Help me choose a distro!

Yes, I have read the "What Distro Is Right For Me ??" sticky on here, and Ubuntu came out trumps with 100% recommendation. Trouble is, I'm really not a fan of Unity. It's too "Mac like" for me. I have tried Mint, but I want something a bit more stable as I've had quite a few issues with it. I'm currently running CentOS 6.4 which I quite like, but I'd prefer a more "modern" OS (CentOS 6.4 still uses the 2.6x kernel, and I'd prefer not to do kernel hax).

I've done 3 Red Hat courses as part of my diploma, so I'm a bit more comfortable with RHEL and CentOS than I am with the other distros. I was thinking of giving Fedora KDE a try. I will be doing mainly general web browsing and stuff like that, maybe a bit of light gaming too. I do plan on installing Steam on it (not SteamOS, just the application). The computer it's going to be installed on is an i5 2400U with onboard HD2000 graphics, so it should have the power to easily run any distro.

So what's Fedora like as a day to day OS? Is it easy to live with, considering I'm not a real Linux geek and I won't be running Windows? Does Fedora support Intel Turbo Boost (will the CPU clock up and down without any problems?). I want an OS that pretty much works out of the box, with simple configuration (no, I'm not buying a Mac!). Ideally I don't want to have to compile from source if I can avoid it, but I will if I have to. I'm open to suggestions for other distros too.

CentOS/RHEL and the like are built on stability and security, not for the newest things. Personally with Ubuntu I use Cinnamon desktop which makes that experience a lot better.

On my laptop, I switch between Windows 8.1 and Mageia, which is a fork of Mandriva.

I don't have any experience with Arch or Mint, but those are updated routinely and some people like them.

For 'out of the box' experience, pretty much nothing beats ubuntu. Try using a custom interface (Kubuntu, etc).

My favorite is probably crunchbang though. You use synaptic package manager for installations and such, and you get access to the full debian repositories. It uses Openbox window manager and it's blazing fast.

http://crunchbang.org/

\dev\goat said:

For 'out of the box' experience, pretty much nothing beats ubuntu. Try using a custom interface (Kubuntu, etc).

My favorite is probably crunchbang though. You use synaptic package manager for installations and such, and you get access to the full debian repositories. It uses Openbox window manager and it's blazing fast.

http://crunchbang.org/

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i used to run that on one of my old singlecore laptop. i loved it, very light and fast

If I want lightweight ubuntu I go Lubuntu all the way. Since my personal preference is Gnome, I use Ubuntu Gnome, Mint (with Gnome as the default) and Antergos.

I personally stay away from Fedora, it routinely releases versions with broken components. It doesn't really target the mythical "average" user but rather aims at tinkerers. It offers leading (sometimes bleeding) edge software which can be nice, but every time I have tried to like Fedora, I always turn away.

You can also try Debian, its a solid choice. It offers stability with the option of adding repos for newer packages.

Just as a reference I have the following at home

1 x Antergos (which is an Arch spin, Gnome 3)
2 x Lubuntu (LXDE)
2 x Ubuntu Server (no gui)
3 x Linux Mint 13 (Running Gnome 3)
6 x CentOS 6.x (most no gui, one Gnome 2)

As you can see I run the gambit, with this post coming from Antegeros.

For steam you are best to stick with Debian/Ubuntu Based as that is what is officially supported. Others have hacked the games into place, but work less reliably

Is Kubuntu identical to Ubuntu in every way, including configuration files etc, except of course for the GUI?

Ya all of the official spins are that way. The specialize in making GUI optimizations that they think appropriate and then package it for Ubuntu. The underlying OS is not maintained by the individual spins, but by Canonical

If you have the time, please consider the following:

Get your machine running on an OS you are comfortable using... Just a simple host OS for testing purposes. I like Mint. You can get it up an running in less than 30 minutes.

-Download and install Virtualbox.

-Try ALL the Distros!

If you want to game, with minimal hassle, I really have to recommend Mint. However, I agree that lately it has not felt as stable, but if you go with a LTS, they will be fixing most of these glitches.

I did a comparison between:

-Slackware 14.1
-Mint 13 and Ubuntu 12.04
-Debian Stable
-Fedora

Personally I found Fedora to be ugly, a little on the slow side, the desktop was glitchy in virtualbox and just not my cup of tea. YMMV.

Mint 13 is a great starter distro, although this round I had to a lot of tweaking to get compiz running properly, and I had some weird sound issues where the OS kept forgetting it's settings. I fixed it by writing a little startup script, and it's fine now. This is my main Distro. The fact that I like Mint over Ubuntu is purely an aesthetic choice. They are nearly identical under the hood.

-If you want to run Steam with a minimal amount of problems, I suggest you stick with Ubuntu, or Mint.

Debian is flat out gorgeous. I would seriously consider Debian if you haven't tried it for a few years. Debian's package manager has more software than just about any distro, and it worked smooth as butter for me the whole time I tested it.

Slackware 14.1: Love it or hate it. I decided to turn one of my rigs into a Slackware box. If you want to learn Linux from the bottom up, and are comfortable using a text editor on configuration files, then you might really like Slackware.

Slackware is faster, (unless you went for a full install, then it's a little slower to start up.) It even makes KDE feel peppy, although the desktop manager easily let's you switch to Xfce.

Now, I have a project to get Steam running on Slackware, but my experience at getting video drivers working on Slack... well, I probably wouldn't recommend Slackware if you expect everything to work the first time.

Based on your post, I would recommend sticking with Ubuntu or Mint, with Debian a close second.

Thanks for all the advice everyone, I think I'm going to go with Kubuntu. It will be a bit of a learning curve since almost all my Linux experience has been with Red Hat and CentOS, but I'm willing to learn! I think once I've figured out where the configuration files are I should be OK. I just found this article here on switching from RHEL to Ubuntu.

I've installed Kubuntu 13.10, and it's very buggy. First it wouldn't even boot into the OS, as it kept going straight into GRUB as it couldn't even find it's own config files. That's a known bug after some Googling. Then when I fixed it, widgets on the panel moved around and wouldn't stick back to where I set them to. After plenty more Googling, I found out that this is also a known bug. I had to delete the panel and create it again. After having this many problems with it in such a short space of time, I have no faith in this OS any more and I'll go try something that hopefully works.

I just tried Mint as well, which performed exactly as expected. It ran well, but then upon reboot the OS refused to boot and got stuck at the loading screen.

I put Debian KDE on, and it performs very nicely. Boots up on its own without any user intervention every time too!

I'm playing around with Kubuntu now after reading this thread, and so far I love it. No issues whatsoever for me. Thanks for the heads up. Going to mess around with it for a while.

SMOKEU said:

I put Debian KDE on, and it performs very nicely. Boots up on its own without any user intervention every time too!

Click to expand...

If you're actually enjoying Debian, you should put crunchbang on a flashdrive and give it a shot when you get a chance. You might like that even better. Same base, different UI.

Vanilla Debian or Mint, the only two I bother with these days... besides Windows 8.1.

I have never had any issues with ubuntu for daily use everything "just works" and the support community is amazing. I also greatly dislike unity but as stated earlier all *buntus are the same under the hood. I'm currently running the latest release of ubuntu studio and it's smooth as licking cream off a milk maid. Ui is fast and nice too. For what you want to do just go for simple and functional. And if you ever want to tinker with nuts and bolts use an install in a vm. May you be a happy penguin =D