I've been using Ubuntu for a while and was slightly irritated with it, so a few days ago I decided to go distro-hunting again. I am no longer irritated with Ubuntu.
My first choice was Debian, for several reasons. I love the apt-get package manager, and Debian uses it insanely well (which is slightly ironic as I will explain in a bit), with almost 30 000 packages that are all well-tested to work well with each other. I also recently installed Debian on my server, and it worked flawlessly.I also considered Fedora, as it (and CentOS) are essentially Red Hat, a very mature distribution. However, the use of rpm packages is not a plus, as dependencies have traditionally been a pain on these systems. I've used CentOS on my server in the past with yum and didn't notice any problems in that area, but that was a server, which (at least in my case) has a much simpler setup than a desktop system.Arch Linux looks fantastic… for its goals. I would love to try it out someday- it's nice, clean and minimal without doing the heavy patching of upstream packages that Debian and Ubuntu do. It also sounds like it has a fantastic package manager and repository. However, I decided against it because I'm not interested in a lot of manual system setup on a desktop machine (and, on for servers, I prefer stability to cutting-edge packages).Why not other distros? They're all either derivatives of one of these, or are very similar and less popular, or are just not well-polished enough for a Gnome desktop setup. I decided on Debian and ended up taking nearly all day to install it using a USB drive net install. It was a little more involved than Ubuntu to set up nvidia and broadcom drivers, but that was almost okay too, since I was looking forward to a less Canonicalized experience. By the end of the day, though, Debian was not looking like a good idea. I still hadn't set up desktop effects and wasn't at the level of features I wanted either. Bleh, all day and not up to Ubuntu level? Maybe I'm just incompetent, but it has at least a little to do with the fact that Debian's website redesign is so convoluted, there's much less focus on usability (especially for the installer) and they're a little militaristic about non-free software. To make matters worse, some network configuration got screwed up this morning and apt-get stopped resolving the repository servers (pretty sure it wasn't apt-get's fault, but that's the ironic bit).Today during school I finally gave in and decided to reinstall Ubuntu. It took about an hour, including the initial iso download. I finished it within one class period, and the installer was BEAUTIFUL. Flash drive installation was automated, the installer image had wireless drivers on it already (I just had to boot into the live install to get it), and the Ubiquity installer did all the downloading and configuring it could in parallel so I didn't have to sit there for a million years. Once I rebooted into the new system, the update manager finished off the install and then Ubuntu's "restricted" driver manager automatically gave me the option to install the nvidia drivers. BAM finished.Of course, Ubuntu's not 100% perfect (which is why I tried Debian in the first place). I don't like their "software store" that's not a store and takes forever to open, or Ubuntu One that's probably only used by the developers, or the bug on my hardware where the battery notification icon is perpetually "estimating battery life…" even though I can open it up and look at a graph of charge over time. However, it's still light-years ahead of Debian with its user-unfriendliness, Fedora with its refusal to include non-free nvidia drivers in its repositories or Arch with its complete lack of automation, and it's still an amazing operating system in general.
I have used Fedora as a portable OS before, carrying it around on a flash drive to "fix" other machines, etc. It wasn't that bad, and it does have an excellent installer. However, the fact that they virtually ignore non-free drivers is kind of off-putting, and I'm much more used to deb packages and apt-get.
I should probably try it out again some time; maybe when nouveau is working or Nvidia releases open-source drivers, so I can actually use my GPU with official support. Yum's also probably not as bad as I make it sound in the post- as I said I'm just more used to apt-get.Are you a network administrator by any chance?
Try installing Gentoo, just for the fun of it.. Oh, and don't use genkernel, configure every feature of the kernel by yourself. You'll shit bricks.
I've been using Ubuntu since 9.04, and I love it. I've used Arch too, but in the end I didn't like it much, when it comes to my personal computer, I'd rather use it than fight it. Back in the lab I work at we had Arch installed in our computers. We updated the machines 3 times a year, and many times the update exploded, X died and libraries went missing. I'm pretty sure we could have avoided that by upgrading more frequently, but that wasn't possible.We then switched to Debian and it's been good, except last trimester when one of the labs went crazy with glibc and upgrading would lead to kernel panics, we had to reinstall. I hate reinstalling.I like Linux Mint. It's based on Ubuntu, though, but isn't that bad.
Alert Games: I just have an old machine I use as a server for stuff, when I have stuff to serve. :P
flashback: Ugh. My point is that Debian makes you do things manually. I know perfectly well how to set everything up, but I get fed up with things like following the install guide exactly and winding up with a broken usb installer, having to look up all the packages I want when they have a perfectly fine system to automate it (tasksel) and random breakage in network name resolution the next day (everything but apt-get works, but apt-get should be using the same method of connection as everything else). Which would you rather have: A system that, as part of the install process, asks you which drivers you want to use, or one that just picks one and makes you read through their crappy website to find what packages to install to use the drivers that ACTUALLY WORK?The reason for a package manager is so you don't have to go hunt down drivers on vendor websites. Refusing to fulfil the package manager's purpose because of ideological garbage is not helpful in any way.How the heck did you manage to break your debian install that thoroughly?
A package manager exists to install software packages. Not specifically drivers. Debian packaging allows access to software in debian repositories which, in accordance with Debian's policy, don't contain non open-source software (such as nvidia's driver).Now the really hilarious part: Ubuntu doesn't have the closed-source AMD or nvidia drivers in their repositories at all. The utility that gets you proprietary drivers? Fetches them from the manufacturer site, basically skipping the oh, 3 clicks you're unwilling to make on their site. So the package manager is actually entirely unrelated to getting you those drivers on vendor websites.Debian has its non-free repository, which contains the nvidia drivers. Fedora has nothing; you have to go out and find either nvidia's download or an alternate repository. I don't care if package managers aren't specifically for drivers- that's just pedantry and it's not useful. How can it possibly not be better to include software half your users will need in the same place they're supposed to be able to get all their other software from? I really don't mind separating it into a non-free repository, or even a separate tool that downloads it from the manufacturer; the point is it's unnecessary to separate it from the regular install process. Ubuntu is a better experience, no matter how easy it is in the other distros.
As for how I managed to break it, I'm wondering at that as well. When I've installed Debian on other (non-desktop) systems in the past it's worked flawlessly, but how can installing a desktop and drivers that are supposedly thoroughly tested with the rest of the distro break networking for only some applications? The only network-related thing I did beside connect to and use some wireless networks was this: I had to switch networks in the middle of the install, but as there are facilities for that in the installer it shouldn't have been a problem, and the issue didn't come up until a day later anyway. O_o