An interview with Derek Sivers

They're kind of bad (there's always that other excuse: limit yourself) seeing how the majority users are hooked like a drug addict lately (crackberry is an example)

That said, I loved Slackware and FreeBSD when I ran them. Arch has more in common with those OSes than the Debian or Red Hat derived Linux distros. If you have the patience to learn, you will likely break it in just like Derek describes.

Upsides: a beautiful, modern, easy-to-use, not-glitchy graphical environment for everything. A decent built-in package manager with rolling updates. Support for most of the basics.

Downsides: No easy rollbacks (yet) on the package manager, so if an update breaks something, you'll have a hassle. Hardware support still lacking (my laptop's trackpad isn't detected; I haven't had time yet to see about porting drivers for it).

I set mine up with Chrome and the built-in terminal and a few other basics in Linux, and then installed the VirtualBox package and (after massaging it a little bit) got it running a Windows 7 environment where I have my preferred text editor of choice and a few other goodies. A shared drive is set up between the two that allows me to, for example, run a local web server on the Linux side and edit the files in the current project in the Windows VM. I really really like this setup.

I love OpenBSD too, and have used Debian a lot, and we use Ubuntu (and other Linuxes) in the shop for various things, but this is the first distribution I've been happy with for regular desktop use.

If you want to give it a serious try and have any questions, drop me an email and I'll see if I can help.

I really wanted to go with Arch but there are simply some desktop things I need and I want them to work out of the box and not spend days figuring it out.

Reasons I couldn't stick with Arch: things like Skype microphone, URL links in various apps able to open the correct browser, consistent key bindings, laptop power management. That last one was a killer for me. In the end, I've settled on Lubuntu 11.10. Lubuntu's LXDE setup is clean and light. It lets me stick with an Ubuntu repo system without suffering through what may be a multi-year Unity breaking-in process.

My personal suggestion isn't really a distro: I recommend any distro that runs KDE well. I think Arch is fine for KDE, but I haven't tried it. OpenSUSE and the KDE spin of Fedora are both great; I would probably side with the latter if I had to, but both would do. Kubuntu was not great; I would avoid it.

I like KDE because it's very configurable and consistent. Also, it's shiny. I like shiny :) You really should try it.

Emphasizing "as a good starting point," I'd recommend anything in the Ubuntu branch. This includes Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu and Xubuntu, as well as Mint, based on Ubuntu. The Ubuntu repository system is excellent.

My favorite is Lubuntu, because it's "just your stuff" with very minimal "vestigial crap" (as the old Anybody's Bike Book https://duckduckgo.com/?q=anybody%27s+bike+book would call it). Lubuntu does have a few small rough edges, but I like its usable minimalism.

At the moment I don't think the main Ubuntu/Unity variant is good as a starting point, because its UI is significantly different from all other distros and therefore does not lead you down a path of expectations to look for when you eventually try other distros. In other words, Ubuntu/Unity mainly teaches you about Ubuntu/Unity, whereas most other distros give you more general Linux UI experience and expectations. Welcome to the Ubuntu/Unity world, as opposed to welcome to the Linux Universe.

When you're at a "starting point," then you want a distro that doesn't demand attention. Distros like Arch and Gentoo are for people who are ready and willing to spend time getting things going exactly the way they want. When you're at a starting point you don't necessarily know exactly how you want things, and being forced to choose is stressful.

Treat your first starting point distro as a stable base, from which you can learn. Branch out from there as far as you want, at your chosen speed. Dual booting and virtual machines will allow you to try experiments at little cost. But if you're also GSD, you want to be able to completely ignore your distro whenever you want.