What's your stable, standard go-to Linux (for those that use it)

[Goobley]

I've been doing most of my work and development on Linux for quite a while now. My work is starting to become more important now (and I'm starting to have real deadlines that have to be met), so I can't be messing around with my old Arch install like I used to - I could never quite get it like I wanted it.

Stability is my primary focus, but having a nice interface is also good.

[SUBJECTIVE]
I don't like Ubuntu's Unity because it's too bright, too shiny and doesn't present much useful information to the user.
Mint's cinnamon interface feels like it's trying to mimic Windows with a dash of older OS X metal here and there, I don't like the feel of it either.
MATE is fine, but boring.
XFCE/LXDE both work pretty well and are lightweight but have big problems with screen-tearing on their default renderers and compositors. Replacing the compositor with something like Compton should fix the problem, but the joy of AMD drivers (on linux) is that they don't respect the OpenGL spec well enough to work properly either.
[/SUBJECTIVE]

In the past week I installed kubuntu 15.04 since I like the look of Plasma 5 and the previous versions of KDE have been pretty stable in my experience (if sometimes a little heavy on system resources). Well, wow, stability has been awful, first Chrome gets lots of screen-tearing/artifacting even with full-screen refresh vsync enabled. Plasmashell crashes at least once every 2 hours, and a lot more if I change system settings/work with applications that link against libsdl2. The mere act of opening a window using the standard libsdl2 functions has about a 30% chance of crashing the plasmashell IME.

Earlier this evening, plasmashell crashed for good and wouldn't come back on its own... or after a reboot... Eventually after deleting lots of config files I got it back. This OS is not behaving like the stable development environment I need.

To sum up my requirements:

• Solid, reliable (first and foremost)
• Access to the latest (or recent anyway) versions of gcc etc. is nice (working with some stuff that benefits from OpenMP 4.0)
• Subjective: Looks decent, works in a sensible way and has a fair number of customisation options
• Not worried about running a particularly light distro, this is for my main rig (in sidebar) only.

My standard workflow is not exactly complex, edit code in emacs, compile and run through a zsh terminal (via gmake), test code. I also browse the web (watch netflix sometimes), handle email and write some latex docs in emacs/use libreoffice.

I feel like Ubuntu/Debian derivatives are probably a solid choice due to their prevalence in the Linux world (and the fact that my current software is being deployed onto some big beefy 12.04 machines). I'd like to know you people's thoughts though (those of you that use Linux on a daily basis and require it to be stable (I know there's a few of you)).

Cheers

[GuidoLS]

My personal use Linux is Slackware. It's arguably the first non-Linus distro, and I've been using it for a looooooooong time. The main problem is, it's not very friendly. If you think messing with Arch was a chore, you don't want to look at Slack at all.

That being said, I have 3 levels of recommendations -

If your machine can handle it, I recommend Linux Mint - I prefer Mate over Cinnamon, and I prefer KDE over Gnome. You'll have to pick your own poison. Considering you don't like Unity, you're going to have to choose one of them. Or go straight command line. Or go with something that looks like an old DOS file manager pretending to be a desktop.

If your machine is older, LXLE - but you've already stated you have the AMD curse. That's going to be an issue no matter which flavor you use, unless... yep... command line.

Netbooks, etc, I like a distro called Easy Peasey. It's fairly full featured, handles wireless very well, and is (or was) a fork off of Ubuntu (I think it was a Lubuntu variant). You can get all the standard Ubuntu/Canonical updates, apps, etc, but the one primary issue is that the distro itself hasn't been updated in a while. It's at v1.6, and there's talk on their FB page about a 2.0 with enough demand.

No matter which one you choose, you're going to have to deal with the relative unfriendliness of the AMD drivers. That's a distro-wide issue, and it can be worked out. You're just going to have to haunt the appropriate forums and how-to's and get it done.

Other possibilities - Red Hat (not Fedora, but the actual Red Hat business install) and/or Debian. Debian is a tad on the quirky side, even for Linux, but rock solid, with a decent package manager, and virtually every desktop possible as an option. They just released an unstable of their 9.0 release, so a stable should be out any time.

[Bluecube]

Based on your requirements I'd recommend Mint Cinammon. I know you said you're not keen on it but it'll do everything you want plus it's stable, well supported and easy to work with. If you don't like Cinammon then install Enlightenment.

[kalniel]

A bit of a mix. Bio-linux is very common for training/workshop images as it's a decent base (Ubuntu LTS) and comes ready setup for almost everything we need. Developers use RedHat Workstation, and at home I tend towards Ubuntu LTS as well - I used to play with the real time kernel version but 14.04 is low latency anyway.

[anacdahudee]

Another vote for Linux Mint, cinnamon being my perticular choice of desktop environment. They've also just updated to 17.2 which I haven't had chance to try. Very stable, very feature rich and I have had zero problems since I started using it.

[herulach]

What's wrong with just plain Debian? Admittedly I only use it on servers (and my old laptop which is essentially an ssh console) but I find it generally as easy as anything else and you're not having to arse around with distro upgrades every 5 minutes.

[Goobley]

Arch wasn't too much of a chore per se. The biggest issue with it was thinking that I had it configured properly only to later find out at some critical time that doing such and such would crash my window manager due to the way I had it configured. Of course this would always come at the wrong time when I was working on something important. This is probably partly due to the 'AMD Curse' (I may end up cutting my losses and side-grading back to nVidia. I had heard that the AMD linux drivers were fine for normal use these days, they still seem pretty poor to me). I may keep a side install of something like Arch, but I don't have the time to spend learning how to configure each little subsystem at the moment when I'm also neck-deep in writing scientific simulations. Whilst I know a lot of setup (my first linux was gentoo) a lot of it seems to get more complex with each iteration.

Debian: I haven't used a plain Debian install since version 6, so this probably doesn't apply anymore (and I was a lot less experienced then), but I seem to recall it taking a while to get all the proprietary software I needed working, it probably isn't these days though.

Mint: I'll probably end back up here, or on one of the Ubuntu LTS. I may just go back to one of the XFCE/Mate variants of these distros, throw a tiling window manager on and call it done.

Folks on the kubuntu forum suggested trying the de back ports to get some UI updates, I'll try this for now and see whether it fixes some/most of the kde5 instability. If it does, great, I'd rather not reinstall again (especially as I have to use wifi and my card is unsupported by default in the kernel, so I have to get dkms and a basic build tools onto the machine to build the module before I can get internet, which does rather slow down the process).

Thanks for your opinions

[Rainmaker]

For desktop it's Manjaro if I want an easy, fast and featured live environment. All codecs, plugins etc already installed and it's much more up to date than Linux Mint with fantastic kernel switchers and auto driver install (eg Bumblebee for Nvidia cards). If I want something for older hardware - or I'm just in the mood - I go vanilla Debian (I'm typing this on Sid). Servers = Debian stable or oldstable. CentOS 6 maybe if I want a particular hosting panel on a VPS.

[VolandoK]

I don't really understand why people want Linux support so much. GroovyMAME, the best MAME version for cabinets, works best in Windows. So...why aren't you using Windows? Yeah. Yeah

[DanceswithUnix]

I tend to use RedHat variants.

My home workstation runs Fedora with a KDE desktop. There is a problem with RH being gnome obsessed, and if you use the fglrx AMD graphics blob then you have to avoid gnome like the plague to the point of switching to the kdm login program. That done, it has been very good. If you run the open source driver, then that probably won't concern you (I have an R9 285 so I can't yet). Have been using Fedora and Fedora Core before that and Red Hat Linux before that so there is going to be an element of "what you are used to" but it has been very stable.

My home server runs Centos. It is super for server usage, specially the built in VM farm support, but for a workstation I found it was pretty bad as it missed the up to date development tools that you need.

At work I am typing this on a Debian box. It works OK, but after years of using Debian I still find myself wishing it was running Fedora.

[b0redom]

I don't like Linux on the desktop. For servers, it's almost exclusively CENTOS/Scientific or RHEL.

[directhex]

As a Debian Developer... I run Ubuntu. It Just Works(tm), which is half the value of it. The other half is that it's so overwhelmingly common that most of the bugs, issues, kinks, weirdnesses etc are known and shared by other people. If I find some amazing distro that's perfect for me, but has a weird issue - how many other people have ever had that issue? Blogged about fixes? Patched solutions? None. There's huge value in doing what others do, to share in the institutional knowledge of that community.

[DanceswithUnix]

For servers, it's almost exclusively CENTOS/Scientific or RHEL.

That is part of why I have tended to run Fedora. If you write code that is going to end up running on Centos/RHEL then Fedora is the proving ground for RHEL technologies, so you get to see code break a good year before those libraries, compilers etc hit a customer. Hopefully you have released a fix and given them a chance to upgrade before anyone sees it.

[spolsh]

Ubuntu, just because it seems to have the most users, but I'm a very infrequent user and tend to install/play around/ go "oooh thats nice, or oh I like that bit" / revert to Windows again.

[Goobley]

Following the advice of the people on the Ubuntu forums I updated the desktop environment to get the backfixes from the KDE team. It's been a lot more stable since. I've heard quite a few good things about the recent improvements of Mint 17.2, so I'll probably trundle over there (or back to a default Ubuntu) after I finish the tight on time project I'm building right now (2nd week of September hard deadline).

As it makes sense for people who deploy to RHEL variants to run Fedora or similar, my university's compute clusters all run Ubuntu (12.04 in many cases with hideously outdated compilers), so it makes sense for me to run a Ubuntu derivative. Unfortunately my 270 can't control its fan properly on the open source drivers and makes a lot of noise so I have to run the dodgy CCC drivers to control the acoustics. I may just swallow the cost of side-grading to green team for improved driver support (especially as I've hung the system twice with OpenCL kernels that weren't even buggy).

Since the people I'm working with are in the Ubuntu eco-system, it makes sense to stay there, thanks for the responses though, it was interesting to see people's opinions.