What is you favored desktop OS and why?
 

Especially now that Microsoft has ended XP we have to move lots of clients?

Welcome to the forums!

My experience is that migrating clients from Windows XP to Windows 7 is often the smoothest transition. End users won't require as much retraining, as compared to migrating from Windows XP to Linux, Mac OSX, or even Windows 8.

If you are asking "which Linux?" then my two personal favorites are Linux Mint and RHEL/CentOS/Scientific (I lump these last three together because they are built from the same source code).

---------- Post added 03-07-14 at 01:48 PM ----------

Welcome to the forums!

My experience is that migrating clients from Windows XP to Windows 7 is often the smoothest transition. End users won't require as much retraining, as compared to migrating from Windows XP to Linux, Mac OSX, or even Windows 8.

If you are asking "which Linux?" then my two personal favorites are Linux Mint and RHEL/CentOS/Scientific (I lump these last three together because they are built from the same source code).

My favorites are Slackware Linux, followed by Debian Linux. They, along with Red Hat, are the existing Linux distros withe the longest lineage.

For Windows users who want an easy transition, I usually recommend Mint, all other things being equal. Mint tries to set up its default menu so it's not too scary to persons who have used only Windows.

Over the years I've noticed "former" m$-windows users find KDE (desktop environment) easy to use and it is included in many Linux distributions. The Xfce DE can also be setup to mimic the Xp desktop.

Debian. It has huge repositories, easy to install, can be set up however one wants, uses meta-packages for installing groups of software, and available for basically any type of hardware you can possibly come up with.

Debian. It works, without any need for much of anything other than installation.

Debian. Debian contains pretty much everything available in open source. The Debian repositories and the apt-get system are set up so that installing whatever subset of Debian fits your client's needs will be fairly straightforward. Debian is very stable so the time spent trouble shooting problems will be minimized.

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Steve Stites

Well, I make a living off of using Mac OSX, 9-10 hours a day, 5 days a week. I'm the rare Mac user that navigates mostly by keyboard. That's where I'm most productive.

But on my own time, I use Slackware, OpenBSD, Arch, and Debian sid (unstable). For DE or WMs, I use Xfce, i3, Gnome 3, Openbox, bspwm, jwm, larswm, sithwm, and many times just the framebuffer/tmux or tty/tmux.

Unfortunately, my favorite if you put emphasis on "desktop" is XP.

There is a lot to dislike about any version of Windows, but it still has a better desktop GUI than any Linux. After XP, the desktop GUI got a little worse and all the other things that made Windows bad got worse as well.

Windows integration of the "desktop" GUI with the file explorer has always made sense to me. The failure of Linux to do the same always feels like a flaw when I'm using Linux. In the Windows file explorer (and desktop) I have always used registry settings to have a powerful collection of context menus. Most of my common activities need only a right click on the relevant object. I've never figured out how to customize any Linux file explorer that well.

On the flip side, the integration of file explorer with internet explorer in Windows or in Linux has always been a major annoyance. When I mistype a LAN address in a file explorer, I never want that to trigger an internet search, to switch the explorer from file mode to internet mode, nor to take away my mistyped address, so I must retype the whole thing rather than fix just the typo. But Windows file explorer does all that. Some Linux file explorers default to doing all that as well, but it is easier to turn off.

But this computer I'm typing on will not be XP much longer. I will be switching to Centos (it is already dual boot XP and Centos).

What is the best replacement for XP? I really don't know.

The things that make Windows 7 an impossible choice for me have more to do with corporate IT than inherent in Windows. My other desktop computer here is Windows 7. I would hate Windows 7 anyway, and corporate IT makes it much worse. In general Windows 7 would be a rotten replacement for XP, but for this XP system, which exists mainly to do the many things that the combination of Windows 7 and corporate IT make impossible on my faster computer, using Windows 7 would not be an improvement over the option of just throwing the computer away and failing at those parts of my job.

Among Linux choices to replace XP, I don't think Centos is in any way the obvious choice. I selected Centos entirely because it is the version of Linux most commonly and competently maintained by local IT here. I need significant help from local IT to integrate any system with the local network resources. I'm not very competent myself as a Linux admin. So the choice of Linux version had to be made based on the experience of local IT, rather than on any difference in technical merits.

The answer will depend on your clients! There is no "best Linux" and what does for one will not do for others.

If you are talking about business users, they need stability. If they are prepared to pay for support, there's Red Hat and SUSE. If they want it free, there's CentOS (the same as Red Hat), Debian Stable, and Slackware.

An important consideration is the GUI, which is not built-in. Anyone will want something that is not going to be too much of a culture shock. If they are used to the XP interface, then they may not like Gnome: there may be cries of "Help, my computer looks like a smart-phone!" KDE is reliable and configurable, although some people find the special effects irritating. It's traditionally said that KDE is more Windows like, but I'd say that applied to the older versions. Mate and Xfce are more traditional. Then there's the question of the age of the computer. Some are going to be running XP on very old machines! AntiX will install Debian Stable in such a way that you can run a professional word-processor in 128MB. A modern KDE desktop will not perform well with less that 1GB.

So, we have
- Red Hat or CentOS with Gnome or KDE
- SUSE with KDE or Gnome
- Debian Stable with Gnome or KDE, or installed with Ice via AntiX, or installed with Mate via Point
- Slackware installed via Salix (more user-friendly configuration tools) with Xfce, KDE, or Mate.

cool. search for miserable MS-addicted in linuixquestions :)
i personally for last 7 years or so use slackware - on all my desktops, and servers. actually i have an XP too ( it come with my eeepc when i purchase it new), but i boot in it about a one or two times in year. i, as many of us, start my way in PC with ms dos, then win95osr, win98se, winxp, but then i got tired from all microsoft philosophy and problems, and switch to linux. not regret...

DE (desktop environment) or OS (operating system). Two different cans of worms, at least for me. My favorite DEs are (in alphabetical order) Cinnamon and LXDE; they let me do what I want to do, are configurable enough for my purposes, and otherwise stay out of my way. Once upon a time, I'd do a lot of switching between Fedora and Ubuntu on my netbook because one or the other would break wifi. Although wifi breakage is no longer a problem, I still multiboot Fedora, (L)ubuntu, and Linux Mint on my desktop PC. I've no strong preference among the three OSs.

CentOS for me any day...

It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell which is more commercial between M$ and Ubuntu...

For work -- Windows 7. I simply cannot get as much work done with my arch laptop/debian desktop as i can with my windows 7 desktop.

Interesting. Are you using applications for which there are no suitable Linux equivalents?