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I have been told very much, which Ubuntu is at dominant, then Linux Mint (LMDE), CentOS, FreeBSD are secondary, BEST to the Unix-like newbies, but why not rolling ones like TW (SuSE), Antergos (pacman), Manjaro (pacman) are better than LTS ones like Ubuntu, Mint, CentOS, FreeBSD? Is this dependent on how much stability a typical newbie needs?
Run everything in VirtualBox, several at once!!!
Slackware IF you want 3/4 of LQ to be your BestFriendsForever
Create your own distro (&submit it to DW)
LTS distros are very popular (and not just with newbies). One reason why LTS is popular, it gives the user a predictable and consistent work environment, for the next x number of years. The commands will stay the same, the interface won't change, hardware that is compatible now will continue to be compatible in the future, etc. An analogy would be, you sit down at your desk in the morning, you see a photo of your family, your favorite coffee mug, your pens and pencils are organized, the book you are reading is still open to the same page, etc.
Nothing wrong with rolling release (for experienced or beginner users) but it's important to remember that updates bring change. Maybe you sit down at your desk and your mug has mysteriously moved from the right side to the left side, or the photo of your family has been replaced by a photo of your cat, or the desk is 2 inches shorter than it was yesterday. Change can be disconcerting for some users.
Other users, of course, want to experience the latest in desks and desk accessories, and don't mind a bit of disruption to their work flow and environment. For this type of user, rolling release is ideal.
Distribution: Debian Sid AMD64, Raspbian Wheezy, various VMs
Posts: 7,669
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When picking a distribution a major choice may be "How much effort do I want to put into this?". If the answer is " none" then use Android, if "some" then Ubuntu or Mint, if "lots, and lots!" Then try LFS!
PCLinuxOS is lacked of external and custom repo support, whose apt-rpm is aging and incompatible against regardless ZYpp, urpmi, dnf.
It is also still lacked of LXQt, Hawaii, Lumina desktop shells, for ones which you are dissatisfied against Gtk+ (some compatibilities issues) and KDE (encouraging integration between Qt and Gtk+)
Trinity desktop shell is an KDE derivative removing KF deps but unsure how lightweight it is.
Budgie is now experimenting for LXQt but Budgie-Qt is not yet alpha.
I think this is fatally dependent on what were your needs backing to the moment to which you were new come to Unix-like.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pan64
Otherwise this question has no any meaning without context: best for what? best to do what?....
I would suggest you to download and test live CDs without installing them and you will find which one is the best - for you. www.distrowatch.com
Distribution: Mainly Devuan with some Tiny Core, Fatdog, Haiku, & BSD thrown in.
Posts: 5,009
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BSD & Linux are similar, but not the same, they do things differently, both are based on unix principles.
If you are looking for a beginner distro, it will be big & loaded with programs, if you want something lightweight try AntiX, I've been using it for several years now, & whilst I also use a Devuan derivative called Vuu-Do Linux, I always advocate AntiX. http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
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