So I, being the genius that I am, decided that a 20 GB partition from my 1 TB hard drive would be enough space to handle Ubuntu.
Well, I'm basically out of space on the OS and plan on starting fresh with a bigger partition, but I'm beginning to wonder if maybe Ubuntu isn't the best way to go.
So what do you people think of the different Linux distros out there? Do any stand out to you guys?
Please don't recommend Windows, because this might just be me, but programs run so slowly on it for me compared to Ubuntu that it's painful. I should benchmark build time of cc65 as an example, because Windows has taken 10+ minutes before.
Also it's hard to build any programs on Windows, so...yeah. No thanks.
Apparently, Microsoft is adding in Linux binary support for command line programs into Windows 10 at some point.
Debian Stable for me, after Ubuntu crashed for the thousandth time and took my HDD with it.
Ubuntu may have been good once, but now it's just a broken mess. The only problem I've had since switching to Debian is operator error.
Dwedit wrote:
Apparently, Microsoft is adding in Linux binary support for command line programs into Windows 10 at some point.
That helps with building stuff, but not much else.
Use Arch Linux. It's the best out there.
... OK, actually I don't recommend it to anyone except to someone who has a somewhat good grasp on Linux and is willing to learn more about Linux. There is no easy installer for instance, when you boot your ISO, you're basically dropped to a root shell and that's it. You are expected to setup your partitions, put a bootloader and configure it, install the base packages and the things you'll need. But Arch Linux has a great wiki, even other distributions' forums refer frequently to it.
Plus, on the compiling-on-Windows side, MSYS uses the basic tools of Arch: pacman and makepkg, so it's relevant here. Of course, it's still a bit of a pain (on Windows!) but it's better than before. I successfully made a build of arm-none-eabi-gdb, for instance. Of course, on Linux, no problem here.
But really, that's not fair bitching on Windows here. Sure, Windows does not fit well into the UNIX and even the FOSS philosophy, and hence compiling most open source programs is a pain, but Windows is the best platform to develop for Microsoft platforms. Even with MSYS the situation is not so pretty. I just prefer Linux for general development, especially cross-development based around gcc which obviously prefer a Linux host environment. And you can do amazing things with your UNIX tools, for which in some situations the best thing you can do in Windows is having e.g. python installed and script it, where the bash/zsh shell would suffice.
Oh and Linux Mint is IMHO the best "easy" Linux, Ubuntu-based but with everything installed (codecs...) and with some nice and easy UIs. Quite good, I used it before for a long time.
I first gnu/linux distro I used was dyne:bolic 1.1 which used WindowMaker for it's windowing system, for the longest time I had good memories about that OS.
Between then and now I've moved to various debian based systems that used metacity.
Now I'm using any system that can run under Xfce. (currently arch)
I'm all about Debian Testing for regular desktop/laptop use.
Arch. I like that Repo-ck exists to add a better queue, scheduler, and compile with all my processor's options. Pacman is also simply the best package manager because it's easy to fix anything because forcing it to remove anything is simple, as long as you know what you're doing it's great. Plus, it can be anything I want it to or not to be. But I built a $1500 PC to optimize the shit out of it, not run generic libraries. And Arch is the easiest when it comes to that, outside of maybe Gentoo where the build scripts are probably a little better maintained than Arch, but I can fix them so it doesn't matter much.
I use Gentoo now. I'm happy, a childhood dream come true.