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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure this is a good release, but Ubuntu itself is going through some serious turmoil at the moment. Seems to me like there's a good chance it's going to wither on the vine in the next five years. What's worse, there don't seem to be many alternatives if you're looking for a "just works" desktop experience.

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> Ubuntu itself is going through some serious turmoil at the moment.

I suppose you mean the recent news about abandoning Unity and focusing on a gnome shell desktop for 18.04 LTS? Sure, it must suck for those who have invested a lot of their time and soul into Unity and are now losing their jobs.

Personally, having used fvwm, olvwm, afterstep, window maker, gnome 1, 2, 3, kde 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, fluxbox, unity, xmonad and a dozen more or less shorter acquaintances, my experience is that I can get work done on all of them. What the Linux desktop needs is not yet another reiteration of roughly the same concepts, but more elbow grease and polishing. Which happens when you have more users and developers. So with three of the major distros shipping with gnome 3 out of the box (ubuntu, fedora, debian) I think this will eventually be a net positive for the Linux desktop experience.

I tried using i3 for a while and loved it, but there were various, for lack of a better word, "desktop integration magic" things that I could only get to work reliably running in gnome or unity.

Thinks like hot plugging thunderbolt and having audio work perfectly, monitors readjust automatically, and variable dpi support. Actually so far ubuntu's been the only distro that makes it work well. This is the only reason I use unity.

For this you can still run the background daemons from the other DEs, for example gnome-settings-daemon or lxsession.

Yup, I use lxsession and lxrandr. It can be a little strange on a laptop when connecting and disconnecting other displays, but it's only a slight inconvenience. For me the trade off is extremely worth it, because hotkeys flow through my veins.

I think you're taking a somewhat optimistic take on what's happening. Lord knows I've wished Ubuntu would ditch Unity and Mir, but I'm unconvinced that they're refocussing on Gnome/Wayland, they're just giving up on the desktop.

I guess time will tell if your optimism or my pessimism is correct.

> if you're looking for a "just works" desktop experience.

Pretty much every popular distro has this experience nowadays. Fedora(as a sibling poster mentioned) is indeed one of them and may I add, at least, twice as stable.

What's the best way to get patent encumbered media working with Fedora for non Americans?

apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras, does it in Ubuntu.

Install the free and non-free rpmfusion repos https://rpmfusion.org/

Is there some form of LTS for Fedora? I'm lazy and only upgrade my system once a couple of years.

Only CentOS/RHEL, but it's probably not for you if you'd like a distro with cutting edge software packages.

On the other hand, although I understand your need, keeping the /home in a different partition and just installing the next Fedora release every 13 months does the job for the most part. And the installation(from a USB) is not more than 15-20 minutes.

Fedora's strong point is that packages are pretty new (not quite Arch). This is also its weak point. The idea that it's stable is just funny. It also doesn't even pretend to support upgrades. If you want stable, try CentOS or Debian Stable.

I use Fedora as my primary development OS in my various machines for ~8 years. Previously I was on various SuSE versions and even farther back I was on Slack.

Around 2011-2013, I used on my work(office) machines Ubuntu while I continued to have Fedora on my laptop.

Fedora not only did it have more recent packages, it was so much more stable than ubuntu that it was incomparable.

In general I find Ubuntu as the most unstable distro one could use :/

Also, dist upgrades are a bit unnecessary when you can have your /home in a separate partition and do a fresh install of the newer Fedora version in a couple of minutes.

It seems to be an unpopular opinion, but I completely agree. Personally I find Arch to suit my needs better than Fedora, but I do recommend Fedora to friends who aren't going to be setting up i3-wm and want access to the AUR. In the last five years, Ubuntu has been the only distro to cause me major problems that weren't easily resolved. That might partially be familiarity with Arch, but something tells me it's a little more to do with Canonical.

    > It also doesn't even pretend to support upgrades

How so? I installed Fedora 21 a couple of years ago and I've been continuously upgrading it up to 25. I've never encountered a single problem with the operating system itself (only with the NVidia driver, which is a major source of pain for all Linux systems, I guess.)

yep since 21 it's also really table, had some problems on 17, 18, 19, 20, but after that it was rock solid. (even with rpmfusion enabled)

> ... doesn't even pretend to support upgrades.

This was certainly true in the past but hasn't really been the case for the last couple of years.

Fedora upgrades work very well these days

Mint is a great just works as is most distro based on ubuntu.

Yes, but if Ubuntu becomes a historical distro it'll be dead in the water.

nah, they also have a version based on debian

If you're talking about gnome/wayland, I'd call that the opposite of 'turmoil.' Those were both huge requests in the HN thread, and while I personally liked Unity more, I'm really happy with the decision-making and I think it will result in a better distro.

Fedora is pretty good imo

I rank distros like this:

DIY: Arch Linux > Slackware

Compile It Yourself: Gentoo > BSDs

Friendly: Fedora > Mint > Ubuntu > Solus > countless other Desktop Env specific distros

Developer Focused: openSUSE > NixOS > Fedora > Debian

How does openSUSE do compared against Fedora, FreeBSD and Debian (testing) for developers? I'm currently running Ubuntu but the experience is not as smooth as I want: I've had several freezes and kernel panics, even though my laptop is well supported (from Ubuntu 14.04, at least).

I want something that's a bit stable with more recent packages. FreeBSD seems to be semi-rolling release, comparing package versions in the 'current' release with that in the snapshot versions. Debian testing has packages as recent as I can use, but I heard it's less stable than Ubuntu and bad things happen too. I'm considering Fedora, but I prefer rolling release distros to fixed release ones (I don't want Rawhide for stability sake). OpenSUSE has older packages in its repos: PHP < 7.0, gcc < 6, ...

First things first. Set up a VM with Arch Linux, Slackware, Gentoo or if you are feeling adventurous Linux From Scratch. It'll go a long way to help you learn how Linux systems work. (Don't install a graphical environment, plain X server is OK though).

Now to your original question:

If you want bleeding edge packages go with either Arch Linux, Gentoo, openSUSE or Solus. I haven't used openSUSE as extensively I'd like to but haven't had any issues with it yet. The package format is a bit too much if you want to create your own packages though. openSUSE ticks all the marks in your checklist too.

Other than that I will suggest to keep your local dev environment as close to production as SANELY possible. Fedora and openSUSE are good bets.

Personally for rolling releases I've found Arch Linux to be the best (not because they are rolling release but because they generally keep the packages without any modifications from upstream). There is a huge selection of packages. But it suffers with the problem that it's not used in production and hence some issues can't be caught on it.

I mentioned that stability is a concern for me. Don't you think Arch Linux feeding packages from upstream might not be ideal for me? That's the reason I highlighted Debian testing instead of Debian unstable.

I've used Slackware before, and it was an easy look into the system; except that package management is a bit stressful on Slackware, and its packages are not so up-to-date.

I'm running a VM with FreeBSD now; how suitable it can be for a laptop, I don't know yet. Battery life matters there too.

Fedora looks good; I already have a Fedora 24 disc, so I might go from there instead of Slackware. openSUSE tumbleweed looks great too. I'll probably try it.

I haven't used FreeBSD on laptops. openSUSE is the best best for you I'd say. It's stable enough, had very good package repositories and is used by quite a lot of people. Fedora has the same issues regarding up to date packages.

I can't vouch for the package breakages on any system other than Fedora. I've just had a single package breakage on Arch in over a year. It was fixed by simply moving a file and making a symlink.

I haven't used openSUSE in awhile but I think I'll have to try it again now haha

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