop until a while ago, but ran into some issues with modern desktop apps.
I also had an experience of installing debian recently, and finding it 'just work' extremely well.<p>Especially if you have a set up (window-manager, etc) that you like and aren't searching for a new cool updated-by-other-people UI (like windows, OSX, KDE, Gnome and Unity), then debian is really quite easy to set up.
I have hopes for the Tanglu project delivering on the promise of rolling releases based on Debian Testing for desktop use. But they aren't quite there yet unfortunately.<p><a href="http://www.tanglu.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tanglu.org/</a>
I tried Fedora (Korora spin) for a few months. However, battery life was bad and Chrome got buggy. Back to Ubuntu LTS (with Gnome 2) for now.<p>Will probably try Debian stable + lots of backports next.
<a href="https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD" rel="nofollow">https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD</a><p>and the points 1 and 2 are out