Fedora is good if your laptop has UEFI and you want to dual-boot with Windows. They did a rewrite of the installer for Fedora 18 so that now you have a huge feeling of accomplishment when you actually get the OS installed, like in the Red Hat 3 days. In Fedora 19 the installer was subtly improved to be more on par with installers from the turn of the century. They tend to do frequent kernel releases with more recent kernels than most distros use which is good if you're using BTRFS for its automatic SSD/Trim support but bad if you use VMWare Workstation. Since Fedora has newer drivers than Ubuntu, it may also help with your issues (FWIW, I've had better luck with hardware support in Fedora than Ubuntu). Although I like Fedora, I find SELinux to be irritating. I like that Fedora works with upstream projects to implement changes rather than forking everything.
Arch is a nice distro, but you have to install it from the command line. There's also a bug in the installation procedure that I assume they created on purpose to force people to RTFM. This makes Arch only slightly easier to install than Fedora. It's a rolling release distro that stays fairly current with upstream projects. Although it also stays cutting edge with kernel releases, the Arch guys are pretty good at coming up with patches for VMWare. It becomes a bit tedious to constantly have to search AUR for the stuff you need to install. Arch has excellent documentation and probably has the best technical support community of any distro -- kind of like Gentoo a decade ago. If you're looking for a project, you can always go the LFS route then tell people you're running ShawnOS. Anand. On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 10:28 PM, Shawn <sgro...@open2space.com> wrote: > I know we've all heard the question many times, but it has been a while > since I have changed distros and am looking for opinions on what distro's > are working well for people. > > I'm about to rebuild my laptop with a new (larger) SSD. The laptop is > currently running Ubuntu with the KDE desktop, and has some problems with > my hardware. (occasional graphics glitches, sound issues, external video > issues, etc.) The laptop has become a primary workstation for me, rather > than an occasional use box like it was in the past. So these issues are > becoming frustrating. I think it is time to try another distro. Something > that works well for PHP based web development, and still supports daily > desktop use well. > > Other than Debian, what are other decent options at the moment? I might > try out Fedora/Red Hat, but Arch looks interesting, as do some others. > > I can easily do the trial and error thing, but I'm wondering what others > are using these days (other than Ubuntu), and why. > > Thanks for any input. > > Shawn > > ______________________________**_________________ > clug-talk mailing list > clug-talk@clug.ca > http://clug.ca/mailman/**listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca<http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca> > Mailing List Guidelines > (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.**php<http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php> > ) > **Please remove these lines when replying >
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