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Ask HN: Alternative to Ubuntu?

16 points| mrpixel | 14 years ago | reply

I enjoyed switching from FreeBSD to Ubuntu 8.04 some time ago -- the FreeBSD went into the rack and I could do office work on a nice Gnome desktop environment.

Until now.

Gnome is broken and unsupported. Keyboard shortcuts don't work anymore. It's frustratingly slow to work with a mouse. I feel so babied around. There's no workflow anymore. I hate it. I so would love to ask them what kind of grass they're smoking... there's just no love anymore.

So, what's THE Linux distro developers might want to switch to?

21 comments

[+] dkersten|14 years ago|reply

My Linux distro of choice is Arch. I know a lot of people who have switched to Arch and everyone seems to like it a lot.

If you don't want something quite as hands on as Arch, I've also been hearing good things about Mint.

[+] Wilduck|14 years ago|reply

Since Arch doesn't come with a window manager out of the box, while you're trying new things, try installing a tiling window manager as well. Awesome[1] and Xmonad[2] are both good choices. If you want to be a power user of your window manager, you'll want to check out a tiling WM at some point.

[1] http://awesome.naquadah.org/

[2] http://xmonad.org/

[+] gaius|14 years ago|reply

Ubuntu was always just a Debian knock-off with a different theme, why not go for the original and the best?

http://www.debian.org/

[+] wr1472|14 years ago|reply

I've heard Linux Mint is a good alternative to Ubuntu not tried it personally though.

[+] imaginationac|14 years ago|reply

I'm using Linux Mint at the moment. I chose it after upgrading Ubuntu to 12.04 when things became unstable. Linux Mint is pretty good so far. It's stable, and uses a mix of Gnome 3 and MATE for the desktop environment.

[+] samuellittley|14 years ago|reply

Arch may not be the system for complete beginners, but if you've been on Ubuntu since 8.04 (4 years I think), you'll definitely know enough to set it up.

The Arch wiki and user guides are fantastic, I've not yet found anything that there wasn't a wikipage for.

The whole point of arch is that you only install exactly what you need, but you also have access to the latest and greatest packages. Plus the AUR system is so much better than PPAs...

[+] sheff|14 years ago|reply

I've had the same annoyances/issues when using recent base Ubuntu distros.

I really dislike alterations in user interfaces for what seems to be little end benefit, so looked around and found Xfce and LXDE which both have Ubuntu variants.

I've been running Lubuntu for a few weeks now and have been quite happy, and hopefully it will only change at a glacial pace.

[+] dkuntz2|14 years ago|reply

I use Arch and have gotten two other developers to switch to it from Ubuntu and Xubuntu, they also think it's awesome.

The reason I switched to Arch was because Unity breaks all sorts of Gnome things, and I didn't want to use Unity. I love Arch.

[+] kristianp|14 years ago|reply

I switched to Kubuntu after running Ubuntu up until the unity releases. It's not as close to the windows shortcuts as ubuntu 10.04, and some things don't work as well. For instance 'safely removing' a USB drive doesn't power the drive down.

[+] mrlyc|14 years ago|reply

Windows 7 leaves drives powered up too whereas Windows XP didn't. I suspect the change was made for people who want to keep charging their devices.