Ask TWIL: Best Linux Distribution and What’s Your Favorite Distro?

Posted by TWIL on July 27th, 2011

Trying out something that I haven’t done in a year or so. What do you think of it?
I’ve really missed having this sort of community interaction, so I hope this works out.

As always, click “Read More” to see the video!

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Thiyag

Hi,I am linux newbie.Kindly let me know, Which linux distro is good for red hat certification.I mean to do practice for rhcsa.Thanks

Shamwow

CentOS
Oracle Linux

http://www.facebook.com/people/Mark-Dasilva/596285111 Mark Dasilva

How do I enable the fallback mode in Gnome 3.? It won’t run on my old intel card in it’s default mode. I’m using Archlinux.
Chris

Hey guys,

I’ve got a 10″ Netbook and I use Ubuntu for quite a while now. The unity-thingy is very handy when it comes to small screens. A couple of weeks ago I decided to replace my old desktop computer with a new notebook and I’m thinking of moving from Win7 to Linux. The problem I’m facing right now is that my new Laptop (HP Pavilion DV7) comes with an intel graphics chip and an ati graphics chip. So I think there will be some issues. (recognizing the correct card and loading the correct driver)
I had a look at the bios already, but HP locked most of the options, so its not possible to switch manually to one card.
Maybe someone of you could help me or share his/her experience in this matter.

Chris
(Sorry for my bad english. I’m not native in english)
http://www.facebook.com/Styromaniac Alex Aaron Goven

I do fine with openSUSE 11.4 and Fedora 15 and I call myself a noob, though I can see how someone could feel a bit lost when coming from Windows, Macintosh or the Ubuntu Linux distro.

If you can figure out how to do anything with a GUI and follow some simple, clearly-written steps for getting your favorite Linux software running, then they are a walk in the park.

I’ve tried Arch and ultimately had lost my patience for configuring a full desktop from a base shell-command system. I probably installed unnecessary packages for audio anyways. When Arch gets package signing up and running and I need a new OS, I’ll see if it’s worth my patience then.
http://twitter.com/brandenstone Branden Stone

I think you said it well. No operating system can meet everyone’s needs out-of-box simply because there are billions of people that have their own personal needs or disabilities that can affect how they use their particular system.

Many people are quick to down Linux for having to set up firmware or driver related issues; however, I might mention that Windows too must have drivers plus third party programs installed to meet the needs of most users. I’ve had driver related issues with mid to high-end Windows machines that included Wifi (which many people are quick to point out with Linux) and eternal hardware such as printers. From the system standpoint I find Unix based systems to be superior to Windows NT. From my personal experience, Linux (varies on distro) is more carefree after setup. Whereas a Microsoft machine you spend too much time doing unnecessary maintenance that should be automated out-of-box.

Unix systems are more secure. We all know that part. If Windows requires a security suite, why does it not come pre-installed. Ever feel the base system is rather stripped down and feel the need to download several third party programs such as VLC Media Player or whatnot to perform your needs? Yea, I think even non computer savvy users are guilty of that too. Why does a three hundred dollar operating system not come with these things built in? By the way Microsoft fans, contrary to the popular belief, Linux is the most widely used operating system and is found in the most fastest servers in the world.

Linux is also, in most cases, free plus open source. You have an immense community of professional talented developers working to create, improve and perfect it. The main reason why you don’t find it more often on general consumer’s systems is the simple fact that most people purchase their systems with Windows pre-installed and in many cases don’t know what an operating system is. I call it the Microsoft monopoly. Not trying to insult those of you who aren’t computer geeks since we’re all smart in something. That’s the reason why many software or game developer’s choose not to target Linux. If more computer manufactures offered Linux pre-installed and advertised the benefits of using it, you’d see more consumer systems with it as well as businesses.

Microsoft, possibly unintentionally, has created an ideology that if it is not Windows, then it must be inferior. Quite the contrary can be said. Linux machines can do everything that a modern Windows machine can and then some. What would happen if the market suddenly waived in favor of Linux? Would the quality greatly improve. Absolutely, but I might also mention that it is already a well-built system by actual professionals instead of the amateur geek in their parent’s basement. You don’t have to be a geek to use Linux anymore either. I think you can fill in the dots for the rest.

My favorite system in Arch Linux with an Xfce shell. Considering something better comes along that fits my personal need better than before, then I’ll probably switch to something else. Nothing more, nothing less than what I want. ^_^
http://www.facebook.com/people/Ernesto-Nadlor/100002648813416 Ernesto Nadlor

I use ubuntu because I am LAZY, but I really really want to install gentoo, just to get enough knowledge about linux.
Anonymous

Your intro music and animation is very professional. But to me it sounds more like something that should go at the END of the show, not the beginning. I know this is highly subjective, but that’s the feeling I get. Maybe a combination of your old theme at the start and the new one at the end?
Kprice789

I would like to see what you think is the best Home server Linux distro. I’ve looked at the Amahi and it is decent at streaming media around the house, however not completely free. Also the new WHS Vail has remote media streaming which would be great, is there a Linux version of it? or if there isn’t a really a dedicated Operating system for it, what kinds of software’s would you recommend to build a Linux home server?

Toby Jones

I’d recommend Ubuntu and XBMC to build one if you do in the end.

fasd

OMG you’re Archer too?! Good to know
http://twitter.com/bnleez bnleez

Love Pinguy!
Paul Lee

I use PCLINUXOS KDE it’s the easiest rolling release I’ve ever used! I love it.
Guest

I would be interested in which books you would recommend in order to debugging the Linux Kernel or software which is mostly used (e.g. gimp, Totem Player, vlc, mplayer, gnome, kde etc).

I’m sure everyone once had a software problem which was/is annoying. To me at least it was even more annoying to be unable to do anything although it’s free and open software. I’m not sure which programming language there is to be studied nor which book (or website?!) is appropriate for that purpose.

I would be glad if that question will be answered in your next video.
Jan

Nice vid on whatś the best distro and I agree with your viewpoint about that there’s no real ‘best’, different people, different hardware, different uses.. makes it hard to define a best distro alltogether.

What I like to add or what I’m bothered with lately is not so much the distro’s themselves but the support for proprietary hardware like Nvidia or even some soundcards. Although soundcards have less of a problem to function than video cards.
I have tried a couple of distro’s myself lately, mostly debian based and fedora (redhat) based.
But all of the distro’s have one thing in common, at least in my experience, Gnome 3 doesn’t work right away and allways runs in fallback mode.

It bothers me, because I have an very expensive video-card with 2 gigs of memory on it and a very recent model. I saved some money over a couple of months to be able to buy it.

I understand that proprietary drives are bound or restricted to certain licenses and that the drivers themselves are not open-source.
But still you can download and install the drivers.
As I understand Nvidia has made an agreement with PC-BSD or FreeBSD to actually make updated drivers with official support for these platforms.
The reason for this is because of the BSD licensing. Although BSD is mostly open-source it still has somewhat more restrictions on what exactly is open-source within the BSD operating system.
I’m not a lawyer or something, but as I’ve read and to my own interpretation, is that Nvidia seems to be more comfortable with a BSD license than a GPL license.

Again, all of the above according to my opinion and understanding. If I’m wrong then please correct me.

Anyway, I’m installing linux. Currently I’m running/using Fedora 15 64-bit. I upgraded my kernel to 2.6.40-4.fc15.x86_64 as soon my installation was finished.
I thought.. well, in other distro’s i could my nvidia drivers get to work, but the kernel version of ubuntu was at 2.6.38-10 or something similar and the drivers did install and work.
But with Fedora, currently, I’m stuck with the Nouveau drivers, because the kernel apparently was/is a bit too new. Don’t get me wrong, the nouveau drivers work, and I’m grateful that there are drivers at all for nvidia video-cards, but it is not like the real deal still.. it isn’t an official nvidia driver.

What I don’t understand is, why are the drivers not open-source ? i mean, you never pay for them anyway. why are the inner workings of the drivers such a secret ?
Is it because the competition of ATI or other videocard makers ?
I guess I’ve answered my own question here a bit ..

Sometimes it a bit hard to understand as a computer user with average knowledge about such things.
Just the fact that my installation says: You’re hardware isn’t good enough to run Gnome 3…
makes me a bit sad sometimes.

http://www.facebook.com/brunopereira81 Bruno Pereira

I would assume that the proprietary drivers are really to do with the inner secrets of a graphics card, not that anyone doesn’t know how they work but I believe the drivers will tell a lot on how the card does and why it does things, those are not things you would like to share with your competitors specially on such a tight market

Yeah, Fedora, bummer, always is a problem with the cards drivers, probably you can downgrade your kernel version to be able to run official drivers without problems (recommended) unless you are sure that the latest kernel does miracles and magically solves some issues you might have.

jan

Yeah, I see your point. I was a bit too much on the negative side with my comment. If you want to run the latest kernel release or close to the latest then one can expect some difficulties with proprietary drivers which are not (yet) up to date with the lastest kernel or hardware, etcetera.

Thanks for your reaction. I was a bit disappointed and my negative emotions got the better part of me.

I am grateful to all developers/programmers who are making the drivers of Nvidia possible to use on a linux operating sytem.

http://sportimizer.blogspot.com Shane

Anyone can help me, I’m planning to install linux and I have two choices but I don’t know which is better. Debian or Fedora? Thanks guys..

M. Alan Hettinger II

it depends on how good of a machine you have, if you’ve got an older machine then debian is really small, as I have found with a computer my boss was going to throw away. on the other hand I find fedora easier to use and a nicer interface.

Sebastián

I’m running Gnome 3 with the Nvidia drivers and it’s working great. I use Debian testing (wanted to learn more) but I get Gnome 3 from experimental since it still needs some time to reach testing.
Guest

I tried XFCE, with Xubuntu but a lot of things didn’t play nice (compiz. xscreensaver, etc.).

As you said, it just didn’t work for me.

I’m thinking seriously about giving unity a second chance.

But, love this show!
Ryebread761

What is your favourite desktop environment and why?
jedi453

TWIL,

You mention that you’re running GNOME in fallback mode. Although it appears to be because of your graphics card/drivers it may be because you didn’t install Arch’s “gnome-shell” package when you upgraded to GNOME 3. This happened to me and the pop-up that resulted made me believe it was my graphics card’s fault or the fault of the drivers for it. So I would suggest double checking that you have “gnome-shell” installed. For me I believe all I had to do was install that package and it worked.

Good luck, thanks for another good video,
jedi453
http://twitter.com/emiel1976 Emiel Pijnenburg

For me it is Xubuntu with DockbarX but it is missing some things that I like in Ubuntu.
But still because of the menu and that it is limeted to change some things, I choose Xubuntu as my nr 1.
Still I like 10.10 a lot and it is running on my 2nd pc.

Unity has some good things but the menu is a disaster and I mis the desktopchanger.
Gnome 3 is also not my thing so I changed to XFCE.
It comes clossest to what I like.
Suhaib

Can you mention my name ?
Jesper Bergman

You say that you use Arch, and like the fact that you only get what you ask for. But, if you want to install software that is not available for arch, what do you do then? You don’t have the Software center or .deb-packages like in Ubuntu or Debian. Does packman fix it all? If not: how do you deal with that?

Thank you for your answer,
i would really like to know =)

//Young Swede

Ayodeji Remi-Omosowon

What sort of software are you after? You should be able to get any linux software that is available for other distros on ArchLinux. Check out the AUR (Arch User Repository) which will most likely have any software you are looking for if it is not in the standard repos. What you may not get is a pre-compiled binary, and in that case, if you do not find the software in the AUR, you can always build from source.
Mike

I’d be surprised if anything in the Ubbuntu software center wasn’t available on Arch. My experience is that Arch provides access to the absolutely most current software whereas programs in the ppa can often be quite out of date. In the off-chance that what you are looking for is not in the AUR, you can put in a request in the Arch user forums and someone will package it for you.

Mondtanz

I love opensuse, and cannot understand why not everybody does. It has a gui, for the new users, you can do command-line if you like. Have to think very hard for the last time I had hardware issues, … flash works out of the box, and it comes with KDE, which apparently even Linus prefers over Gnome. And the best with opensuse, it has a rolling release, so with 1 command-line you are always updated.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_3BEMYXZR3QTBZF676TUAEKATHM syncdram

can you make another video on your kdenlive composite video ending using the (latest) version of kdenlive? To lay videos on top of the video you want the numbers are a bit different.
Justiceh

you dont quite point any Os you say what is too hard for poeple to play around with… and what you use… you should point what is best for like : noobs=ubuntu (but still for advanced hehe dont stab me guys)… pinguyOS or whatever linuxmint for whatever and such…na’am sayinnnnn haha
Jake Davies

Ask TWIL: You’ve never spoken about the best alternatives to desktop environments: sole window managers, namely of the tiling type. I’d like to see some discussion about dwm, awesome, xmonad, ion, wmii, etc. and setting up an environment that’s great for developers rather than casual mouse-driven desktops. Feel free to morph this into a question
Ruben De Smet

QUESTION: What’s your experience with Macintosh OS X? I hate to use it
http://twitter.com/OgMaciel OgMaciel

Too bad you didn’t mention Foresight linux… Arch would be the logical distro for some who’s used Foresight but fell out of love with it during the “dark days”…

http://www.thisweekinlinux.com Jordan

You’re absolutely right, I completely forgot to mention Foresight. Someone asked me the other day what my favorite package manager was, and I think I said it was a tie between yum and conary, because of the history/rollback features, and how easy it is to package for conary.

Anonymous

For ASK TWIL, I would do what hardware your running, it seems like a common question most people are probably wondering.
John

love this section!
go twil
Dalton R.

This was a good one and a lot of help for me….thanks
Luke

Mint, it’s polished very well. Basically it’s Ubuntu + hours of customization that I would do myself including the very important font rendering improvements. Works well with my dell dual-head laptop setup.
http://profiles.google.com/dyrver.eriksson Dyrver Eriksson

Do you as me dislike Pulseaudio? Tried it many times, still not satisfied with what it does and the quality I wish to get. Lately I installed Gnome3 and it forced Pulseaudio on me. Didn’t take long before I got rid of Gnome3 to get back to good sound quality. Arch Linux with KDE 4.7 atleast leaves me a choice of PA or not

http://www.thisweekinlinux.com Jordan

I’ve been using Pulseaudio exclusively for a few years now, and I really like it.
Andreas Kedert

what is wrong with puleaudio ? it works verry well for me, however some mp3 files that works fine on my sisters windows computer that skipps and makes noises on my ubuntu computer

Andreas Kedert

Verry good video, i mainly use ubuntu, but i have however tried Linux mint and xubuntu and i like them both verry mutch, im going to build 2 new computers soon and one will run xubuntu and one will run Mint, thus my current computer will remain on ubuntu
http://www.youtube.com/user/liamfraser280 Liam Fraser

I decided to choose Debian because I got introduced to linux in a terminal only workshop with no GUI. They used Debian and after looking around I thought, I might as well start with a difficult distro to configure so I learn more along the way. A lot of people criticize Debian because the main repository is usually out of date (but rock solid reliable. However, I run Debian Testing which is pretty much up to date (maybe a couple of weeks after the packages have been in Debian Unstable or Experimental), and is probably as stable as something like Fedora 15. Sadly, Debian only runs on my second computer, My audio interface wont work in linux and I need it to because I record music. Also the production software on linux isn’t up to standard yet! Maybe I’ll dual boot in the future but I still have college projects that need me to have Windows.
http://twitter.com/archvortex Stan McLaren

I vote for Arch using either Openbox (I’m biased towards ArchBang) or LXDE. The kernel updates/changes can be a pain for drivers as already mentioned (also the big commit in 2.6.39.1 to remove aufs2 rendering Larch inoperable to make .iso files) or changes to packages like wicd where wicd needs a -f upgrade for the new .pyo files, but that’s life on the bleeding edge. People who don’t like tinkering, using a terminal or solving problems with their system should stick with solid stable OOTB distros like Linux Mint as mentioned in the video.

Hopefully, kernel 3.0-ARCH should be out of testing this weekend.
Arthur Reeder

Xfce feels a lot like Gnome 2.x and it’s quite a bit lighter in resources.

Ayodeji Remi-Omosowon

I agree. Especially with being light on resources. I’ve been a gnome/xfce user for a while now, but have now stuck with xfce for good; I’m not a fan of Gnome 3.

My xfce desktop: https://picasaweb.google.com/113919667778621127789/RandomShots#5633721043375451586

Email

https://github.com/taylorchu/march/archives/master

This is the archlinux live cd that has gnome3 and almost everything you need packed in 430 mb. I think it is the only up-to-date archlinux live cd. If you want to try arch, this is a good start. (to auto install, type /march/setup in the terminal)
M. Alan Hettinger II

I would like too see for the next ask TWIL a comparison of linux to mac and windows, and your answer to the people who say that linux sucks and only has one percent market share.

http://twitter.com/MichaelKargl Michael Kargl

totally… a friend of mine bashes linux with “linux is mac” speeches :/
would be really neat to now some reasonable answers to such questions that
do not scare off that person (as I tend to unfortunately)

Toby Jones

lol. linux has been around longer than apple’s variant of unix, so just say mac is linux oh and BTW i’m using Linux Mint, the ATI drivers play very well with it unlike with Ubuntu and Unity :

http://danielj.se MaTachi

Check this image: http://www.netbooknews.de/wp-content/uploads/Fanboys.jpg

M. Alan Hettinger II

as far as the best I would say that at the time fedora 15 is good, although, once ubuntu goes to GNOME3, I will say that that is my favorite.
Ronnie Moore

I’m a big Arch Linux fan as well but I switched back to Linux Mint after a Kernel update broke my video driver and I was unable to get a terminal. I love Arch’s simplicity. If you have any hardware that requires closed sources drivers, Arch can be a pain since the kernel does update so often. If possible always run the open source drives if they exist. I find with Arch that I tend to tinker with the system a lot more. I will convert back to Arch when I have more time to play with it.
Daniel Dickson

I really like this video it answered a lot of my questions, so thank you. My question is which linux distro would you say is the best for PHP development. I have been using Ubuntu and was thinking of moving to something else. I tired Fedora15 but found it to difficult to install the LAMP stack compared to Ubuntu’s LAMP install via tasksel. So I guess my question is should I stick with Ubuntu or is there something better out there for my needs? Thanks in advance for any feed back.
Kenneth Skramstad

Linux kernel 3.0 is already in Arch enable testing repo and you’ll have kernel 3.0

http://www.thisweekinlinux.com Jordan

I figured it was there. Not really interested in going to testing though. I’m fine to wait a little while until it’s “Stable”

LucasXIIHK

Tumblr doesn’t work :S

http://www.thisweekinlinux.com Jordan

Fixed, Thanks!

Ask TWIL: Best Linux Distribution and What’s Your Favorite Distro?

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