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Comment by aboutus | Hacker News Reader

I haven't used Linux for a few years now (KDE was always my go-to GUI), but after reading this article[1], I've decided to go back.

What is the hot new Linux distro on the block? Elementary OS? Tails? Steam OS?

[1] https://medium.com/backchannel/why-i-m-saying-goodbye-to-app...

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Remember http://distrowatch.com/ was the place to go look at recent distros.

I used to be a distro geek, test all kinds of various ones, various window manager, twiddle driver settings and all.

Now just use Ubuntu for the last 7 years and like it. It just lets me get the work done.

I'm mid-switch back to OpenBSD. If you have the luxury of picking supported hardware, it's actually a pretty awesome experience--just like I remember from a decade ago, but with incremental improvements and up-to-date packages that are a snap to install.

I just use Ubuntu LTS with Unity.

In the early days (Slackware 2.0 onwards) I used to test every distro and windows manager, eventually I got tired of it.

Nowadays I tend to use Windows on my main laptop and Ubuntu does everything I need on VMs and my travel laptop, without spending time messing with configurations.

Of the ones I've tried recently, I liked manjaro a lot. It's based on Arch, so you get cutting-edge software, access to the AUR (really great) and good default configuration (with vanilla arch you have to set up everything yourself). It has the standard DE's, I used xfce. You might want to check out Korora, it also looks pretty cool.

DE-wise, KDE's Plasma5 and LXQt both look pretty cool, though not many distros have them yet.

+1 on Manjaro. I used Ubuntu but got sick of their changing the UI EVERY couple years. Switched to Manjaro 6 months ago & it's soo much better. No crazy shit like Ubuntu's forked kernel (they had to backport Intel's BDW gfx driver recently). Just plain upstream packages nicely configured to install. As a dev it's wonderful.

I use Linux Mint on my main computer, but have used Xubuntu with good results. It's particularly good for older hardware.

You might want to use Kubuntu if you're a KDE fan.

SteamOS is only made for Gaming though. You can go back to desktop mode but nothing's really added versus Stock Debian there.

I'd recommend Mint, they use Cinnamon as their Windows Manager and it's pretty cool.

Agree with Mint. Its Cinnamon experience is excellent and, if it turns out you're not a fan, it's just Ubuntu: you can switch to any of the other desktops without reinstalling.

Or you could just use Ubuntu, and install the Cinnamon desktop.

Yeah, but I find the Mint experience often more polished vs Ubuntu. In Ubuntu (at least in previous versions) there was always a bug somewhere that annoyed me, in Mint it's almost flawless.

I need something that just works for the parents. (Since Unity, Ubuntu has been on a constant slow slide downwards usability-wise.) I tried Mint on a recommendation, but their idea of an upgrade was a re-install (really!), so that was a no-go. Any other ideas?

Manjaro with XFCE.

Mint is good. Cinnamon is pretty, but occasionally has problems that I don't see since I swapped to XFCE (it randomly started hogging the CPU, I never worked out why).

Manjaro needed a few more tweaks to get things working at first, but I have had less problems afterwards.

You can't go wrong with Ubuntu, or just plain old Debian.

Manjaro looks pretty cool.

+1 on that, it's awesome. Switched 6 months ago from Ubuntu & could never switch back.

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