Open Ballot: What's your ideal distribution look like?

Dream Linux Distro

Harshad Joshi (not verified) - July 16, 2012 @ 2:45pm

I will steal installer from Fedora Core, stability from Debian and code base from Gentoo.

My dream distro

Tobi - July 16, 2012 @ 3:18pm

Pacman, the rolling release model with up to date stuff and the general flexibility from Arch

Graphical installer, GUI tools and default applications from Ubuntu

Repository and stability from Debian

Design skills and overall roundness from Mint

File system structure from Gobo Linux

Distro Mash-Up

Beardy Jesse (not verified) - July 16, 2012 @ 3:38pm

For my dream distro It'd have to be a rolling release (SolusOS) with a "works with all hardware" philosophy (ubuntu) super fast and massively customizable interface (fluxbox) and all the newest and most up-to-date software (debian testing) and also stable (not debian-testing). I've never had a problem with the installation program of any of the distros I've used, so don't have a favorite there, but do love a menu that can be searched from a simple hit of the super key (mint).

Exactly Like Arch Linux

Anonymous Penguin2 (not verified) - July 16, 2012 @ 4:16pm

Exactly Like Arch Linux

Shut down button

Fat Penguin (not verified) - July 16, 2012 @ 4:20pm

My ideal distribution has a shut down button... Remember those times?

usable by your granny Part II

cupcake penguin (not verified) - July 16, 2012 @ 6:26pm

my granny like dancing and listing to radio.
my granny also likes cakes, plus some cakes come with iceing.

Favorite Distro

HopSkipJump (not verified) - July 16, 2012 @ 8:47pm

Favorite distro?

SolusOS of course! Stable, current/up to date software, fast/low resource draw, works out of the box, etc., etc., etc. What more to say, what more to ask for?

SolusOS is what other distros should be, but, unfortunately, are not.

Ideal Ubuntu

Petescan321 (not verified) - July 16, 2012 @ 9:29pm

A stable base of Ubuntu LTS with the Ubuntu software centre, remastersys, multimedia codecs, DVD support & Wine preinstalled. The closest thing to this is Zorin OS.

Now that I think about it...

Prolific Puffin - July 16, 2012 @ 9:53pm

To further elucidate my point, EVERY Linux desktop I have, or have ever had has been perfect in my eyes. As I mentioned above, that is the entire point.

Mirror, mirror...

Sultan_of_Swing - July 16, 2012 @ 11:34pm

You'll note from the other responses that there are so many choices users are making to have their dream linux distro become a [virtual] reality in this ballot. What's interesting is that many distros are quoted as having a superior feature, be it the package manager or user interface for example, but these are all shortlists of the major distros. Arch, Suse, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian and Gentoo all sound like capable distros, and would appear to be, for most, already near-ideal. However, the choices of applications, or the way they choose to have their systems constructed, seem to be more of a reflection of the user than a simple tick-box exercise to bolt together an OS. In a way, the ideal distribution seems to mirror the overall working pattern of the user. I'd describe myself as a home user with bolt-on multimedia creativity, so for me, Linux Mint KDE is a perfect fit. If you logged into my computer, you could probably tell a lot about me as a user, which, I dare say is likely the same for many others. So, if this doesn't entirely sound like a load of whimsical rubbish, our ideal distros are really a reflection of ourselves. We are the package managers of our lives.

In a separate, yet relevant point, this comment "Mirror, mirror..." is hereby licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-ND 3.0), which means Linux Insider and Slashdot are welcome to share my opinion, but please attribute any comments on their website to me, Sultan_of_Swing (care of TuxRadar.com).

Perfect distro?

CJH (not verified) - July 17, 2012 @ 12:58am

ArchBang but with a weekly rolling release and Fedora's anaconda installer.

@miska

jarubyh (not verified) - July 17, 2012 @ 1:17am

miska: You might want to check out Sabayon, it's a desktop distro based on Gentoo, but you can use all of the power of Gentoo's portage while still having a nice, just-works distro.

Linux distro

Anonymouse Penguinea (not verified) - July 17, 2012 @ 7:57am

Rolling release,
Package: RPM,
DEs: GNOME for easy use, Blackbox for speed,
Old-fashioned curses installer,
All multimedia codecs (including libdvdcss) and proprietary drivers,
init for startup and shutdown,
Funny release names (Manky Monkey),
Something reliable.

It was...

Ray Penguin Woods (not verified) - July 17, 2012 @ 10:12am

It was Linux Mint 10 with Gnome but now SolusOS is King, it just works!

Slackplan 9 BSD

wh (not verified) - July 17, 2012 @ 12:08pm

Few levels of ideal:
1. Slackware with statically compiled packages and open source drivers with good performance (OpenGL)
2. With BSD user land
3. With hardware accelerated OpenGL display system (not X, maybe Wayland will be ok?)
4. With real union mounts and real per process namespaces (like in Plan 9)
5. With display system from 3 but similar to /dev/draw from Plan 9
6. It all sums up to Plan 9 with proper drivers for most hardware with hardware accelerated OpenGL, dwm-like window managment, more applications

I'm using Gentoo for 6-7 years and plan to switch to Slackware. I can't stand compile times anymore and rolling release is not helping ether. So Arch is not an option.

debian stable with backports and extra repositories added

uomosenzanome - July 17, 2012 @ 5:46pm

I guess it would depend on the intended use, but I find debian stable with enabled backports/extra repositories to be the best for my everyday laptop. I love its stability, ability to customize to your heart's content, huge package library, and the massive community support.

I know adding the backports and extra repositories adds more instability than the vanilla stable release, but I have had only very few, minor issues. Every so often I have issues because of this (conflicting packages due to things like rapid iceweasel development for example, *cough cough*) but I have found it to be the best compromise between having a stable system and having relatively recent apps.

Linux Mint and Ubuntu go too far for me for a default install, throwing everything including the kitchen sink. Gentoo seems interesting but I remember seeing a quote somewhere stating "Gentoo: 98% of your time compiling to have 2% gains in efficiency." Then after hearing an actual Gentoo user describe what they do, it sounded something like that.

I prefer to start with something reasonably stripped down and go from there, downloading only the wireless drivers I need, etc. As long as there is quality documentation for my hardware, this is what I shoot for almost all the time.

Ultamint/Ulti-Mint

ZaTurk (not verified) - July 17, 2012 @ 6:34pm

Nuff said...

Debian pretty much does it for me

hydrophones.com (not verified) - July 18, 2012 @ 1:36am

Debian pretty much does the job for me. I do wish they had an option to include proprietary CODECS and graphics card drivers. Likewise an option to include all the .dev files for the packages installed.

Arch Linux

breton (not verified) - July 18, 2012 @ 3:19am

I have tried many Linux flavours over the years, and many of them have been good, or good enough, but four years ago I, unwittingly at the time, settled down with Arch and KDE. Getting to know and utilise a specific distro takes time, at least for me, and when you get (more) comfortable with its ins and outs, what more do you need? Arch is fast, has the latest software, is endlessly configurable and does not require any reinstallation as long as you make sure you have a backup. As I said, Linux offers many good distros - the weakness, and what we need to discuss, is applications. If only ten percent of the time and energy spent on configuring distros had gone into application development, Linux would have been a much tougher contender.

Gentoo

Ricardo Stallmenza (not verified) - July 18, 2012 @ 11:17am

I would use the gentoo base system, coupled with the gentoo package manager, and the gentoo handbook as an installer.

Cairo-Dock + Compiz

Pawel (not verified) - July 20, 2012 @ 7:47am

Any distribution/DE that supports cairo-dock and compiz, so that the whole experience is based around these two modules. No desktop icons, no panels, just some desktop widgets (weather, clock/calendar, CPU frequency, etc) - currently screenlets and/or cairo-dock applets (not perfect or complete, but there's nothing else). Currently I'm using Linux Mint MATE as the basis, because:
- it offers the configurability of GTK-2 (for some reason can't change window decorations though)
- I can use emblems/symbols (very important to me to mark e.g. which movie files I've viewed or which pdfs I've read)
- Mint has got Ubuntu's repositories

By the way, shouldn't it be "What DOES your ideal distribution look like?". I'm a bit fussy about grammar :)

Ubuntu all the way

Rajeev Nandal (not verified) - July 20, 2012 @ 11:07am

I like using Ubuntu, but release cycle should be 1 year rather than six months. And should play all media files out of box.

The time of beauty distros is over

Oscar alias xpenguin (not verified) - July 27, 2012 @ 1:11am

I has have 2 beautiful distros: mandriva 2010.2 in flash look and Ultimate Edition 2.7 in my own look. Both in GNOME version. Since kernel 3.0.0 and "GNOME" 3 nothing more! This pseudo "GNOME" is an attack of user's creativity and a raping of eyes!...

Slacky XFCE

Freddy Rambone (not verified) - July 28, 2012 @ 5:33am

So far loving slacko Puppy on a laptop, low resource usage with slickpet loading up Libre and other useful apps. File management is not perfect though loads better than Gnome. Mint won't do many things, I've tried and buntu's rolling releases piss me off when merely trying to add extensions. Think I'm on fedora right now, got that gnome lurking up on the tool bar as I thought this was an XFCE version not a 686 with PAE that makes no sense on this hardware. Tried Salix too but was a little too heavy for my needs, perhaps Chrome OS or Andriod 4 on my XP convertible tablet for stylus fun; so long as it runs decent productivity suites and has extended run times I'm down with the big "G"...

have factory reset button

bmwmgii (not verified) - July 31, 2012 @ 3:15pm

ubuntu 12.04 should have factory reset button so that all programming should have restore to original

linux should starting development finished and good ustr interface software .

new approach for design should be taken

+1 "slackplan9 bsd"

Staalmannen (not verified) - August 3, 2012 @ 2:28pm

+1 to the suggestion of a Linux distro with BSD user land, statically linked and rather than PATH environment variables etc a proper union mount system with "private namespaces" like in Plan9.

A working Glendix distro (clean Plan9, but with Linux kernel) that could be self-hosting would be very close to ideal (if enough people came to it and ported the most essential suckless applications/libraries to it).

Ubuntu derivatives: Zorin & Pinguy

'Buntu User (not verified) - August 4, 2012 @ 10:54pm

Personally I like the Ubuntu derivatives Zorin and Pinguy. I would give a mention to Mint and Ubuntu. As one noted, one's favorite distro says more about the person than the distro.

All the major families are very solid. The choice is more the what philosophy appeals to me and which distro allows me to work my way.

Specifically I like the Ubuntu repository system and the generalist nature of the Ubuntu family.

Debian Is The Best...

Swamoy (not verified) - August 11, 2012 @ 7:49am

My Ideal Distribution Is Debian As Well As Debian Based Distros Like Ubuntu,Mint And SolusOS.

My Ideal Distribution Configuration:

=> Based On Debian Testing. [SolusOs Testing or Linux Mint Debian Edition]

=> Ext4 File System. [Ubuntu,Mint]

=> Desktop Environment GNOME 2. [Debian Stable Squeeze]

=> All Multimedia Codec pre-installed. [Linux Mint]

=> Rolling Distribution. [LMDE Or Arch]

=> Supports Deb Packages. [Debian Based Distros]

=> Up-to-date Applications. [Debian Testing]

=> Fast And Stability. [Debian]

=> Good Community Support. [Ubuntu]

Noob-Friendly & Geek-Tweakable*

Steve I. (not verified) - August 24, 2012 @ 4:52am

(*I know most Linuxes are very geek-tweakable)

Ideally something Debian/Ubuntu based for stability, updates and repository ease, BUT:

1- OS "Upgrades" at most yearly or (preferably) less (Like Ubuntu LTS), with no major changes to the look & feel.

2- All multimedia codecs should be installed by default, so people can just put in a DVD (or other media) and play it.

3-I'd REALLY like to see a Puppy-like installer that walks the noob-user through installation (and analyses all the hardware first) walking people through initial setup/default-application decisions with some basic queries about their qualifications and end-use.

For example:

A- "You have a powerful machine and can easily run any of the word processor options. If you are a power-user and require a large, fully-featured professional program (similar to MS Word), choose LibreOffice as your default word processing application. If you only need to write business letters, reports or your first novel, you should find AbiWord much simpler and less cluttered to use, yet still fully capable. It will also load and run significantly faster. Don't worry, both will be installed on your computer (you have plenty of available disc space) and you can always choose either one from the drop-down menu, we are just setting up the default program that opens via shortcut."

B- "Your computer has only moderately-powerful capabilities (CPU and RAM). For best performance, we recommend the XFCE desktop environment.
Screenshots of your other options, Gnome 2.x, KDE and Unity are shown below.
If you have mobile devices (tablets, phones) that use Unity or a similar interface, we recommend you choose it just to keep your user-experience consistent across platforms.
If you have used MS Windows extensively and have a hard time learning "computer stuff", we suggest you try Gnome 2.x at first as it will look and feel similar, though, unlike Windows, it can be extensively customized to your personal needs and tastes.
Remember, this is only the *default* desktop environment you are choosing. You have plenty of disc space so all four of them will be installed and available for you to try at your leisure. (And please do! You might just fall in love.) If, after playing around a bit, you find you like another desktop environment better, it is very easy to change the default environment that your computer boots into (of course all of them will still be available should you wish to use another at certain times).

This could seriously ease the main-streaming of Linux (and dispel the "which distro/desktop would compete with Windows FUD), as well as making setup easier for those of us who build boxes for friends.
It's a simple paradigm, give them options but with guided reasons and illustrations/examples for those who don't know what to choose.
Perhaps it could be the basis for a new installer?

I don't much care what it LOOKS like, so long as it ACTS right

Anonymous Egg (not verified) - August 27, 2012 @ 2:42am

S0 much wrong with linux distros that are all bling and no substance! Drop it guys, get the thing working, THEN decorate.

Here's the nightmare, a personal journey:
In fact, here's the average Linux live distro from wherever...

Load up: Specify locale in the boot parms.
Locale ignored, you're in the good old U/S of A, whatever. And you keyboard is presenting you with rubbi$h.
Dig around for keyboard settings, or (Lord forbid) dig away for config files.
But that's after your display doesn't work, and the menu entry doesn't help, just tells you it (mint13, that is) "has no proprietary drivers installed" when you waNt the damn proprietary drivers because the linux driver thingy is out of date & doesn't work with Firefox. Take a computer science class to learn how to install a working Nvid driver, only to be told you have to reboot your liveDVD (which you can't do without starting over, of course) for it to work. D'uh. It's a shorthand lie, anyway, you just need to know how to restart the screen or Xorg.
Only someone thought it was a good idea to disable ctl+alt+backsp. Who knows, maybe they were right at the time.
You can go to terminal at F1 & do such things, but a nooob has NO chance, he's off back to Redmond.

Ok, you have your screen properly resolved & now your keyboard properly set to wherever you dwell. If you're luck you can tweak it so it doesn't drive you up the wall by getting the caps lock by mistake. Or maybe you can't.

For security, you set/change passwords.
(Not that you are warned to do so. I wonder if there's a massive botnet of linux live distros? Should I patent the idea? I could be rich like Dotcom!)

Just for the hell of it, you swap session, but the keyboard defaults back to the good old U/S of A and you can't enter your shiny new pa$$word, so switch off & start the whole process again.
(Maybe Alt+SysRq reisub to do that, but it doesn't work because someone changed it to AltGr+SysRq & nobody told you.)

Look for ever-popular Firefox so you can find out how to sssort out the mess. Not there, some Kdweeb effort that half-works. Install FF, if you're lucky and you know the repository (as a noob, you're expected to be psychic). Find it's several versions old & doesn't work properly, but you can't feedback to Moz because it's not the latest version. Seek out how to get latest/beta FF & take the risk (Hey, don't distro writers know what FF is doing beforehand? Does no-one tell them there's a release schedule?).

Go to your mail. It needs JRE. You haven't got JRE. Or the plugin. More searching (for out-of date versions, but you don't know that until after they install). Spend a few minutes/hours seeking how to get up-to-date JRE & where/how to install it.

Same silly story with the Adobe Crash Player.

Get VLC, find out where the repository builders have hidden the codecs.
(By now, all the noobs have gone. They are in a heap by the window, crying out of frustration.)

Oooh! but just l00k at the pretty effects on the screen...

OK, take look at the text files a Windoh user might have. WHAT??!!!?? Where ARE they??? Zero files? Whaaaa?
Gradually you find out how to get ownership of your own files - ok, you have to do that somehow, but it's not a guided simple process for the nooby-person.

If you're relatively unlucky, there isn't support for NTFS. If you're REALLY unlucky, there isn't support for NTFS but the system doesn't say (because of linux snobbery?) and you corrupt your NTFS files. Or you have an old version which will corrupt your NTFS files without warning. Maybe on an un-re-formatted USB drive. Maybe important data, maybe not. Like you're going to re-format for a live DVD try-out?

Anyway, linux has great data-recovery routines. Pity about the indices & lost file-names & 10% lost corrupted data, though. Can't have been important.

Then you notice the date-time isn't set properly, because you miss a priority appointment.

By sheer chance you happen to be trying PClinuxOS, and some brain-dead joker has fixed the digital clock so that if you select London, it points you at Belfast with the time about five hours out. I can guess some Limey-hating Richard Head, whose uninformed personal politics over-ride any respect for the Project, plus lack of vigilance by aNy0ne else at all. But he did a thorough job & locked away the manual time-setting, too.
Which you might have a chance of finding if you knew the name of the clock widget thing, which you don't and can't find out without more hours at the forum. (They used to feed people to lions at the forums, didn't they? I can think of a candidate, if I can find him.)

Just maybe, you think, it's been fixed in an update, since your attempts at searches turn up nothing or far too much that's no use. See if the live edition can take an update (hey, way out of n00b territory by now..). Risky because the distro hasn't picked up the swap partition but after a few weeks's study you can fix that. But still the swap doesn't always cope so well with updates.
But you might regain space with bleachbit (if you know about it & where to install it; better do that before it's too late). Or one of the other space-reclaimers that don't work (or work too enthusiastically & are lethal in the hands of the ingenue). But they don't work anyway after a while on a live DVD because the systems are set up with some COW-son of a filesystem that doesn't reclaim space or indices or something unless you reboot (which you can't with a liveDVD...). So you end up with swappy panics that won't give the keyboard back so you can save work before giving in to the off button. And presumably shorten the life of your precious blu-ray reader.
(How do they expect servers to work? Reboot all the time?)

No updater. Install updater. Try the update. Get 563 broken packages and dependency hell if you try to fix it. Yeah, like I'm really going to install this one...

Lazy, shoddy, thoughtless distros. Just like the reason I left M*ckros**t.
But what the heck, it's free, and look at the NICE BLING, chaps.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Credit where it's due. PClOS did give me an NVIDia driver straight away, thank the Lord, though it needed some tweaking. Why can't the others do that? And Puppy is a good dog, though a little eccentric at times. Don't even talk to me about Cinnamon, the essence of all that is wrong. But this facility is not available at this time.

A little bit of everything (wow)

ahmedakg (not verified) - September 5, 2012 @ 3:20pm

1. Menu from (Linux Mint 13 Mate)
Reason: Search and Application is very easy and quick
2. Theme Customization from Windows 7.
Reason: You can easily change or customise the whole theme with slide show wallpaper, sounds, icons, window style etc
3. File Explorer from (Ideally Windows XP but a mix of Krusader and Dolphin is the next best thing)
4. Icons (Fedora) It Should be Glossy and HD Style
5. Dock Bar from Mac
6. Glass App Launcher Overlay like App Drawer from Android or iOS
7. HD Wallpapers selection
8. Easy to learn keyboard shortcuts for App Drawer, Change Workspace, Minimize All etc
9. Widgets (From Android OS) like "News Republic", Weather, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail... Sort of personalized desktop for who you are and feel connected to everything you're about.
10. Automatic File Sorting to Defined Folder like docs to docs and music to music and videos to videos no matter where you put them. they will be in their specific folder and you'll know where to find them after a year or two.
11. MS office with ribbon or libreoffice with ribbon
12. LightRoom 4 on linux (Wow)
13. glossy glass appearence.
14. Window Effects from mint 13 cinamon
15. bleeding edge stable updated os, security, Apps, Driver Support, Kernel etc
16. Multimedia Codecs complete full support
17. Flash And Java
18. IPv6 Compatible
19. Long Term Support
20. Software Manager (Like Google Play or Apple Appstore: Deepin Software Center is Close enough)
21. HDMI A/V out supported
22. Fonts (MS Core Truetype, Mac) Pre-installed
23. Software pre installed list
a. Picasa (Photo Manager)
b. Firefox & Chrome
c. Office
d. Skype (Original)
e. Photoshop Lightroom 4/5
f. vuze
g. Download Manager (Browser integration)
h. Video Editor & Slide Show Maker with Hollywood effects and auto movie maker feature
i. Video Trans-coder from any format to any other without loosing any quality or AV sync for dummies. click and done
24. Light on Resources
25. All processor architecture supported 32bit or 64bit
26. Big Red Shut Down button with sleep and restart in sub- menu

Please can someone make this for me??? I'm just an end-user full of desires for such a OS since the times of MS-Dos. Linux community never helped me then and now that there are so many developers, wont anyone of you make my dream come true :'(

ahmedakg@gmail.com in case someone wants to give me such a distro. Still dreaming and wishing ;)

my sort of a dream distro would have

koll apraas - September 20, 2012 @ 7:31pm

stability of debian and/or freebsd
light DE - preferably LXDE or lighter (window manager alternative?)
security and LTS
able to run on old and older machines
configurability/ customization - if i don't want it i can chuck it and if i want it, i can get it
userfriendliness of at least Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE)
good driver support
multiarch support
rolling release or if better alternative, then that.
out of the box audio and flash.
friendly community to aid you in your OS troubles.
Documentation that is easily comprehensible (or at least FIND-able.)
My dream OS should not hang when I am using virtualbox for 8 hours or more to run at least 2 commercial OSes, firefox with at least 90 or so tabs open, opera with 25 tabs open, chromium with 35 tabs open, a libreoffice calc, and writer being used along with a pdf reader/editor and VLC player belting out some tunes all at the same time --- I guess, I can dream on.

Improved superiority

erixz (not verified) - December 27, 2012 @ 6:40pm

Basically Ultimate edition as a cyclically rolling release a la Solus
Hy-menu from Hybryde Linux or Look changer from Zorin OS to change between window managers without the nag of loggin in/out in between and all the window managers.
Easier installs a la Bodhi Linux or PC BSDs App café.
Menu look of Matriux linux.
The responsiveness of Backtrack.
A script to automatically check for and install updates for Chromium.
VLC
LibreOffice
Irfanview via Play on linux.
Hardware recognition of Knoppix.

and of course exchange the linux kernel with the optimized Exton kernel form linux_exton_net

starting to feel pretty good now. i just need for somebody to actually make this distro.

PS When is this poll ever go into an article, Tuxradar?