I'm typing this rant on my phone. Why? Causey computer crashed. Here's what just happened.
Yesterday I decided to give Ubuntu 16.04 a shot after using Mint for the past three years. Today I decided to re-download my Linux Compatible games from Good Old Games and install them. For some reason, I'm not having any success even though I'm following the instructions on GoG's forum. Whatever. It's fine. Dinner is ready and this shit can wait.
I'm about ready to head to the kitchen when I realize that my computer is working its ass off to do literally nothing. Figuring it's Firefox, the only program that's running, I try to just close it. Nothing. After a minute or so, I hit Alt+F2. Then I wait two minutes for the command prompt to come up. Then I type "xkill" and wait another three or four minutes for the option to come up. I select it, wait another minute, and finally my cursor turns into the little white X of death. So I try to close Firefox, but clicking the icon in the task bar. Does it kill Firefox. Yes. It also kills the entire fucking GUI, because all that's on screen now is my wallpaper and my computer is still running at full steam.
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?!
I do the only thing I can do. I turn it off and get myself some dinner. Fuck Ubuntu. I'd rather go back to Windows 3.1 than use this. Fucking shit.
This goulash is amazing though.
I will go the opposite and say Debian. Mint had a major security breach a few months ago, to the point that someone edited their blog to give a download link to an image with a built-in backdoor (and edited the MD5 hash displayed on the site to match). Unsurprising since they used WordPress for their site, which is about as insecure a platform as you can get. Made me seriously question their proficiency. Debian is better-supported, with a much bigger userbase and longer history. It's free, and doesn't have any of the corporate entanglements you get with Ubuntu or Fedora. You can install whatever window manager you want (including MATE, which Mint uses by default) on Debian or any other distro. I personally used xfce on mine, since it's lighter than Gnome while still being quite user-friendly. Basically any WM is going to be pretty customizable. Here is my current UI.
My answer is Mint. It's GUI is basically an XP clone, in my three years of using it I've never had the OS crash (Firefox has an issue from time to time), it's well supported and easy to keep updated, and if you're not doing anything fancy, it's perfect.
You are not the only one. I have switched from Ubuntu 15.10 to Mint on my main computer soon after I've heard that Canonical will not support AMD hardware (I need OpenCL capability). But I have installed Ubuntu 16.04 on my older laptop and had unprecedented amount of crashes, X fucking off and shutting down, and a whole lot of other problems. I probably got more problems in a week than for the previous six months on a version that was supposed to be this buggy and unstable release-candidate-like step. Now I have Debian installed on the other laptop instead of Ubuntu. Unsurprisingly, it woks fine. As someone who was having an Ubuntu system on at least one computer for past six years or so: I never had such a poor experience with LTS or even unstable versions.
I am so glad this isn't just me then. I honestly don't even know what I did. Ubuntu seemed like a decent shot because while it's new to me it's popular enough and obviously GoG supports it. I haven't used anything Debian based since CrunchBang went under and since I can always use my wife's windows box for gaming if needed, I'm half tempted to give Debian a shot.
mk, you might like to read it as well. Debian is really good, I do recommend giving it at least a try sometime. But bare in mind that because it focuses on stability you might end up having problems with installing some of the programs due to version requirements. If you have nVidia hardware instead of AMD you are better covered anyway (better support in general in my experience and drivers from nVidia don't leave you with impression that Linux is on the furthest backburner possible), but you might end up being frustrated that program N requires (for example) xorg 6.5.5 but even in Debian SID (most unstable and with newest software) they only recently added 6.3.4. Numbers made-up for purpose of example. Overall, Mint is much less fussy for people who don't want to dwell too much in command line but Debian is by no means a bad system. However, since it's a basis for *buntu and Mint and many other distributions you have to be aware that there are some extra steps to do in order to improve some functionality or use fairly recent software.
Who would have guessed? ;) Just to add one thing: Debian has its place, when setting up a server stability should be fairly high on the priorities list (this is freaking weird thing to say to Hubski admin :D). Same thing with systems like CentOS or RedHat Linux. Sure, you can use them on your desktop/personal laptop and don't mind staying within delivered software. But if you just must get something to work that requires new stuff, it can get painful. The computational grid for students at my university actually runs Debian (and the one for researchers is either CentOS or RedHat) and according to the admin it never had any problems once the setup was completed. And as you can probably guess, majority of the first year is close to monkeys who try to run code that due to intended or unintended error can have something along the lines of: double * velocity = (double*)malloc(N_PARTICLES << sizeof(double)); :D. Chance of having something like that on your personal machine are significantly less than when you have 300 people with ssh access and too much free time on their hands ;). const unsigned N_PARTICLES = 10000000U;
Nope, not just you. I've tried Ubuntu a few times, but it's consistently been unstable (once requiring a complete wipe and reinstall when upgrading to a new version failed). Plus I hate Unity. Plus I don't like that they made your searched of your computer default to searching Amazon too. Bleh. I'll second what Devac said and recommend Debian. I installed it on Monday, and have been super happy with it. Am typing this post from there, in fact. Truth be told, I don't really like having to go back to using my Windows 7 desktop. Have had zero problems with drivers or dependencies so far, although haven't tried to do much gaming. I did install Steam, which worked fine once I figured out how to add a 32-bit environment to aptitude. But smuxi and irssi for IRC (depending on whether I need notifications or not) and Firefox handles 99% of my use cases. Side note: I'm on IRC right now, and will be for the next couple of hours if you have additional questions.
To be fair, Ubuntu (or to be precise, Xubuntu in my default case) was doing the job for me up until 15.10. There is also a rather comprehensive Wiki that solves a lot of the performance problems with a tutorial that can be done once (and takes about 10-15 minutes to complete). Some of that also applies to Debian. It just is not the default set of settings for a reason that I can't fathom. In the end, all distributions have some problems. In terms of the Debian-derived ones: - Canonical did some shitty stuff with Ubuntu (Amazon, forcing Unity, recent and mentioned above 'fuck you' to people with AMD hardware) and only recently made it inactive by default (but to my knowledge it is still within Unity) - Mint ISO repositories got hacked (more info here) so for sake of security you might want to wait for a day or two after downloading ISO from site. Bit shit if you want to install it right after download. - Bunsenlabs (successor of CrunchBang Linux) left me with an impression of being just Debian with preconfigured OpenBox window manager. Following 'review' comes with a caveat that I have used Bunsenlabs for less than a month to see what's the hubbub about. It carries a version problem from the opposite end of Debian normal repositories. Instead of being on the safe and stable side it goes the Arch way and uses some of the cutting-edge/experimental versions. It's not impossible to work and have a fairly stable system out of it, but when something crashes you might get boned and a lot of the Debian/Ubuntu support will be outdated for you. As was in my case when I have plugged my USB camera into it and system went full retard on me.Nope, not just you. I've tried Ubuntu a few times, but it's consistently been unstable (once requiring a complete wipe and reinstall when upgrading to a new version failed).
I didn't know Mint got hacked. That's scary. I'm almost 100% positive I was running a clean version, but still, damn. That really is worrying. It's sad to hear you're not liking BunsenLabs much. CrunchBang was my first Linux rodeo, filled with curse words and Google searches galore. Maybe I really will just look into straight Debian this time.
Don't worry, the problem was found out at the very same day, properly disclosed and dealt with in a professional manner. Truth be told the advice I gave for dealing with downloaded Mint ISOs should be extended for every single distribution out there. It's uncommon, but we live in a world where anyone can spot security problems (hell, I have one imo serious found on Hubski itself, and I am by no means an expert when it comes to IT. It was solved almost instantly, thanks to mk's awesomeness and quick response.) and it can be hard to resist temptation to exploit them. Seeing how Mint team dealt with the problem, I would count it as a mixed blessing. On one hand, they got hacked due to lax wordpress configuration. On another hand, looking at their response they probably hardened their servers and will keep a much closer attention to security measures. That could turn out to be a major plus for them in the long run. Possible bias as a Mint user notwithstanding ;). I would not say that I don't like it, but it did not leave me 'wowed' afterwards. It was advertised to me as mix of the best things that both Debian and Arch have to offer (and I do like both of the philosophies behind them)… and basically got a Debian with OpenBox and one driver problem. It was by no means bad, but suffered from severe case of overhype. I would compare it to one place with Chinese food close to my dorm. Everyone was telling me that the food is more than filling and so tasty that you should watch out for suddenly jizzing in your pants ;). After giving it a go I got a solid and fulfilling meal, but by no means best I ever had when it comes to Chinese. Different strokes etc.It's sad to hear you're not liking BunsenLabs much.
That stuff happens. I can forgive my darling openSUSE, but I hate windows or Ubuntu for crashing.I think distros hardly matter any more though, as long as it supports the DE you like.
I switched to Arch from Ubuntu after it kept breaking on me. I've never been very lucky with updates and upgrades. Despite its reputation for being unstable I used the same installation for 7 years and it's been rock solid. It has broken from time to time, but it's been reasonably easy to fix. I never had that with Ubuntu - once it broke it was broken. I recently bought a new computer - the disk on the old had severe performance problems - I think it was starting to fail. Setting up a new OS minus all the accumulated years of cruft on new hardware is such a good feeling. EDIT: I really need to proof read my posts more carefully.