I've heard doo many good things about Gentoo, Arch, and Slackware lately. My biggest concern is that I'll constantly switch distros. I absolutely love Fedora and as such my favorite distro is Korora. Korora is the most solid distro I've ever used (more so than Manjaro). I always loved the fact that it is literally on the bleeding edge and is community driven (in a way). Reason being, Korora was previously based off of Gentoo, a distro I've always wanted to further research. Slack, is as far as I know, the oldest distro in existence, however I figure that if I was to install it I might as well go LFS. Just curious what eve r to be has to say.
A distro is but a distro lol... if you can't find a readily-available distro that suits your needs, go LFS, BUT... GNU/Linux distros are not like Windows, you don't HAVE to take a distro as it comes in most cases, you can customize it to a huge extent, and in the end, most linux users actually use some kind of customized distro that suits their needs.
Customizing a distro is not just about selecting a repo or making a package selection... it all starts with the kernel. It's very easy to compile your own custom kernel with exactly those features enabled that you need. This usually gives the biggest performance and security boost, not the distro. Compiling your own kernel is surprisingly easy and fast.
I'm pretty practical as far as distros go. I don't want to lose too much time on dicking around with distros, even though I also like to try just about every distro out there because the software itself interests me and I want to learn from it. But in practice, I usually decide on one RPM distro for work, and something arch or gentoo or derivatives thereof for games and private experimentation. I don't have ANY distro on ANY system that is configured the way it came out of the box:
- on my private use systems, mostly arch and gentoo based, I always compile my own kernel. The reason for this is double: 1. I want more security than what the standard kernel of these distros allows for, so I want extra kernel features enabled and some kernel features disabled, and 2. I want to use proprietary graphics drivers on rolling release distros with development repos enabled, which is a recipe for disaster as everybody knows, so I just compile the kernel manually, and recompile the kernel and proprietary graphics drivers every time an updated driver or kernel comes out, which is about every week. I like bleeding edge, I want the features and performance of the latest kernels, also because I often use very fresh hardware, and as everybody knows, using the latest and greatest hardware, especially hardware that hasn't been officially released yet, often leads to a bunch of problems, and hardware with proprietary graphics drivers (often very fresh graphics hardware only has partial open source driver support, so one has to use proprietary drivers to get all the features) makes things exponentially worse.
- on work systems, I use full custom configured distros, sometimes using selected packages from development repos, and sometimes using custom or modified kernels, but I'm not very interested in the latest bleeding edge as long as the performance and compatibility is there, and I value a high quality packaging system and secure repo connection and low bandwidth package downloads more than anything else. Stability and reliability is pretty much a given with all major distros, especially Debian stable and RPM releases, and therefore these criteria are not even a factor in the choice of distro any more.
- I want custom distros, but not at any expense. I don't do LFS because it takes too much time and is not low maintenance by any stretch of the imagination. If you want the latest en greatest and best, you have to compile everything very regularly, and compiling is not the fastest process on any machine. There are alternatives though, like for instance the SuSE Build Service and SuSE Studio, which pretty much let you configure a highly customized RPM distro, pretty much from scratch, and test it out on a server before even downloading it. I think this is a step up from LFS in terms of practicality.
- I had been using Fedora and RHEL for ages, until last year, when RedHat really started to screw up. I then moved to Mageia, but settled with OpenSuSE and SLES again, because they have upped their game enormously in the last year, and actually, OpenSuSE 13.2 is further developed that Fc21 at this stage, and that is very surprising. I want to use one distro for everything work related, because I don't want to spend extra energy and time where it can be avoided. So on my own PC's, because I like to have the latest and greatest and I'm very serious about testing and filing bug reports because I think that's super important, I run SuSE Factory and Tumbleweed, and on servers and employee workstations, I run SLES and OpenSuSE release version. RPM distros have a few advantages for work, because they save a lot of bandwidth and offer a great deal of advanced security features and latest and greatest development tools, and the packaging system is ultra clean and safe. However, for personal non-work-related use, I don't really need all those things, and I can go for a much smaller footprint, mostly a custom arch or gentoo install starting out with a minimal "net" version.
..."I absolutely love Fedora"
Fedora is a great distro.
I'm looking forward to playing around with Fedora.next (F21 base) and see what I can break.
The Fc21 TC's are available, and they break easily (grrrrrr, Gnome 3.14!) lol...
Fedora is RedHat, they are the eminence grise of the linux-based x86 distro world... they've also been "touched" by the Patriot Act, and have wingclipped Fedora, and with GKH maintaining Tumbleweed and Factory, OpenSuSE is now taking over the role of Fedora. Almost all packages on 13.2 TC are more recent than on Fc21TC, with the exception of Gnome Shell, which is also a RedHat product basically.
(grrrrrr, Gnome 3.14!)
That because of wayland or something else?
I use Red Hat, while this sounds insane, the fact I paid for a distro, but for me a wise purchase, as I plan to work on their systems, and wanted to learn there actual system not one based on, straight from the horses mouth as it where. also I didnt pay for it lol, anyways I got the dev suite, and I love it, I have yet to do a minimal install, but look at it this way, if you minimal install any distro, they can be as good as the next guy, I even recommend Ubuntu Minimal sometimes, although I recommend Arch/Deb normally.
The fact is this pick something you like the sound of, so me if I was to pick a new distro, I would go OpenSUSE, run minimal, get KDE5 and YaST, get chromium, then go nuts from there, just some commands and package manager changes, nothing major
I'll give OpenSUSE a try, and will try Gentoo.
No, because of the usual Gnome Shell beta version shenanigans... dialogue windows locking up, features on implemented yet but already represented in the GUI, permissions of various files not set as they should be... it's like that with every Gnome beta... it's just frustrating, but the Gnome Project kinda behaves like Apple, they always have, they're not really on the same frequency as the rest of the open source world for some reason lol, but they'll get there before they release the bloody thing, they always do in the end, well... at least on RPM distros Gnome works pretty well after release.