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posted by
Dopefish
on Wednesday March 05 2014, @07:30PM
from the no-need-to-join-the-microsoft-collective dept.
from the no-need-to-join-the-microsoft-collective dept.
resignator writes:
"'Arm yourself with the information needed before telling someone to install such and such distro because it's great,' warned blogger Ken Starks in his recent FOSS Force post. 'It might be great for you, but maybe not so much with my hardware choices.'
What considerations do SoylentNews readers have when recommending an OS? What OS do you recommend the most or least? How far would you go to 'tailor' a Linux distro to a potential adopter before recommending something that will work out of the box but lack non-essential features?"
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by PrinceVince on Wednesday March 05 2014, @07:46PM
That's the generic answer for normal users (web browsing, basic boring stuff) which everyone agrees on. It tends to work well out of the box and the UI looks fairly familiar for those migrating from Windows.
I'm still stuck with Windows 7 though (not bad), because of certain software packages. I hope this will change within the next few years; I see plenty of good reasons to make a Linux distribution my main OS.
(Score: 3, Informative) by solozerk on Wednesday March 05 2014, @07:55PM
Same here - I recommend the Debian-based Mint to those not-so-savvy people that ask me for a good distro for beginners. Used to recommend Ubuntu, but I don't anymore since their amazon-search & gnome 3 bullshit move. It's not as polished as the best user-friendly version of Ubuntu was but it's good enough that even my girlfriend (not tech savvy at all) manages to use it without any help regularly for almost all tasks.
Personally, I use Debian - and that's what I suggest part of the same people (the tech-interest ones) look at once they've had the chance to get familiarized with the shell and Linux in general on Mint and they want to get a more "advanced" distribution.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Bill Dimm on Wednesday March 05 2014, @09:31PM
Having seen so many people gushing about Mint lately, I decided to give it a try after an OpenSUSE 13.1 install failed [novell.com] on my new laptop. Mint recognized my hardware fine (unlike OpenSUSE), but had problems during installation [linuxmint.com]. It felt much less polished than I was expecting from all of the positive news I've heard about it. I ended up installing OpenSUSE 12.3, which worked but required installing a different WiFi driver [novell.com] to get wireless working, and still has weird bugs [novell.com], and the laptop screen stays on when the laptop is in a docking station with the lid closed and the WiFi stays on even when the hardware switch is turned off (works fine in Windows, so it's not a hardware problem).
Maybe I've just had really bad luck this time around, but things just seem to be less polished and robust compared to when I installed OpenSUSE 10.2 on a similar laptop (mainstream Dell business laptop - D620 vs. E5430) in 2006. I've been using Linux since 1995, and I remember the bad old days. I thought they were behind us in 2006. Maybe some of the teams building distros these days are just too small to provide something really polished.
(Score: 1) by HiThere on Wednesday March 05 2014, @10:02PM
From my experiences (limited) Mint is a decent distro, but one that takes a more powerful CPU (or perhaps more RAM) than does Debian. This might be because I was using Mate on Mint, but xfce on Debian, but at that time Mate wasn't in the Debian repository. Mint may have had xfce, but the target user wouldn't have been satisfied, so I didn't test it.
OTOH, I've tried a different version of Mint on the machine I'm now using with Debian wheezy KDE, and found it slow. I don't have any idea as to what's going on to cause this, however. Again, no straight-up comparison, so no strong conclusions can be drawn...but the result is that I tend to think of Mint as a slow system.
Put not your faith in princes.