There are so many good distributions, it is hard to settle on just one. For me, anyway.

In the past when I’ve started hopping, I’ve almost always wound up using Fedora or some debian-based distro like Linux Mint. Then I go back and forth.

I’ve been using LM for quite some time now (Debian Edition on 2 PCs, LM17 on 2 PCs) and plus Ubuntu desktop on one laptop and Ubuntu Server on my VPS and home server. One of my LMDE PCs is a machine that I use at work to host Windows VMs for development, even though RHEL is the preferred deployment there.

I am going to convert that work machine over to CentOS soon to be more company-compliant, and that got me started thinking that it’d be nice to play around with some more distros at home again. I asked on GNU Social and Pump.io for suggestions on distros to try, and got quite a few responses. I’ve condensed and edited the list, and will put a blurb for each here, plus my initial thoughts.

On Free Software

I love free software and I certainly prefer to use it, however in my personal view it is not a requirement. I will sacrifice freedom to have a working video or wifi driver (or even for one that works better). Other than hardware functionality, I don’t care much about proprietary software and use free alternatives whenever possible. Oh, except for Steam, I like Steam.

Just so you know where I’m coming from here.

The List:

  • Arch
    • I’ve used Arch in the past for a while, and had a pretty good run. There’s lots that I like (/love?) about it.
    • What I don’t like about it is possible instability due to its ‘bleeding edge’ nature.
  • Crunchbang
    • This is another I have used in the past.
    • It is great, but my main complaint is the same that I have for Debian stable and CentOS – packages seem to get outdated very quickly.
  • Debian
    • Debian is like the golden standard for GNU/Linux.
    • As noted above, my only complaint is that over time the packages get stale.
  • ElementaryOS
    • I don’t know much about this one, but it is apparently an Ubuntu derivative
    • It also looks focused on being pretty, which isn’t a bad thing. Looks quite nice, though I don’t know if it is for me.
  • Fedora
    • Fedora is obviously a good option since it is very similar to CentOS/RHEL and compatibility is great as a convenience.
    • Downsides, I can’t really think of any. Heavily company guided? That’s about all I have.
  • kFreeBSD
    • This one is a port of Debian proper that makes use of the FreeBSD kernel.
    • It looks to be still in development, but sounds interesting– there is a “why” on the wiki
  • KaOS
    • This one sounds interesting, it is Arch-based and is rolling-release.
  • Mageia
    • This is a fork of Mandriva which I’ve never used.
    • Maybe I did use Mandrake once a long time ago, but I don’t remember much about it.
  • Manjaro
    • This one looks pretty promising, being Arch-based!
  • Mepis
    • Mepis looks ok, seems to be another Debian derivative using KDE.
  • Tanglu
    • Tanglu looks and sounds good, is also Debian based.
  • Tiny Core linux
    • I don’t see this being a daily driver distro. I’ll leave it here because it is useful, but I’m not going to seriously consider it.
  • Trisquel
    • Trisquel is an Ubuntu-based freedom-focused distro.
  • Xubuntu
    • This one is a lightweight ubuntu.

At this very preliminary stage, I’d say my main contenders that I am biased towards are Fedora, Arch, Manjaro, and Tanglu. I’m also very fascinated by the Debian/kFreeBSD. I’ll plan to install and try each one (in some order) for 2 weeks each, doing my normal activities. I don’t feel that I have a dificult list of needs to meet those daily activities which include:

  • web browsing
  • using Dianara and Pumpa to interact with Pump.io
  • using heybuddy to interact with GNU Social
  • using Geany to do some code things (typically in python) and write text documents (like this blogpost)
  • Email, most importantly of the GPG encrypted variety

OK, let’s get started.