I have been using Mint with XFCE as a desktop for many years and across two
jobs. I tend to work with about a dozen desktops ("workspaces") and the
behavior of XFCE suits me, or I've just become accustomed to it. Any
instability has historically been due to a specific hardware
component/driver.
I also support customers that typically are running RHEL with a few Debian
installs too, and have a number of VMs running varieties of versions of
Debian and Centos with different versions of our software. (opennms.org/com,
we do open source enterprise network managment software) Not a big fan of
systemd for the dubious individual heading it and their approach/vision,
but change is. We tend to favor redhat-based distros mostly because it
reflects our customer base. They use it under heavy loads in large
environments and it has been very stable.
Maybe the largest differentiating factor I have noticed is that binary
packages *I use* tend to come in rpms more than deb. It is usually, except
in SuSE flavors (and we also used SLES at oldjob), pretty easy to match up
rpms to a redhat version and more difficult in a debian or ubuntu
environment. Both package management environments aren't the best
(apt-/dpkg vs yum/rpm), though I think redhat gets the tip because
apt-cache and dpkg --get-selections are just weird to anyone not used to
them.
A lot of this is very conditional and depends on what you're doing with
linux. I had a coworker at oldjob that would buid the most minimal BSD and
tiny kernel he could. I also had another that did similarly with Arch.
Part of their enjoyment of *nix was they could do that and accepted the
difficulties (or lack of) that came with those approaches. I'm not a fan
of extra cruft, and vanilla installs come with plenty, but not to the point
that I wanted to create a custom install approach.
Just put together a small, low-power desktop based on the ASRock N3700-ITX
(6W TDP) with Mint 17.2 and am in a holding pattern for Intel to release a
Skylake video driver for Linux. Might be a good time to try other
distros/desktops and see how they do with the hardware until drivers are
available.
--
Ken
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