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Comment by pjungwir | Hacker News Reader

So even though this article is from early 2015, commenters here seem to confirm 14.04 is still bad. I've been feeling guilty lately for running 12.04 and am just waiting for a slow weekend to upgrade. I run Xubuntu and have no intention of adopting Unity. I have two monitors with an Nvidia video card. I like how in Ubuntu things "just work". Also I like running the same OS as many of my production servers. But maybe in spite of that it's time to try a new distro? Any recommendations?

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Ubuntu 16.04 is coming out April 21st, I have high hopes for it. There is a lot of really cool stuff coming in the new release. Perhaps you could give it a go.

I mostly use ubuntu on the server, but jump between Debian, CoreOS and Ubuntu, and mostly have had a pretty good experience with ubuntu on the server.

I run Xubuntu 14.04 here and it's been great. I thought it was a worthy upgrade to 12.04. Also I just put it on a friend's new Lenovo (dual boot) at his request and he is enjoying it, having only used Windows before. So I kind of get the feeling that OP has at least a few very particular system-specific or setup-specific things (I don't even use bluetooth, let alone on multiple systems) going on that aren't affecting everybody. Could be wrong.

My main machine has been a Macbook Pro for the last 4 years, and as long as I don't need to be using Photoshop or Coda, I'd rather be using Xubuntu on a system with even half the specs.

A lot of my customers use Ubuntu on their production servers, but I don't really understand why. You're getting the latest stuff, but there's no guarantee that it all works reliably. They invariably come across problems such as imagemagick crashing (on an earlier version of ubuntu), or avconv using up all your memory when converting some ogv files to mp4 (current bug on 14.04), plus a bunch of others.

I always use CentOS on my servers, and have been very happy with it. It's rock solid. I haven't even upgraded to CentOS 7 yet. I just moved to a new server in March and decided to stick with CentOS 6 until systemd becomes a bit more stable.

Using 14.04 for last 2 years. Not issues till now except when i changed my config from AMD to Intel( along with video card).

I've been running Ubuntu 14.04 for a couple of months now for my home/dev PC. My experience overall has been excellent. I run VMWare Workstation 12 pro for my test environments.

The only recommendation I have is to never run Ubuntu with an AMD card with their proprietary drivers.

If you don't mind using a command line, switch to Arch. It's always up-to-date, it never breaks, proprietary software like Steam and the nvidia drivers are available in the official repos, and it doesn't force crap like Unity onto you.

I am happy using the command line and even prefer it to GUIs. I've always thought that Arch was a "project" distro, like having a car you work on every weekend. I spend enough hours fussing with systems already, so I want my desktop to "just work". In the past I thought Ubuntu was the "just works" distribution, but perhaps that is changing. "Never breaks" is pretty appealing. Maybe my stereotype about Arch is wrong!

I've been using Arch for a decade, and it's the only Linux distro whose package management I find to be sane.

I spend about one minute per day maintaining my machine by executing "pacman -Syu" to upgrade all installed packages before I log out. Occasionally (once or twice a month), I'll need to manually port my changes to a config file into a new version of that config file. Rarely (once a year), I'll need to hunt down and fix something that broke. For example, a few years ago the proprietary nvidia drivers dropped support for my graphics card, so X refused to start until I installed the legacy drivers. Extremely rarely (count-on-one-hand), Arch will make a major system change that requires manual intervention, such as the switch from SysV to systemd. Breaking changes like those are noted on the arch-announce mailing list and the homepage <https://www.archlinux.org/>.

It has an intimidating install process, but once you understand the system and have it up and running, it's actually very low maintenance. I attribute this to the fact that it doesn't try to "do anything for you," which usually actually means "break the system for you" in my experience.

> I spend about one minute per day maintaining my machine by executing "pacman -Syu" to upgrade all installed packages before I log out.

For anyone else thinking of trying arch, this bit is actually important. The one sure way to make Arch break is to try and treat it like debian stable where you just get a working system and then expect to not touch anything for several months at a time.

If you do that in arch, you'll likely be unable to use the package manager for much of anything, because the versions of things you have installed will have rolled off the end of the "rolling release" system. Arch expects you to do an upgrade of all installed packages ("pacman -Syu") at least every couple of weeks -- daily is a pretty common pattern. He's right, that the process is almost always completely painless, but you still have to do it. Wait too long and the upgrade command simply won't work without you doing a fair amount of manual recovery.

Configuring has become a lot easier. I also preferred the desktop to "just work" but with a little work at the beginning I now have a laptop that "just works". Every now and then you have to do some more work because of a major upgrade of some software package. But I prefer that over a major upgrade of the entire OS every few years. I also feel like more non-standard stuff is supported properly. No fiddling with unofficial packages. Just use AUR. (Which technically also is unsupported but still has quite good quality packages)

That definitely was my experience with Arch. In my early twenties it was fun and I learnt a lot but it was also a huge time sink.

Come to think of it, that was my problem with desktop Linux in general: small things broke frequently and often times I was tweaking/fixing the OS late into the night.

So I built a Hackintosh 3 years ago and never looked back, haha. It's more stable than any distro I've used.

Did you use it in the ol' rc.conf days? :) Things have improved greatly since the systemd switch.

The initial install is certainly that way -- the install media drops you to a command line and you get to partition/format disks, write network config files, etc., yourself -- but once it's running, things are very smooth. Everything is close to upstream so you don't have distro-specific crud that breaks randomly. It's a rolling release model so you just update daily or weekly and don't worry about big (12.04 -> 14.04) jumps. And as GP mentioned, the package repository is pretty comprehensive, and the community-contributed packages (AURs) exist for every obscure thing you could imagine -- Skype, Steam, etc. Definitely worth a try IMHO.

I don't think "never breaks" is an appropriate description of Arch. At the very least, you should read the mailing list to know what updates to beware of because they might break in a big way.

Well, yeah. Subscribing to arch-announce and following the instructions is a required part of maintenance.

Yes. Arch is often "broken" intentionally, like when they switched to Py3 as the default about 1.5 years after its release. If you're not paying attention and you're not competent to recognize what's going on when your Python-based applications stop working, Arch is going to look "broken". I think this is a good test case for whether someone is suited for Arch or not; would you know what to do if you started getting weird errors that executed /usr/bin/python expecting python2 and got python3 instead? No? Maybe Arch isn't for you [yet].

Despite that, I find Arch is the least disruptive distro to daily work because it doesn't meddle. Canonical is full of people who think they are Steve Jobs and decide they're going to overhaul System Y with some super-special never-before-seen invented-here components this release because it's the visionary way to do things (and that other competing revitalization effort that's seeing widespread adoption, well, it's not). The result is 2-3 Ubuntu releases that are bug-ridden and really not production ready until the new system can stabilize. It seems as soon as one major userspace component begins to mature they decide to rip out another core component (Gnome->Unity; X->Mir).

Source: Arch and Ubuntu user for the last 10+ years

How are Arch fonts? I use CentOS on a VM. I dislike Ubuntu, but it's the only distribution that has good fonts.

The infinality patches make fonts look awesome on any distro, can be a bit of a pain to get working properly but I find it worth it.

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