Thinking of trying a new distro, any recommendations?

[whm1974]

Give Manjaro a shot. You will like it. But read their forum and Wiki. There have only been a few times I had things break when updating, but manage to fix them. Manjaro is more stable then Arch from what I read- but it is a rolling release so do be prepared.

 

[adamantine.me]

Ubuntu 16.04 might be worth installing and settling down with for a while.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Ubuntu 16.04 might be worth installing and settling down with for a while.

It still has some... quirks. At least the server version.

 

[adamantine.me]

It still has some... quirks. At least the server version.

Anything quirky enough that it should be avoided until further notice..?

 

[Red Squirrel]

Does stock Ubuntu still have that terrible UI where they basically pulled off a windows 8 and got rid of all the basic stuff like the start menu? I remember installing that once and within 5 minutes I was installing something else. There are different versions of ubuntu like Xubuntu Kubuntu etc... so those are options too. Problem is when you're googling for anything it's usually hard to find info for those specific ones as everything will be for the main one.

 

[ControlD]

Anything quirky enough that it should be avoided until further notice..?

I haven't found anything too strange with the desktop version of Ubuntu 16.04. I just can't stand the interface. It has been quick and stable however from my experience, which has been commissioning quite a few systems (60 or so) for an industrial application. For my main home system I run Mint, but I think Ubuntu would be a solid choice as well.

 

[ControlD]

Does stock Ubuntu still have that terrible UI where they basically pulled off a windows 8 and got rid of all the basic stuff like the start menu? I remember installing that once and within 5 minutes I was installing something else. There are different versions of ubuntu like Xubuntu Kubuntu etc... so those are options too. Problem is when you're googling for anything it's usually hard to find info for those specific ones as everything will be for the main one.

Yes, it still has that Unity interface. That interface style isn't completely unique to Ubuntu either. The Gnome 3 interface feels fairly similar to me which is why I can't completely get comfortable with Fedora. I still prefer an interface with a task bar and start button, and right now Cinnamon feels like the best of those to me.

 

[lxskllr]

Anything quirky enough that it should be avoided until further notice..?

I've been using xubuntu on two machines since the .1 release, and everything's been great aside from occasional thunar crashes, which is a known issue not affiliated with ubuntu specifically.

I don't like the ubuntu unity interface, but that isn't a problem with ubuntu. It works as designed. I just don't like that style of interface. Good thing interfaces are trivial to change in gnu/linux :^)

 

[whm1974]

Yes, it still has that Unity interface. That interface style isn't completely unique to Ubuntu either. The Gnome 3 interface feels fairly similar to me which is why I can't completely get comfortable with Fedora. I still prefer an interface with a task bar and start button, and right now Cinnamon feels like the best of those to me.

I feel the same way without a taskbar and start button. I haven't tried Cinnamon or Mate yet, but Xfce is my favorite.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Anything quirky enough that it should be avoided until further notice..?

No. I'm just one of those weirdos that hates "known issues" and wants zero error messages and warnings. And I work in an office full of computer programmers that want a root cause analysis of every twitch. (I've even gotten pushback about rebooting Windows boxes to quickly clear up AD issues, because you "shouldn't have to do that.")

The most noticeable thing right now is the fd0 device failure message I've been getting. Despite disabling the appropriate lines in fstab and adding "floppy" to the blacklist, they're plaguing me. Haven't found a working solution yet, but I'll probably get pissed at it again in a few days and take another crack at it.

There were also a couple Ubuntu 16 VMs I stood up where the devs bounced them back to me asking for 14.04 instead, because it turned out that somebody upstream "fixed" some libraries in 16 that the rest of their tool chain hasn't caught up with yet. Whatever they're trying to do (I don't even remember who it was now, let alone what project they're on) they can do it with Ubuntu 14, but not 16. At least not as of December.

Finally, the iSCSI initiator seems a little less... predictable (?) than the latest version of CentOS. That may just be in my head, though.

 

[Murloc]

There were also a couple Ubuntu 16 VMs I stood up where the devs bounced them back to me asking for 14.04 instead, because it turned out that somebody upstream "fixed" some libraries in 16 that the rest of their tool chain hasn't caught up with yet. Whatever they're trying to do (I don't even remember who it was now, let alone what project they're on) they can do it with Ubuntu 14, but not 16. At least not as of December.

doesn't this happen with other distributions as well?

I was also forced on ubuntu 14 LTS because the xilinx tools I need to use don't work on 16 LTS. It's not like this doesn't happen when new windows systems come out either.

As a linux noob and non-professional, I tried CentOS, but the security features I don't need made me go mental.

Ubuntu just has so many noob-friendly resources on the internet when you want to do something you can describe only in words it's hard to beat.

And you can replace the interface to avoid any potential Unity amazon spyware or annoyance, but I haven't done this since I'm still on windows at home, but honestly I haven't seen what the big deal with unity is.
I just click the icon and the terminal opens up, done.
If I want to start gui software from an icon there is the lens thing which works like the windows start menu, it doesn't cover the whole screen like W8.
The dock thing works like on mac os and on windows 7+ so no issues there either.
Maybe I don't see the issue because as a long-time windows user I'm used to this.

One mildly annoying thing is that the shell defaults to dash and I needed bash to avoid potential trouble (idk how different they actually are) so I had to edit some settings. So they are moving a bit away from the standards I guess?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

doesn't this happen with other distributions as well?

Sure does! I'm not trying to knock on Ubuntu overall here, just saying why I'm keeping my Ubuntu 14 templates around for a while still.

I was also forced on ubuntu 14 LTS because the xilinx tools I need to use don't work on 16 LTS. It's not like this doesn't happen when new windows systems come out either.

Exactly.

...

Maybe I don't see the issue because as a long-time windows user I'm used to this.

It's not an "issue" per se, except in the "Why I'm going to stick with Windows 7" sense. And yes, Ubuntu is very well documented and fairly n00b-friendly. That's also why I use it.

One mildly annoying thing is that the shell defaults to dash and I needed bash to avoid potential trouble (idk how different they actually are) so I had to edit some settings. So they are moving a bit away from the standards I guess?

I've been using "bash" scripting in dash for as long as I've been using Ubuntu, without issue.

"Moving away?" Apparently they changed it about 10 years ago for performance reasons.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh

If they only implemented basic GNU tools, they wouldn't need to have their own distro. Everything's a standard to somebody, and there are as many shells as there are stars in the sky.