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-   -   [POLL] Which Linux Distro and Desktop are you using? (Only 2 Questions) Thanks! (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/%5Bpoll%5D-which-linux-distro-and-desktop-are-you-using-only-2-questions-thanks-4175447739/)

fixles2 01-29-2013 02:49 PM

[POLL] Which Linux Distro and Desktop are you using? (Only 2 Questions) Thanks!
 
http://pollmill.com/f/what-is-you-ma...mgahm.fullpage

You dont have to sign up or anything I'm just curious. Many Thanks!

Emerson 01-29-2013 04:30 PM

Dude, you have *BSD listed as GNU/Linux.

fixles2 01-29-2013 05:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emerson (Post 4880184)
Dude, you have *BSD listed as GNU/Linux.

LOL I know. I just copied distrowatch top 100. Forget it included BSD. Thanks for voting. Over 400 in 4 hours. Pretty good. Surprised Ubuntu isnt winning by more and even more surprised Gnome3 is the most popular desktop (only just)

chrism01 01-29-2013 06:40 PM

Re Ubuntu; its very popular (recommended) for newbies/those who want a more MS experience (but apparently Mint is even better).
Its less so for experienced uses eg see people's profiles on the left here.

fixles2 01-29-2013 06:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrism01 (Post 4880253)
Re Ubuntu; its very popular (recommended) for newbies/those who want a more MS experience (but apparently Mint is even better).
Its less so for experienced uses eg see people's profiles on the left here.

A year ago Ubuntu got me into Linux and now I only use windows to play starcraft 2 (I got it running under wine but it was really sluggish :(

I think new users and ex-windows users would feel more at home with mint than ubuntu. It also looks a lot better in my opinion.

Arch is the only way to go for me at the moment though.

fixles2 01-29-2013 06:51 PM

Over 600 people have taken the survey so far. You can see the results here

http://pollmill.com/f/what-is-you-ma...m/answers.html

m.a.l.'s pa 01-29-2013 08:03 PM

Couldn't participate, because there's really no distro or desktop that I use the most. I multi-boot, and use various DEs and WMs.

fixles2 01-29-2013 08:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by m.a.l.'s pa (Post 4880310)
Couldn't participate, because there's really no distro or desktop that I use the most. I multi-boot, and use various DEs and WMs.

I think most people find a disto they like and stick with it. But if we were all the same it would be a boring world. Thanks for looking though. Over 750 responses much better than I ever imagined!

m.a.l.'s pa 01-29-2013 08:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fixles2 (Post 4880313)
I think most people find a disto they like and stick with it. But if we were all the same it would be a boring world.

You're right. I have a handful I like, and I tend to stick with 'em, which I guess is not normal, although I think it's fun.

fixles2 01-29-2013 08:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by m.a.l.'s pa (Post 4880319)
You're right. I have a handful I like, and I tend to stick with 'em, which I guess is not normal, although I think it's fun.

What do you run then? I've only been using Linux a year and swtiched to Arch a few months ago. Steep learning curve but well worth it. Not many distros rocking Slim login manager with i3 tiling window manager.

m.a.l.'s pa 01-29-2013 08:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fixles2 (Post 4880329)
What do you run then?

Currently: Debian, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Sabayon. Currently on various distros, Xfce, GNOME Shell, Unity, KDE, Openbox, and Fluxbox.

m.a.l.'s pa 01-29-2013 08:55 PM

Also I like Mepis and Knoppix, but mainly for live sessions, when I need them.

fixles2 01-29-2013 08:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by m.a.l.'s pa (Post 4880336)
Currently: Debian, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Sabayon. Currently on various distros, Xfce, GNOME Shell, Unity, KDE, Openbox, and Fluxbox.

lol that is a lot. Debian Sid was my previous distro. Loved it but Arch is more cutting edge and seems to have every package you could think of. You can even install Unity. Sabayon is a distro I'm going to look at as an intro to Gentoo.

m.a.l.'s pa 01-29-2013 09:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fixles2 (Post 4880344)
lol that is a lot.

That's after I cut back. I used to also have SalineOS, PCLinuxOS, Linux Mint, and Mepis, and I also had Cinnamon, E17, and AwesomeWM running here. I just like everything, I'm easy.

suicidaleggroll 01-29-2013 09:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by m.a.l.'s pa (Post 4880336)
Currently: Debian, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Sabayon. Currently on various distros, Xfce, GNOME Shell, Unity, KDE, Openbox, and Fluxbox.

That's a big selection to use on a regular basis.

Personally, on a regular basis I use Fedora (all versions) with Gnome 2, CentOS 6.3 with Gnome 2, and OpenSUSE 12.2 with XFCE. These are all on different machines, and by FAR my favorite is OpenSUSE with XFCE, in fact none of the other systems are even a contender. I've also used Ubuntu a decent amount, and found it absolutely atrocious. Mint is decent, for an Ubuntu-based distro. CentOS and Debian are good for what they are, stable server distros, but when it comes to daily usage they start to fall down in many aspects. KDE 4 is avoidable, and Gnome 3 is an abomination in my opinion.

m.a.l.'s pa 01-29-2013 09:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by suicidaleggroll (Post 4880350)
by FAR my favorite is OpenSUSE with XFCE, in fact none of the other systems are even a contender

I'm relatively new to openSUSE, having used it for a bit less than a year. I've been kinda surprised at how good it is.

suicidaleggroll 01-29-2013 09:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by m.a.l.'s pa (Post 4880355)
I'm relatively new to openSUSE, having used it for a bit less than a year. I've been kinda surprised at how good it is.

I think a lot of people are surprised by OpenSUSE actually, I know I was.

I used Fedora for a very long time, and always faced problems with updates. Everything would be fine, then I would "yum update", and one of the updates would break something. For example, I once "yum update"'d two of my Fedora machines, and instantly all of my CIFS remote mounts on those two machines died. Nothing I did would bring them back up, then about 6 days later another "yum update" fixed the CIFS libraries and my remote mounts popped back up. If you've ever seen people post about how Fedora is an "experimental" distro for RHEL, there you go...

On the flip side, my CentOS and Debian machines are SO slow to implement updates and bug fixes that they face the opposite problem. For example, my desktop PC at my office runs CentOS 6.3. Every couple of months, it starts to give me errors when I try to open new terminals. In fact, here is the exact problem:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=667539
It's been going on for YEARS, yet Redhat (and by proxy CentOS and ScientificLinux) haven't responded to it at all. Notice the dates on that bug report...first reported January 2011, then closed August 2012 not because the problem was fixed, but because the distro that it was first reported on became obsolete.

This is the problem with server distros, they're so incredibly slow to respond that if you do encounter an easily solvable problem (in fact an ALREADY SOLVED PROBLEM), it's not going to be fixed for years to come.

In comes OpenSUSE. In my experience it's the happy medium between the 2-3 year old server distros (Debian/RHEL/CentOS) and the .0001 year old experimental distros (Ubuntu/Fedora). Things just WORK, and they work well.

In fact the only problem I've ever experienced with my OpenSUSE systems has been when trying to install a rolling-release update (11.4 to 12, 12.1 to 12.2, etc). This is admittedly buggy, however this can be avoided very easily by:
1) backing up the existing system
2) install the new system
3) restore any backup files that contain config files that are needed to restore functionality (namely the files in /etc/ and /home/).

DavidMcCann 01-30-2013 11:29 AM

I was wondering what the results would be, but my colour vision isn't good enough to make head or tail of your pi charts!

fixles2 01-30-2013 11:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DavidMcCann (Post 4880802)
I was wondering what the results would be, but my colour vision isn't good enough to make head or tail of your pi charts!

Hi David,

If you hover over one of the pie charts a menu pops up above the question title which allows you to switch to a table view. You can click the columns to sort. Not the best UI but it works.

DavidMcCann 01-31-2013 12:05 PM

Ah! Interesting results, presumably influenced by where the participants came from. Arch second to Ubuntu was rather surprising, and Xfce second to KDE says something about Gnome.

fixles2 01-31-2013 12:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DavidMcCann (Post 4881497)
Ah! Interesting results, presumably influenced by where the participants came from. Arch second to Ubuntu was rather surprising, and Xfce second to KDE says something about Gnome.

I posted the link here and on reddit r/linux r/linuxactionshow Would have been a bit stupid to post it in the ubuntu or arch forums.

The thing I found most surprising was mageia got hardly any votes but is second on distro watch.

273 01-31-2013 12:18 PM

Why did you decide against a poll on LQ?
I may take a look at your poll when I have a PC in front of me but it seems odd to take people off-site dor a poll and it may influence the outcome.

fixles2 01-31-2013 12:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 273 (Post 4881511)
Why did you decide against a poll on LQ?
I may take a look at your poll when I have a PC in front of me but it seems odd to take people off-site dor a poll and it may influence the outcome.

I didnt know you could do one on LQ. I just typed online poll into Google.I initially posted it on Reddit. I didnt think many people would respond but over 2500 did! I think the results are pretty fair. The backend has a find cheaters feature which is pretty nice but didnt find any.

m.a.l.'s pa 01-31-2013 12:36 PM

Interesting results. Okay, so what happens if a person clears cookies, starts a new browser session, and votes again?

fixles2 01-31-2013 12:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by m.a.l.'s pa (Post 4881520)
Interesting results. Okay, so what happens if a person clears cookies, starts a new browser session, and votes again?

Their IP Address would be the same

shivaa 01-31-2013 12:46 PM

Done!
Mine is Debian + Gnome 2 :)

m.a.l.'s pa 01-31-2013 12:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DavidMcCann (Post 4881497)
Ah! Interesting results, presumably influenced by where the participants came from.

I know from when I used to use PCLinuxOS that folks at their forums love to encourage voting in polls/surveys. It strikes me that this survey has only 8 votes for PCLinuxOS at this writing. Just wait until they and the Mint users find out about this one. :)

fixles2 01-31-2013 01:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shivaa (Post 4881528)
Done!
Mine is Debian + Gnome 2 :)

Ahhh a classic! Thanks for voting.

fixles2 01-31-2013 01:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by m.a.l.'s pa (Post 4881543)
I know from when I used to use PCLinuxOS that folks at their forums love to encourage voting in polls/surveys. It strikes me that this survey has only 8 votes for PCLinuxOS at this writing. Just wait until they and the Mint users find out about this one. :)

Yeah I was worried about that happening. Do you think I should stop the votes? Votes have pretty much stopped now. 2600 people though not bad.

m.a.l.'s pa 01-31-2013 01:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fixles2 (Post 4881554)
Do you think I should stop the votes?

No, I don't. With any poll, there's potential for inaccuracy, but I'm thinking that more votes is better. Anyway, these things get people talking, and I think that's good.

TroN-0074 01-31-2013 01:33 PM

My most used distros in order of how oftem I use them are
1-Ubuntu
2-OpenSuse
3-Slackware
4-FreeBSD

My Desktop environments in order of what I prefer
1-Gnome
2-KDE
3-LXDE
4-Unity

Distros I wish to use but I have nothing to install them in are
1-Arch
2-Debian

Desktop environment I would like to try
1-Xfce
2-E17
3-IceWM

That's it!

fixles2 01-31-2013 01:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by m.a.l.'s pa (Post 4881566)
No, I don't. With any poll, there's potential for inaccuracy, but I'm thinking that more votes is better. Anyway, these things get people talking, and I think that's good.

It sure does I got a great new window manager from the discussion on reddit, i3 http://i3wm.org/. Its tiling but much easier and more intuitive than xmonad or awesome. Unfortunately I missed it out of the poll :(

m.a.l.'s pa 01-31-2013 01:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fixles2 (Post 4881573)
I got a great new window manager from the discussion on reddit, i3 http://i3wm.org/. Its tiling but much easier and more intuitive than xmonad or awesome. Unfortunately I missed it out of the poll :(

Thank for that tip! Hadn't heard of it, but I'm looking at one of the screencasts, and I think I want to try it out!

fixles2 01-31-2013 02:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by m.a.l.'s pa (Post 4881575)
Thank for that tip! Hadn't heard of it, but I'm looking at one of the screencasts, and I think I want to try it out!

Its a different way of interfacing with a computer from normal window managers. Give it a try for a few days to get used to it. install dmenu as well which is like gnome-do. ALT+D and type what you want to launch and application. Let me know if you get stuck or configuring gtk themes or auto suspend etc.

TobiSGD 01-31-2013 02:53 PM

i3 is (for me, of course) the best of the tiling WM's, if you prefer manual tiling.
Sadly, it is not on the list and since I use it exclusively I can't vote for any of the other DEs/WMs, so note votes from me on your poll.

fixles2 01-31-2013 03:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TobiSGD (Post 4881605)
i3 is (for me, of course) the best of the tiling WM's, if you prefer manual tiling.
Sadly, it is not on the list and since I use it exclusively I can't vote for any of the other DEs/WMs, so note votes from me on your poll.

Really sorry about that. Hadnt heard of i3 before about 3 million people complained it was missing... I can see why, I'm running it now, its amazing.

fixles2 01-31-2013 03:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TroN-0074 (Post 4881567)
My most used distros in order of how oftem I use them are
1-Ubuntu
2-OpenSuse
3-Slackware
4-FreeBSD

My Desktop environments in order of what I prefer
1-Gnome
2-KDE
3-LXDE
4-Unity

Distros I wish to use but I have nothing to install them in are
1-Arch
2-Debian

Desktop environment I would like to try
1-Xfce
2-E17
3-IceWM

That's it!

Arch and Debian are my 2 favourite Distros. I found E17 to be very clunky and horrible to configure I think its my least favourite desktop. One to add to your list is i3 really easy to use tiling window manager. http://i3wm.org/screenshots/

TroN-0074 01-31-2013 03:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fixles2 (Post 4881618)
Arch and Debian are my 2 favourite Distros. I found E17 to be very clunky and horrible to configure I think its my least favourite desktop. One to add to your list is i3 really easy to use tiling window manager. http://i3wm.org/screenshots/

I cant commit to just one distro, I wish I had a spare laptop or something to install Arch and Debian in it. The reason why I must use these distros is because I am learning Linux but once I develop a taste for just one I will probably only use that one flavor

E17 is the default graphical interface in Bodhi Linux and it looks really nice, I dont think the user has to do too much to it.

I once tried Xmonad and I think it would required some used to. Other than that is all fun.

etech3 01-31-2013 05:40 PM

My choice, Debian and Gnome

fixles2 01-31-2013 09:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TroN-0074 (Post 4881662)
I cant commit to just one distro, I wish I had a spare laptop or something to install Arch and Debian in it. The reason why I must use these distros is because I am learning Linux but once I develop a taste for just one I will probably only use that one flavor

E17 is the default graphical interface in Bodhi Linux and it looks really nice, I dont think the user has to do too much to it.

I once tried Xmonad and I think it would required some used to. Other than that is all fun.

I think the best way to learn linux is to install an use Arch. Any other distro is easy by comparison.

Randicus Draco Albus 01-31-2013 10:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by suicidaleggroll (Post 4880350)
Debian ... good for ... stable server distro
2-3 year old server distros (Debian/RHEL/CentOS)

Debian is server distro? That will be news to many people.:eek:
Quote:

but when it comes to daily usage they start to fall down in many aspects.
Then all of the people using Debian must be doing something wrong. Or perhaps the rock-solid performance in daily use is a figment of our imaginations.:rolleyes: Provide some examples to substantiate your opinion. I would be interested to "learn" the drawbacks.

kedarp 01-31-2013 10:39 PM

Its great to see that Arch ranks right next to Ubuntu. I think you posted this link on an Arch forum.:doh:

JESSEJJ89 02-01-2013 12:27 AM

Why can't we all just go back to "command line" only days :)

FredGSanford 02-01-2013 06:26 AM

Mageia 3 Beta & Gnome 3

273 02-02-2013 04:18 PM

Currently using Debian Sid with XFCE on both my desktop and netbook. I do occasionally boot into Slackware on the desktop though, again with XFCE, and I keep using Ratpoison on the netbook now and again.
I'm always playing with other distros in VMs but I've yet to see anything that makes me want to switch. Not that the other distros don't look good, because they do, I just tend to stick with what's familiar.
What always strikes me nowadays is how many decent distros there are out there and how easy Linux is to install. It's a far cry from when I first moved to Ubuntu from Fedora due to dependency hell when I was first getting into Linux.

Mountain Dev 02-02-2013 04:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Randicus Draco Albus (Post 4881892)
Debian is server distro? That will be news to many people.:eek:

I see the same being said quite often of Cent OS and SL, though I find them to be excellent, solid dekstop OS's.

goumba 02-02-2013 05:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 273 (Post 4883244)
Currently using Debian Sid with XFCE on both my desktop and netbook. I do occasionally boot into Slackware on the desktop though, again with XFCE, and I keep using Ratpoison on the netbook now and again.
I'm always playing with other distros in VMs but I've yet to see anything that makes me want to switch. Not that the other distros don't look good, because they do, I just tend to stick with what's familiar.

I absolutely agree. I primary use Debian Wheezy, but have tried Mint, Fedora, Slack, kFreeBSD, and on and on, but it's familiarity that keeps me with Debian. Although I did make the transition from Gnome 2 to Shell and am (*gasp*) loving it. It's the deep down stuff (package management, file location, etc) that makes each distro what it is to each user as far as I can see.

nigelc 02-03-2013 12:16 AM

Mageia 2 + Xfce.


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