[Lemur]

In the past few months I've near completely lost faith in Linux. Half the packages are mismatches and everything is a mess. It's borderline impossible to get any real work done on a patched together system that has no coherent package management.

I've gone through the following, each of which I've abandoned out of annoyance:

• Ubuntu
  
• Kubuntu
  
• Chakra
  
• Mint
  
• Fedora
  
• OpenSUSE

If anyone has suggestions of a different distro to try out, feel free. In the mean time I'm going back to BSD land where I know its safe and packages are actually monitored and kept control of.

Is this only me, or am I just going out of my mind?

[Atli]

Ubuntu has been working pretty well for me so far. I don't think I've ever found a package in the Ubuntu repositories that failed to install properly. Occasionally 3rd party packages will fail, but that's to be expected.

[modi123_1]

I tried this crunchbang Debian.... not a fan.

[baavgai]

Ubuntu is current yet buggy, because they're screwing their own display manager.

Kubuntu and Chakra use the newest KDE, which I found to be unreliable at best. It even made Slackware unstable. Chakra, in particular, trying to support the newest KDE toys, was epicly unreliable.

Mint is trying to maintain gnome old guard. However, they're traveling down a fork, which is probably a problem.

Fedora was never mean to be stable, it's where Red Hat throws things to watch them break.

OpenSUSE... is tainted.

If you want real stable, you have to go back in time...

Red Hat is about as solid as they come. They have the cash to make sure that's the case. CentOS is a reliable free version of Red Hat. Using CentOS you go back to Gnome 2. And, it's good. I run this at work.

Debian, current stable, is sturdy.

If you like the *buntus, look at Lubuntu. It uses LXDE and has impressed me by running well on an ancient netbook of mine.

Short answer, all the new fangled display managers suck. Find something proven.

[RudiVisser]

Never liked Linux so much for anything other than a server platform, but that said, I have and do use it as a desktop when I just need something quick to do that doesn't need everything that Windows offers.

What I've found is that Ubuntu would generally be the "most compatible" of all of the distributions out there, simply because it's aimed at first time linux users and attempts to hide the underlying linux platform as much as it can.

However when it comes to what I need, which is something stable, quick, reliable and no-fuss, I choose a base install of ArchBang, which is based (obviously) off Arch. It's package manager pacman is the simplest I've found to use including using it to update a whole system, and honestly I've never had any issues with this at all.

Like baavgai said, these new fancy WMs don't do anything useful really, Archbang comes with Openbox as it's WM which is simple to use, easy to customise and pretty damn powerful, whilst using minimal system resources.

[xclite]

I've also found OpenBox to be simple and reliable. Unity is garbage as mentioned and I need to rip it out of my desktop at work. I also hear good things about the XFCE desktop environment.

[GunnerInc]

Back in time? I still have my RH 5.0 CD's I bought in a store back in the day. Have RH 9 on CDs too from somewhere. I always felt RH was stable. I use Mint and have no problems with it.

[Lemur]

I'm going back to BSD land, where the packages are stable and the display managers don't crash every 20 minutes and require almost completely refurbing xwindows config files.

PC-BSD is where I'm headed right now. I love OpenBSD, but I still have a thing for minecraft and it's been said that it's a stunt to get Java to work on that thing.

[blackcompe]

I had a few configuration issues after Unity was introduced, but generally speaking, Ubuntu runs fine for me. It rarely crashes.

[RudiVisser]

Lemur, on 19 August 2012 - 04:26 PM, said:

I'm going back to BSD land, where the packages are stable and the display managers don't crash every 20 minutes and require almost completely refurbing xwindows config files.

Never had this on linux, and found that package management for BSD is fairly limited (talking from a FreeBSD/NetBSD perspective). That said, I do much prefer BSD.

This post has been edited by RudiVisser: 19 August 2012 - 11:01 AM

[KieranQuinn]

I can't decide what distro to stick with. Every one I've tried in the past has a flaw. Now, I've resorted to trying multiple different distro's and environments in VirtualBox.

[Lemur]

I work from an OpenBSD for servers perspective, I wanted Desktop to be run and done without a bunch of customization and whatnot. The main annoyance I have is that Linux has started to shift from "it just works" to trying to be the latest, greatest, and shiniest thing available.

BSD has always had my love for not jumping onto every new and patchworked thing they can find. Stability and integrity is the one thing I can always count on with BSD.

[baavgai]

The level of instability described, across multiple distros, sounds atypical in the extreme. I'd be inclined to blame the hardware, at that point. Some less than optimal driver that has to do some emulation, due to proprietary issues. Or a custom proprietary driver. Some proprietary linux drivers I've used are a vast improvement, some are as stable as junkies in withdrawal.

Even a worst case linux system is hard to fully crash. A single process rarely has that ability. Most "crashes" are really just freeze ups of the X system. That X system is mostly shared between linux and the BSDs...

[Lemur]

Granted. It's a collection of that, package mismatches, gcc not being properly linked, and various other little bugs that I tend to notice very quickly.

[no2pencil]

Lemur, on 19 August 2012 - 02:20 AM, said:

Is this only me, or am I just going out of my mind?

You should move OpenSuse closer to the top of that list. It's about as much Linux as OSX is FreeBSD.