Ubuntu became my favorite in 2006 and I've used it ever since.
Prior to that I preferred RPM-based distros, Red Hat, Suse, and Mandrake.
Ubuntu has polished terminal colors (and now a beautiful
hand-crafted terminal font), good hardware support, and a nice security
model (sudo with no root password). Some of their packages include cool
patches that upstream OSS developers don't include by default. And
pretty much all Ubuntu knowledge transfers directly to Debian systems.
The cold boot time is targeted at 10 seconds or less, and there is
excellent support for running Ubuntu as a server O.S. (i.e., recent LAMP
packages, well-documented config files, frequent security updates,
etc.). There is also good support for using Ubuntu as a development
platform.
Ubuntu has had some blowback in the last few months because they
are pushing their new tablet-friendly GUI (called "Unity") very hard.
In 11.04 and 11.10 it was a pain to get back to a familiar Gnome
desktop. But they listened to customer feedback and now the Gnome
desktop is a one-click install (but it is still not the default). I
think the 11.xx series was a debacle but I appreciate them trying to
move forward in a new direction (instead of just copying the same old
"Start" button that's been in vogue since Windows 95).
Linux Mint is another .deb-based system that has been gaining a lot
of steam. After Ubuntu 11.10 a lot of Ubuntu users jumped ship to
Mint. I believe Mint is the fastest growing distro right now.
I still see a lot of Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS in my work and I
find it easy to switch between them. Certainly much easier than it was
flipping between HP/UX, Mach/NextSTEP, Solaris, and Irix (back when
those things existed).
I recommend you try Ubuntu (with the default Unity Desktop), Ubuntu
plus Gnome (for the classic Ubuntu people love), and Mint. Please let
us know what you try and what you liked.
--Derek
On 05/14/2012 04:26 PM, William Kreuter wrote:
After sixteen years of faithful use of Red Hat, it's time to switch.
May I have opinions as to which to choose for a home desktop?
My criteria include hassle-free installation, similar
look-and-feel to Red Hat, and full support of
rhythmbox, ffmpeg, perhaps realplayer, and generally
good all-around support of that sort of media
software.
I'm imagining that Fedora, Ubuntu and Centos ought to be my leading
candidates. Should I reduce this list? Expand it?
