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Is there any Linux or BSD that is good* on the desktop for you? Just wondering! PS: There appear to be a number of CentOS boxes that have been left for more th

Is there any Linux or BSD that is good* on the desktop for you? Just wondering! PS: There appear to be a number of CentOS boxes that have been left for more than a decade judging by the thread on CentOS Forums about patching a CentOS 4 server for Heartbleed...

batou 11y ago
Ubuntu pre-Unity was pretty good. Yeah we have two CentOS 4 boxes. They aren't connected to the internet just an old fashioned DUP to receive and send text from a client's mainframe and wrap it in a SOAP request and post to an internal host on an internal LAN. One of them had an uptime of 6 years until our UPS blew up.
- beagle3 11y ago
  Have you tried recently? The first few versions of Unity were awful - but I tried again (Trusty, 14.4), and whoa - realized I like it better than the Mac and Gnome2 I'm still using occasionally. It took a while to take off, and I still meet the occasional bug - but it's extremely usable right now. YMMV.
  - TillE 11y ago
    Yeah, once you turn off the internet search crap, Ubuntu is pretty comfortably the least terrible desktop Linux distro. I simply don't have the time these days to configure X and everything from scratch, and Ubuntu mostly manages to take care of that for me. Then it gives you a desktop environment which looks a lot like my OS X setup, and is perfectly fine at doing basic things.
  - batou 11y ago
    Thanks for the heads up - I havent tried since 13.04. Will have a bash in a VM today. I've not got on with OSX since 10.5 TBH so I'm with you there plus I'm allergic to MBPs for some reason; end up with bad rash on palms.
ams6110 11y ago
I use OpenBSD on the desktop and am perfectly happy with it. Does everything I need it to do. That does not mean it's right for everybody, of course.
noir_lord 11y ago
Xubuntu is close to perfect for me, fast, stable, has everything I want, they don't stop the boat mid ocean to redesign it. Used it for years and have basically no complaints.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Just wish Gnome would lighten up on their GTK chokehold.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    Agreed, I wish GTK was isolated from Gnome like Qt is from KDE but I can't see it happening.
likeclockwork 11y ago
I can recommend Fedora and Arch... but "good" is a pretty individual thing. I measure by ease of maintenance and breadth of repository. Some people measure by WM/DE which is strange to me because you can replace that in about 30 seconds with one command.

batou 11y ago

Ubuntu pre-Unity was pretty good. Yeah we have two CentOS 4 boxes. They aren't connected to the internet just an old fashioned DUP to receive and send text from a client's mainframe and wrap it in a SOAP request and post to an internal host on an internal LAN. One of them had an uptime of 6 years until our UPS blew up.

beagle3 11y ago
Have you tried recently? The first few versions of Unity were awful - but I tried again (Trusty, 14.4), and whoa - realized I like it better than the Mac and Gnome2 I'm still using occasionally. It took a while to take off, and I still meet the occasional bug - but it's extremely usable right now. YMMV.
- TillE 11y ago
  Yeah, once you turn off the internet search crap, Ubuntu is pretty comfortably the least terrible desktop Linux distro. I simply don't have the time these days to configure X and everything from scratch, and Ubuntu mostly manages to take care of that for me. Then it gives you a desktop environment which looks a lot like my OS X setup, and is perfectly fine at doing basic things.
- batou 11y ago
  Thanks for the heads up - I havent tried since 13.04. Will have a bash in a VM today. I've not got on with OSX since 10.5 TBH so I'm with you there plus I'm allergic to MBPs for some reason; end up with bad rash on palms.

ams6110 11y ago

I use OpenBSD on the desktop and am perfectly happy with it. Does everything I need it to do. That does not mean it's right for everybody, of course.

noir_lord 11y ago

Xubuntu is close to perfect for me, fast, stable, has everything I want, they don't stop the boat mid ocean to redesign it. Used it for years and have basically no complaints.

digi_owl 11y ago
Just wish Gnome would lighten up on their GTK chokehold.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  Agreed, I wish GTK was isolated from Gnome like Qt is from KDE but I can't see it happening.

likeclockwork 11y ago

I can recommend Fedora and Arch... but "good" is a pretty individual thing. I measure by ease of maintenance and breadth of repository. Some people measure by WM/DE which is strange to me because you can replace that in about 30 seconds with one command.