Moved to Linux as primary OS.

[NoOther]

it's awesome. I highly recommend it compared to any of the *buntu's or mints or whatever else people are currently excited over.

having come from gentoo myself, what over ten years ago?, I'm extremely appreciative of teething on a stage1 install. but now that I simply want something to run and run well with the ease of apt-get on top of it all I find debian does all I want and then some.

What window managers have you used with vanilla Debian? I tried installing the latest one with elightenment, but with just the vanilla Debian, I find its not compatible with many of the software applications I use. I believe typically this is the case with the newest kernel, but I also loaded an older kernel and experienced similar issues. The more popular packages like Mint and Ubuntu come preloaded with many of the libraries and package dependencies needed for the more common software applications.

To date, Ubuntu has been the best choice for many of the applications I use, even though I am not much of a fan of Unity, it works better than some of the other WMs I have tried. That said, it wold be nice to use a more minimalist install with a more versatile WM. I am trying to get a decent stable build that I can use for friends and family converting them over to Linux.

 

[jwcalla]

To date, Ubuntu has been the best choice for many of the applications I use, even though I am not much of a fan of Unity, it works better than some of the other WMs I have tried. That said, it wold be nice to use a more minimalist install with a more versatile WM. I am trying to get a decent stable build that I can use for friends and family converting them over to Linux.

It seems that GNOME 2 (gnome-panel) and compiz could be installed up through 13.04. I'm not sure about 13.10 though. I think for 13.10 they're using GNOME 3 + extensions to give a gnome-panel like look and feel.

 

[NoOther]

It seems that GNOME 2 (gnome-panel) and compiz could be installed up through 13.04. I'm not sure about 13.10 though. I think for 13.10 they're using GNOME 3 + extensions to give a gnome-panel like look and feel.

I have installed GNOME 2 with 13.10, but there were some issues here and there. It really isn't designed for it. I also re-installed and am just using the base 13.10 and all around it works far better than my other installations. There are a number of things that I don't like about it, but at least most of the media stuff and online chat/voice/video programs work relatively well on it. For now that is all that system really is for, until I can setup the new VMware server and get some other flavors in and redo my whole home setup.

 

[PinkyThePig]

I've been using Arch lately and I absolutely love it. The wiki is fantastic and updates are the easiest thing in the world. Either "sudo pacman -Syu" or (if you have a pacman wrapper app like yaourt) it is "yaourt -Syua". With the AUR repository and and a wrapper app like yaourt, you never need to sideload ANYTHING. I have yet to find an app that wasn't inside of either the default repositories or the AUR. Even branches of git projects (like anime and torrent branches of sickbeard) have AUR repositories and anyone can make one (provided you have a medium amount of shell scripting knowledge). Keeps everything up to date and more importantly, keeps everything documented. Want to know a list of apps installed? "sudo pacman -Q" want a list of aur packages? "yaourt -Qm". No longer do you have to hunt down PPAs and sideload 30 of them to get all of your packages to the latest versions.

Plus, due to arch's minimalistic approach, you only end up installing precisely what your system needs. No bluetooth devices? no bluetooth anything installed. No printers? No printer drivers installed. Makes for a very small install.

Last part (that is the one of the best imo) is that you are always on the cutting edge of updates. As an example, Arch ends up getting the latest cinnamon versions before most Mint users do. Sure, sometimes things break, but the arch community is so big now that you are extremely likely to come across others having your exact same issue that already resolved it.