My Search for the Perfect Linux OS Just Ended | Hacker News Reader

My Search for the Perfect Linux OS Just Ended

forbes.com

12 pointsdsr127 comments

I normally steer clear of these articles as I long ago realized the "perfect distro" was like the best flavor of ice cream: contentiously debatable and variable by individual.

I got sucked in tho and actually enjoyed the article, despite it concluding that there is no perfect distro.

For me I've settled on Fedora and am extremely happy. I went the Arch/Gentoo route for years and also went the Ubuntu/Mint/Debian/Elementary/etc route. I learned more about Linux/open source using Arch than anything, and loved how customized and hackable my system was. The rolling nature was great until it wasn't (breakage and unpredictability paired with Murphy's Law). Ubuntu et al were too slow moving. Old software, strange hacks in the kernel that made custom kernels/modules difficult to use (it's gotten better the last couple of years ftr), and PPAs were a must but often broke upgrades requiring nuke & pave.

What I found was Fedora is the perfect middle ground: quite bleeding edge in many ways without being a rolling distro and upgrading your gnome suddenly without warning, but fast enough moving that I rarely notice any outdated packages. It's a "just works" install but super easy to tweak and customize in any way desired. Much of the Arch wiki (my favorite thing about being on Arch next to the AUR) is also mostly applicable to Fedora since they follow similar conventions. If you manage RHEL/CentOS servers in any way for work, it also gives you a chance to get intimately familiar with the next round of improvements coming your way in enterprise Linux.

Disclaimer: I work at Red Hat but I've been a Fedora user much longer than I've worked at RH

You have to tailor it yourself. There's no perfect OS or distro unless you start building it from scratch.

I am waiting for the "BTW I use Arch" remark...

I'm here!

IIRC I started on a Knoppix live CD and over the next year or so I hopped around Mandrake, Ubuntu, Gentoo[1], Red Hat, etc. mostly coming back to Mandrake... and then I found Arch and fell in love with its simplicity and speed.

Around the time of GNOME 3 and KDE 4 I went looking for a new DE and found Unity to be the best and most polished - even to this day it's better than anything I've used before or since - which meant I had to use Ubuntu for a while, but eventually the Debian-isms and instability got to me and I went back home to my Arch.

BTW, I use Arch Linux... on servers and have found it to be very stable, simple and pain-free esp. when compared to Debian and Ubuntu.

[1]: https://funroll-loops.oya.to/

No such thing. Distros are bundles of software. Linux is just the kernel. The perfect distro is the one u never have to change because u built it urself. In so sick and tired of these types of links all over the internet. Blah blah so boring.

TL;DR: Peppermint OS

Not really. Better TL;DR: Peppermint is so great it tempted the author into making it the one distro. But then he realized that he didn't have to pick one - that part of the beauty of Linux is that he could just keep choosing new distros without changing anything much.

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