Best linux distro for daily use in 2017

A new year has begun. Time to format my disks. New windows install and more importantly, new Linux install. With windows, the choice is easy. Windows 10. With Linux, it’s a bit more complicated….

Here were the candidates

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Here’s a little history about my relationship with Ubuntu. Ubuntu was my first distro and all was right with the world, I would never have left… that is.. until the fire nation att… until unity. It was a bit of a messy breakup, something about it just didn’t resonate with my soul. A year or two ago I tried it again but I remember seeing amazon search results integrated by default and was instantly disgusted. But time has passed, seasons have changed and I believe people learn from their mistakes..so I wanted to give it another shot. so I did…

Aaaaaand it was cool. I mean, stable and pretty responsive. I completely forgot how awesome it was to have a global menu. Besides the fact that I couldn’t get trackpoint scrolling to work, everything else seemed functional. To be honest, I almost did settle with it but…. That amazon link in the dock and menu… There was no ‘simple’ way to remove it. I didn’t just want them gone from the dock.. I wanted it gone gone.. forever.. The solution I found online was to remove unity-webapps-common.. Which worked but then I started to get some weird errors. And why would you ship a disto with that extra bloat anyways? I’m pretty sure anyone who can install ubuntu can open up a browser and go to amazon.com.

It may seem petty but that annoyed the crap outta me. I didn’t like how Ubuntu felt they could do whatever they wanted just because they are the most popular linux distro (more on that later for you mint people). So yea. In the end I did not go with ubuntu.. Still, if my first choice did not exist (it’s Fedora 25 btw) I’d be an Ubuntu man.

Fedora 25
Before I started this whole quest to find the best distro, I had Fedora 24, so I figured 25 would be the logical update. At first things were good…. Everything worked (including my touchpad) but after a few hours.. things started to get… weird.The there a noticeable delay…. everywhere. Things would randomly freeze for no apparent reason (especially vlc). And for some reason I could not resize the windows ‘settings’. So what did I do? Uninstall and move to OpenSuse of course -.-

OpenSuse Leap 42.2
OpenSuse… sigh, I had such high hopes for them. (I went kde btw). I did a default installation as I normally do with my distros and noticed that it comes bundled with everything but the kitched sink. Kinda made me miss the minimalism of Fedora. While that in and of itself was fine, I found myself just laughing at the ridiculous amount of lag that came with it. I mean, I don’t have the best laptop in the world (i5-4210U, 8gb ram). But dear god I should be able to run a desktop environment without lag.

Sadly, that was not thee case. Still laughing hysterically… I formatted again and moved to elementary OS

Elementary OS
I tried elementary OS once in the past before. It was still young and immature then so I was glad it got a chance to grow up and find itself. And man did it grow up to be a looker. I mean it was always one of the best looking distros out there but now not only was it good looking, it was rock solid too. Not a single error message. Everything (including my trackpoint scrolling) worked by default and It was just a pleasant experience…

to look at…

But then I tried to use it.. and things… just didn’t seem as functional as they should be. I’m not sure how to describe it but it was akin to taking a trip to North Korea as a reporter. I can only access and see the things that they want me to access and see. I didn’t feel like I had any control over the system. You may have a different experience… and this is just my opinion but.. elementary just seemed like something I’d install for my mom. To open, fawn over how good it looks.. and use the web browser. In the end, my gut told me to remove… and so I did.

And then there was none
I had now gone through all my options.. and had not found anything suitable… I started scrambling to other options. Xubuntu, Mint, Gecko linux… nope, nope and nope. I got annoyed and decided.. well… I guess its back to fedora 24. But I stopped and thought.. wait.. why does Fedora 25 suck so much in comparison to 24.. and then it hit me… wayland.

I quickly spun up another Fedora 25 install.. logged out.. selected Xorg and oh man.. what an immediate change. Lag free, buttery smooth and minimal gnome goodness. I had found my home for the next 6 months.

I think fedora should have a lil message popup after 5 mins of use saying.. “having Problems? click here to try Xorg”. Would have made this process much easier for me. But still, in hindsight the journey was fun. I’m using Fedora 25 and loving it. What are you using in 2017?