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Comment by NateDad | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr is where you want to be. It Just Works, plus there's a huge and awesome community to help out if you have questions. I haven't tried the derivatives, like Mint or Elementary, but I've heard good things. Note that even though Ubuntu is based on Debian, you do not want Debian... It's release cycle is a lot slower, the UI is much less polished, and you'll be stuck with versions of software that are really really out of date.

A note on the name and version - 14.04 means released in April 2014, and the names go up alphabetically per release (T U V etc).

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Fedora's another solid option; it's much more bleeding edge than the Ubuntu LTS releases, but it upgrades cleanly and tends to be very developer-friendly.

Fedora is a great platform if you like to be living in the future, where what Fedora does today is what other distributions will reluctantly pick up on in a few years.

Fedora was one of the first to move to chkconfig-style scripts, and it was one of the first to systemd. It sort of forces you to learn new things, even if you don't want to.

The big downside is the updates taper off really quickly, so unless you keep rolling forward, you'll soon end up with an orphan distribution. Fedora is the philosophical opposite of the Ubuntu LTS releases.

Fedora's also a buggy mess at least 99% of the time. It's not something I would readily recommend to even an experienced user, let alone one new to GNU/Linux, unless they're prepared to use an operating system which is in no way meant to be stable.

This is true if you're running pre-releases, but what kinds of issues have you had elsewhere?

I've been running Fedora for over a decade, and while it suffers from being bleeding edge sometimes, I don't think I've ever had stability issues or things I'd describe as a buggy mess.

I've only used "stable" Fedora releases (i.e. the ones officially released, named funny names, etc.). I think the most recent I used was whatever one came right before Spherical Cow (or maybe Beefy Miracle; my mind has done a good job of suppressing Fedora from my memory, which I'm thankful for, lest I be diagnosed with PTSD); whatever it was right when Fedora had switched over to systemd.

Fedora would throw kernel panics on seemingly-minor things. Things like starting Xfce instead of GNOME3, for example. Things like running for more than 15 minutes. Silly cases. The hardware was not the problem; it handled Slackware (a non-systemd distro) and openSUSE (a systemd distro) quite alright. Because it handled openSUSE alright, I knew it wasn't systemd itself either (though that certainly didn't help).

Fast forward a year or so, and I'm investigating using Fedora in order to leverage FreeIPA to authenticate against an Active Directory environment. Fine and dandy for all of three days, after which Fedora magically forgot all my network settings without any explicable rhyme or reason. Switched back over to openSUSE (which also has AD integration features - and much more polished ones, so I found), and everything worked fine for several months (after which I ended up finding a better job anyway).

To put this in perspective, I've found everything from Debian Sid to Arch to Slackware-current to openSUSE Factory significantly more stable than Fedora. I've also found RHEL and CentOS to be significantly more stable than Fedora. By some god-forsaken Beefy Antimiracle, Fedora somehow manages to fail even harder than Softlanding Linux System (which - if you know your distro history - was so awful as to cause Pat Volkerding and Ian Murdock to create Slackware and Debian (respectively) in a desperate bid to give people good reason to not use Softlanding Linux System). That's absolutely depressing that an ancient and horribly-designed distro from 1993 running on my ancient Compaq Presario 1210 runs better than a supposedly-modern distro like Fedora.

> you'll be stuck with versions of software that are really really out of date

I've had way more trouble with out of date packages on Ubuntu than Debian (Sid).

> I've had way more trouble with out of date packages on Ubuntu than Debian (Sid).

Just my two cents, but I've had way more trouble with missing packages. It's a pity, but Ubuntu repositories are growing at a much faster pace.

If I want the latest and greatest I can always compile from source...

Just to add to your comment. I've had almost zero issues with Sid, and the issues I've had I've avoided by using apt-listbugs anyways. I can't say that when I tired Ubuntu and Mint. Mint actually botched my install on an update, took me 3 hours to undo the mess and I promptly backed up and installed Debian on that machine. YMMV

> awesome community

I think a lot of us have had mixed experiences. I've had some that were awesome, but some that made #python look like a hippie drum circle.

(Of course, sometimes #python is a hippie drum circle, but that's another conversation.)

I agree. The problem is Ubuntu is too popular, so you get many "mainstream" users responding with really nasty hacks to make things work rather than fixing things properly.

Arch linux (actually I use a spin off called Manjaro) seems to be a lot better in that regard.

There's also a lot of impatience, intolerance, and infighting.

I've always liked Arch. I'll give Manjaro a look at some point.

Agreed. Too often it's the blind leading the blind.

"Oh download this script, and run it as root", or "Edit this file and paste the following". With no real understanding or awareness.

Arch is starting to suffer from similar problems, though, from what I can see; a large number of Ubuntu users are graduating to it and its relatives.

That said, as a Slackware user, I'll admit to the Arch wiki being one of my go-to stops for reading up on how to tweak some program or other; Arch's wiki and the Slackbook are both on pretty equal footing for the closest things the GNU/Linux world has to OpenBSD's manpages in terms of complete and comprehensive documentation on ever last facet of the underlying system.

Arch does seem to have a higher bar of entry, i.e. its a bit complicated to install. Ubuntu always seemed to aim itself at the inexperienced Linux user. I still have it on one of my machines as its the easiest way to get around secure boot.

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