10 Linux distros to watch in 2014

Names of some distros. Short descriptions. Some image. No orginal content. Some remarks but no reasoning about why a distro was included in the list. Little surplus value in comparison to the top 10 distros of http://distrowatch.com.

Its been interesting to watch journalist distro reviews over the decades.

In the olden days it was all about the install. The difference between a good or bad distro was did the installer have a graphical image on boot, or text mode. No journalist commentary on OS features or actual usage, the sole quality of an entire OS was just the installer. According to the journalists no one ever does anything with linux that install it over and over while admiring the installer.

Now its all about the window manager, with a small side dish of large corporation gossip. Nothing is ever heard anymore about the beauty of the installer. Something that remains the same is no one ever discusses the OS underneath the window manager. According to the journalists no one actually does anything with linux other than admire weird and counterintuitive desktop managers while occasionally gossiping about how this mega corporation likes alpha blending but that corporation likes multitouch, often without the journalist knowing what it even means.

No one ever talks about the professionals who mostly look at how quickly are security issues patched and pushed, whats the upgrade experience look like, how big is the mirror network, how many devs are working on the OS (as a proxy for how many people could we hire...) and most importantly licensing constraints. I admit I was pretty unprofessional in 1996 when I switched everything to Debian just so I could hand a copy of the DFSG to the software license audit goons and tell them to go away, and like a magic incantation, they surprisingly did, and its worked like a magic scroll of protection for me ever since. Here's a copy of my sources.list (now a days a puppet recipe) showing none of the servers I have control over run anything other than main, here's the DFSG, heres a print out of the GPL and BSD and a bunch of other DFSG licenses, and my signature, now go away. Costs the linux admins like 10 minutes annually and $0 while the windows admins end up spending weeks and six figures each time.

Of course for anyone working server-side, Ubuntu 14.04 (the next LTS) and RHEL 7 are going to be the biggest deal of all, I think. I don't see the value in much of this commentary, but I agree the some of the "X server wars" may influence popularity. I switched to openSuSE recently for very related reasons and was happy with the choice - so that prediction may have stock...

I used to follow linux distros very closely. I tried out new releases all the time, and spent hours (days, weeks) tweaking desktop environments.

Now I just use Ubuntu with Unity and Get Stuff Done. I look forward to Ubuntu 14.04. It better be rock solid.

I think what will cause most damage to the ubuntu popularity is the new Unity integration with advertisers, I for one, start using Mint instead, getting the ubuntu environment I'm used to without all the bullshit.

The list:

elementary OS

Ubuntu Touch

openSUSE

ChromeOS

Lubuntu

Mer + Plasma Active

Mint

Arch

SteamOS

Roll Your Own - At this point, the tools for building your own Linux distribution are mature and easy.

Nor amazed with the list... Include http://bedrocklinux.org/ at least.

I stopped reading this at the Arch entry. It makes the list based on a "hunch", with no elaboration or even speculation? Why should I care about this author's hunch?

I think 2014 is the year for fedora. It is the best solution I see to avoid the insane unity and to have a reliable, modern mainstream distribution.

Elementary OS is the best. Problem is, it's buggy and would freeze on me atleast 3x a day.

Would somebody please write a random "X Y of Z" generator already?

Can somebody please tell me what elementary OS is based on? Ubuntu?

Use elementary OS everyday, and love it.