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Comment by mmgutz | Hacker News Reader

Hard to beat Ubuntu LTS. It has plenty of documentation and community support, has mostly up-to-date drivers and runs VirtualBox. LTS offers stability over several years. I use Xubuntu variant with i3. Moreover, I prefer to develop on the same OS I deploy to.

ArchLinux: Great community but too many surprises when updating that sometimes break things or in one case left the OS unbootable. Fun to tinker with but if your livelihood depends on it, choose something more stable.

Fedora: good option but no LTS version

Debian: slow to upgrade and doesn't support newer hardware

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Running Ubuntu LTS on personal machine + cloud servers.

Pros:

- It's stable

- Easy to replicate same environment on home/cloud machines

- Handles millions of request daily, just fine

- Almost all popular s/w packages are easily available

Cons:

- Some advanced manufacturer specific laptop features/drivers don't work out of the box

- No real complaints. I'm getting great value for no money.

Yeah that imo best. I do donate 10$ during every year upgrade.

Fedora has really cleaned up the release upgrade process over the last couple versions. Transitioning from Fedora 24 to 25 was surprisingly painless!

The fact that you are celebrating one recent successful upgrade is telling.

I used Ubuntu prior to Fedora and I never experienced a single clean upgrade. I can't speak for recent versions of Ubuntu though.

Debian's rolling release system is the solution for this. Ubuntu's 6 month release cycle is a nightmare.

Painless for you maybe. Gnome Software wouldn't let me upgrade, so I had to do it through a terminal. Afterwards, I found that the graphics in certain videogames were broken. I tried fucking around with drivers, but ended up bricking my OS. In my effort to recover, I destroyed my boot sector, and thereby made my windows partition inaccessible (destroying another avenue to playing games). I tried backdating fedora to v 24, but now it won't let me play the video game either. Absolutely painful.

Ubuntu LTS follows almost the exact release cadence as Debian stable, so if it is slow to upgrade then so is Ubuntu. If you ignore LTS then you would have to compare that to Debian unstable to compare apples to apples in which case Debian would usually be faster to get updates.

> Debian:

> slow to upgrade

More or less the same as Ubuntu LTS, ~2 years.

> and doesn't support newer hardware

Enable non-free, install firmwares and now they're almost equal in terms of hardware support (which one has newer kernel depends on the year). For support comparable to HWE stack kernels use the kernel from backports repository and now Debian probably has even better hw support because backports kernel is updated every ~3 months following mainline, while Ubuntu follows latest non-LTS Ubuntu kernel, thus every 6 months).

It's been more than a decade these claims aren't true anymore. Please stop repeating the same old myths.

Fedora LTS is Centos / RHEL

Ubuntu is a good option. It is easy and things work. I've run virtualization of other Linux distros on it fine. The documentation and message boards are robust. The desktop bug reporting system has a lot of traffic (although it is not necessarily better).

If you need the very latest packages (although Ubuntu has PPA), or are developing for Linux itself, or want to know whether system components are all FLOSS, another distro might be better. For ease of setup and maintenance and stability, Ubuntu is good.

+1 for the latest LTS Xubuntu

>Debian: slow to upgrade and doesn't support newer hardware

zzzzzzzz

This is said so often it's not even fun anymore. Debian stable is made for servers, for stuff that's not going to move for ten years and is supposed to be up 99.9999% of the time. Run testing and your problems are solved. Recent hardware is supported, relatively recent versions of all software are in the repositories, depending on the maintainer. Or run unstable if you're feeling adventurous

Agree it's made for servers. Great for older machines. Too often I've run into old libraries when I want to use a recent desktop app. I'm not knocking Debian but its kernel is older, dependencies are older. Great for stability. Ubuntu (based on Debian as you know) IMHO is a better laptop distro.

That's what Debian backports (https://backports.debian.org/) are for. Best of both worlds - run stable as your base distribution, use backports whenever you need a more recent version of something.

E.g. Debian stable comes with kernel 3.16, but 4.8 is available as an official backport, should you need the (almost) latest and greatest. Just add backports to sources.list && apt update && apt -t jessie-backports install linux-image-amd64.

Unstable is hardly adventurous. I have ran unstable for 15+ years as my desktop/laptop. I have never had more than a couple hours of downtime and no data loss. Things rarely break in unstable anymore, that's what experimental is for. Moreover apt-listbugs prompts me about bugs in any package I am about to upgrade.

Seriously, install apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges. Unstable is not that adventurous.

Solid points.

> Moreover, I prefer to develop on the same OS I deploy to.

Me too, but I use containers (Docker) or VMs to achieve this.

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