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Comment by banachtarski | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, as a developer who's constantly trying out distros and stuff, over the years I've concluded that Ubuntu is a really suboptimal starting point.

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It's funny that his first tip is to change the desktop appearance, or as he calls it, "do[ing] a hack" :/. The rest of the "tips" are spent fighting the defaults when he could've chosen a different distro.

I don't think the headline reflects the content or that there's much of a takeaway for devs, hence flagged.

I could probably give a nice rant for each distro I've tried and why they're all horrible. Ubuntu is probably my favorite, but IMO there is no "good" when it comes to OS's.

Every single UI and every single complete set of defaults has a fair number of things wrong with it. Instability, insecurity, lagging feature set, slow ui, ugly and non-intuitive ui, bad documentation, inconsistency everywhere. There is none that are good.

My own 'trying distros and stuff' involves learning the keyboard shortcuts for doing stuff, enabling virtual desktops and changing one or two shortcut bindings.

Having done all this, Ubuntu is a very well thought starting point.

Once you get beyond keyboard shortcuts and stuff (which isn't the distro, it's the window/desktop manager), the thing to evaluate is the package manager (how are files laid out, how are releases done, how do rollbacks happen, how is the kernel updated, etc). Along with that, what init system is used, how sane the defaults are, etc. Beyond that, I think about how community packages work, and how good the documentation is for, well everything.

Ubuntu loses in every one of these categories for me compared to Arch.

I politely disagree about the package manager, and I think that Ubuntu model is the best of both worlds: PPAs are the best thing ever for any software I want to have cutting edge (community packages), and stable packages are better for the rest.

The documentation is also very good.

The init system has been changing and I don't have an opinion about it, except that it seems systemd took over the world and any alternatives will die.

I can only conclude that we are both fanboys.

So what is the optimal starting point in your opinion?

That depends where you want to go with your system, but Unity seems to be one of the most obnoxious Desktop Environments when trying to get it to look different from its default-look.

Apart from that, if you're going to replace most of the DE-functionality with dedicated components anyways, you'll want to start out with a more minimal DE, if possible, for the sake of resource usage.

Arch Linux.... or another rolling distro.

You get the software releases as quickly as possible.

This empowers you to work with the latest releases and also forces you to be more conscious of what is supported by which software release. In which case you spin up VMs to test out all the other distros / software releases for compatibility concerns.

My 2 cents... Sometimes Ubuntu 14.04 will be perfectly fine for whatever environment you need...

Most people here are replying Arch. That's what I keep coming back to. (over and over again)

Arch maybe a better starting point than Ubuntu

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