Which versions have you worked with and what is the one you found that worked the best?

_________________
To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

There's a lot of ways to answer this question. I have had several distros in my lab at any given time.

What kind of answers to this question do you find work the best, concise lists of names, or lists of names and reasons why?

_________________
"All crowds boycotting football games shouldn't care who sings or takes a knee because they aren't watching." - Nas

Due/thanks to a congenial working relationship with the desktop/laptop support crew, I regularly end up with dated but not dead legacy hardware that I rejuvenate by instaling the latest stable release of Linux Mint on:

http://linuxmint.com/

Previously it had been Linux Mint 13, but Clem (the driving force behind Linux Mint) recently released a Linux Mint 15 RC "Release Candidate" that is all that and a bag of potato chips....

Linux Mint is increasingly loosely based on "ubuntu" which (repackaged debian), besides being the rally cry of the late oughts Boston Celtics, is also a bordering-on-proprietary and that's not a good thing linux distro that piggy-backs on the "debian" iteration of linux.

Besides "debian" (yes, some dumb ass named the best linux version after himself and his gf, in a "brangelina" kinda way) which underpins not only UBUNTU and LINUX MINT but also CRUNCHBANG linux and a host of other distros, there are approx 3 or 4 or more other major "streams" of Linux distros:


1. Debian

2. Fedora/Red Hat/Centos

3. Arch Linux

4. Gentoo

5. Slackware

6. Mandriva/Mageia

7. SUSE/OpenSUSE Linux

8. BSD,various flavorsl, which includes, to some extent, Mac OS X.

The introduction of gnome shell/gnome 3 really turned a lot of folks off of the Fedora/Red Hat stream.

Clem, the Linux Mint guy, has done a bang up job developing and maintaining an iteration of "gnome 2" called MATE as well as an entirely new desktop called "cinnamon" which is gaining purchase and presences outside the Linux Mint community.
Fed

I regularly install and run the most recent releases of debian (in some fashion, Mint/Crunchbang), Red Hat (usually as Fedora and/or CENTOS as well as any interesting versions of ARCH Linux.

Gentoo and Slackware are avoided at almost any cost.

So, in conclusion, run Linux Mint version 13 or 14 or 15 and you'll be sorted. CRUNCHBANG linux is very nice and lightweight in a VirtualBox setup and Fedora is always worth installing and running for a few weeks for the too cool for school new features, e.g., "boxes".

Mint is the way to go. Ubuntu's been getting weird of late.

_________________
Middle Aged Crazy, like Uncle Terry

I wonder if the ubuntu guys ("Canonical?") are involved in the development of the gnome desktop If they are, their end-game all along might've been mobile/phone/tablet. As gnome shell (quite the misnomer)/gnome 3 feels like a smart phone user interface.

Windows 7 is actually an excellent desktop OS. As was Windows 2000 non-server or whatever back then.

But Windows requires a certain amount of TLC to keep humming along smoothly and without malware/virii/etc mucking up the works.

So now when I get asked to troubleshoot a friend/family member's/random stranger's computer problems and they are running windows, I go into windows, reduce the size of the Windows partition and install Linux Mint alongside Windows on their machine, with the default boot being into Linux. Amazing how their issues just disappear after that, esp since nowadays with Valve/Steam linux is a suitable gaming platform.

Check out Linux Outlaws podcast, Fab/Fabian is a German expat living in London who is also a Sidney Crosy/Penguins fan, and he sounds like Stewie from Family Guy:'

http://sixgun.org/linuxoutlaws

http://slashdot.org had been around forever, originally started by some dudes from Holland, Michigan. It's a decent venue to keep up with the Open Sores whirled and IT in general.

No, they aren't. Their MacOS-looking Unity UI though *does* look like a mobile user interface, and indeed Canonical has Mobile phone offerings that use Unity. Let's just say, the UI fits well into the mobile consumer space.

The one thing that they are doing is moving people off of the X server. First they were pushing Wayland, now they're pushing Mir. I don't particularly want to work with a graphics server that only works on one distribution.

Anyway, yes, Gnome 3 is moving to at least looking like a mobile UI. KDE4 looks a little like that, too. I've been using XFCE.

Windows 7 is okay; you can keep the Windows 8 UI. But Windows makes it fairly easy to install malware/viruses.

_________________
Middle Aged Crazy, like Uncle Terry

I dabbled with Ubuntu 3 or 4 years ago, but I could never get the wifi drivers to work. I have a Sony Vaio laptop that is about 5 years old that someone gave me. It doesn't have a hard drive in it currently. I was trying to run an Ubuntu live CD in it, but it would not boot up with the laptop's drive or an external USB drive. So I loaded Ubuntu on a flash drive and that actually works pretty well. I need to get a bigger flash drive, but my plan is to load Mint with a version that has flash installed.

On my Windows machine I have flash blocker installed, so there is no sneaky flash malware playing without my consent. I also have a Script Blocker, but I don't use that quite as much although it can disable all scripts on a page.

_________________
To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”