At the moment I use Arch. It's quite good aligned with upstream well, you make what you want from it, and works well but its a little less user centric you get what your given and there's a bit reliance on aur which I don't think it the most reliable source of packages.
Gentoo/Funtoo I also like, similar somewhat to Arch in that you make what you want of it. What it does better than arch (far far better) is giving the user more control. The management utilities are great and the package control is second to none.
My other go to distro is Fedora. It's aligned much more to a free desktop, it works really well out the box and it just nice to use.
Remember that you can use distcc to compile elsewhere if required. Just a thought.
I've tried it. It was a while ago though. At the time not all packages supported compiling with distcc and among them were some larger core tools. Maybe things have changed?
I'm at a point where I actually don't care that much about my distro, or at least it's not such a big topic for me. I care about my tools. I'd miss my current window manager, I'd miss my text editor and its useful plugins or my IDE, I wouldn't want to be forced to use another music player or IRC client. But the distro where all this stuff is running on? Meeeh, don't even care that much. Of course I also prefer some package manager over others, or a certain release model, but at the end of the day I could live with pretty much any of the bigger distros which is maintained by a good team.
1.Debian, because it only breaks when you do something stupid, damn flexible and has a wonderful community. If you know your way around Deb you know your way around most distros. apt
2.RedHat & Fedora 22, as above just a little less flexible. However... someone somewhere told me something about a git project that adds everything AUR natively to Fedora 22/23...?... which is going to be epic if so.
3.#! Crunchbang! (RIP) used it for many years as my laptops daily and the front-end for my media server and it has never let me down...... only canonical let me down ha. I know there are reboots in the works.. but it wont be the same. If it was still around it's rate higher. still the easiest installing OS ever, that post install script was great.
4.Kali/Backtrack-toolkit, most useful piece of software I've ever owned. It's made & saved me a fortune over the years.. probably a few heart attacks too.
5.Arch. Surprisingly, one of the most reliable distro's I've ever used. Plus it's oh so satisfying when it's all working and looks exactly how you want it to look.
6.ZorinOS pure hilarity reasons, it's great installing Zorin and making it go full windows XP mode. I've had clients hand me there shitty old laptop or pc with a barely functioning windows os.. installing Zorin, theming it and handing it back to the owner only to have them say things like.. "omg, its never been this fast" "it boots like, instantly" " holy fuck i have bluetooth? windows would never install the drivers?" "why does internet explorer look different? " "Hey! my printer works now! thankyou!" ...most of them never knew it was linux until i told them.. a week later, no one has ever gone back to windows.
need to invest some more time in gentoo and opensuse.
I can largely agree with this post, although not as fanatically myself. It's all about what it's going to be used for in my opinion.
I like a lot of distros, even bloody AOSP for that matter lol. I like Manjaro for the extra preconfigured user-centric additions that provide a comfortable solution for the people that want that kind of system. I also like Gentoo and Arch and Slackware because it provides me with a system that I have total control over every aspect for other use case scenarios. I like Ubuntu because it offers a lot of repo options, but I dislike it for the quality of the packaging and the quality and up-to-dateness of the packages in their repos.
A lot of GNU/Linux distros offer a lot. Together with BSD, GNU/Linux certainly offers the most out of any operating system - open source or not - that has ever existed. However, there is a reason why there is so much choice and why there are so much distros, because nobody hardly needs everything the ecosystem has to offer, and thus everybody will gravitate towards the distro he/she feels fits his/her use case scenario the best.
The distro doesn't matter all that much. You can adapt any distro, you can install every application on every distro, you can configure any distro to do anything. The choice of distro is but a comfort-inspired choice, the only object of the selection being to save time for a specific user.
I think people that are into computers should at least learn how to use one enterprise-grade distro (an RPM-distro like RedHat/Fedora/CentOS or (Open)SuSE or any distro of the Mandrake inheritance), one DEB-distro (Debian or Ubuntu), one source-based distro (Gentoo/Slackware and derivatives) and should at least have some experience running Arch Linux. It's part of the charm of the linux ecosystem that users can learn so much by changing the learning environment, and by not having to take anyone's word for anything or use anyone's solution or modus operandi.
The mere fact that there is no one set way to achieve things, is a big part of the reason why linux is so great. It keep everyone thinking all the time, and keeps everyone creative and open-minded. That's probably what I like most about GNU/Linux, and that's why I like all GNU/Linux distros.
I think that as long as the user is happy with the distro they're on than they should use it proudly. My ideal distro is up to date, fast, and customizable, which is why I run Fedora. It suits my needs while being stable and at the end of the day that's what matters. So I encourage anyone who wants to try Linux not to settle because there is a distro that will meet your needs.
For laptops I really adore both Elementary OS and Ubuntu Gnome - Debian based systems just have always appealed to me (large support, out of the box use) and I like the apt system and so forth. Gnome I just love in particular because of all of the great extensions for the shell, such as Drop Down Terminal. Plus the navigation is so responsive and fast and perfectly designed for on the go use.
I don't currently use openSUSE, but I love the OS, and love the guys behind the project.
For servers that i'm hosting large amounts of virtual servers off of, I always use LXLE, just because it uses so few resources and is very nice on power consumption. Of course, I adore using Ubuntu Server and freeBSD as well.
Sadly on my main desktop I haven't gotten away from using Windows due to compatibility problems (I use Visual Studio, Music Software, and play games a lot on it).
I've been an hobbyist Arch user for about 10 years. Since I found Arch, I did not have any incentive to try anything else. Coming from Gentoo, it's just the perfect amount of DIY combined with an incredibly helpful community and wiki. The bare bones speed never had me longing for anything else. So I'm curious, why do you list Fedora above Arch? Or is it the enterprise/management features that you prefer? I can't imagine it is more rolling, faster or has something better than the AUR? Just wondering if I have been caving myself in too much..
The awesome thing about Arch that I found for me is, that if you're not geeky enough to constantly read man pages and figure things out by yourself, the Arch wiki can be incredibly helpful in providing shortcuts to the solutions, giving you more freedom to decide when you want to dive deeper into a subject or not. It's the perfect OS for wannabe geeks.
My main reason for using Fedora over Arch is simplicity. I love Arch I just prefer graphical installers which is why I like Antergos a lot as well. Another thing for me with Arch is that while it's stable most of the time I have had it break more than Fedora does. Plus I love DNF it's a really awesome package manager and probably my favorite one to use. Overall I think Arch is slightly more for tinkering and I just don't have a lot of time to do that with school and all.
I'm still fairly new to linux, having only began tinkering about two years ago. In that time, I have tried a lot of distros on a lot of hardware. Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubunutu Gnome (14.04 and 15.04), Mint, Fedora, Arch (about five failed installs and one with too many bugs to use; I will revisit this), Manjaro Cinnamon and their unstable Gnome iteration, and finally I landed on...
Korora:
Everything I liked about Fedora, but with out of the box support for third-party software.
Pharlap preinstalled and configured to find the best driver solutions
Numix Circle Icon Theme and even a custom Numix Gnome shell theme
My runner up would be Manjaro. The main reason being, their access to the AUR. I found everything ran very smoothly on my Manjaro install on a Macbook Air, where versions of Ubuntu encountered hundreds of issues.
I wanted to use Antergos because it is just a well skinned Arch, with simple installation... or so they claim. I have tried several versions and the installer always crashes. Even if I run updates before, or try another version. When they ditch Cnchi I will consider trying it again, though really I couldn't be happier with Korora.