Hi Omer and all,
On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Omer Zak <w...@zak.co.il> wrote: > In another E-mail thread I am discussing selection of a laptop. > Once a laptop is acquired, I'll want to install one of Linux > distributions on it. > > At present, I am using Debian Stable (today it is Debian Jessie) as the > host OS of my PC, along with Ubuntu 14.04 inside a VirtualBox based > virtual machine (Android development environment). > > For the new system, I'd like to select an host Linux distribution with > stable but up-to-date kernel, Docker and a virtualization system > (VirtualBox or other). For this, Debian Stable (today's Debian Jessie) > is not the answer as it gets updated about once each two years. > > I'll want to use Docker to run my current Debian Jessie installation and > the Android development environment (running on Ubuntu). The > virtualization system will be used to experiment with bleeding edge > stuff such as new Linux kernel versions, Debian Unstable, GNU/Hurd and > other exotic stuff. > > What is the community's recommendation for a Linux distribution which > provides stable yet up-to-date versions of the Linux kernel and the > other basic software tools? > > Well, in general, I believe that when it comes to Linux distributions, there's a tradeoff between having frequent releases with up-to-date software and between being as bug-free as possible (what you call "stable"). Note that it's not all-or-nothing and you can be somewhere in between on both cases. Anyway, my favourite distribution for now is Mageia (see http://www.mageia.org/en/ ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mageia . It has a release roughly every 9 months, and also has the "Cauldron" branch which like Debian Testing ends up stabilising on the next release. I'm a Mageia contributor and am using Mageia Linux x86-64 v5 on my relatively old Acer laptop and Mageia x86-64 Cauldron on my Core i3 desktop machine. Recently, I noticed some occasional freezes with the Cauldron system, and in order to investigate, I decided to remove and avoid using VirtualBox, which caused my kernel to become tainted due to it deemed buggy by the kernel developers. After I removed VirtualBox, I didn't have any freezes, but I'll have to see if they may still and in the meanwhile, I decided to try using KVM instead. Otherwise I'm happy with Mageia, which has quite a few of what I call "cute bugs" but with easy workarounds. Mageia is an open-source distribution (but not considered purely "free" by FSF/Stallman zealots) and is maintained by a community of volunteers. Some other distributions I used or played with: * Archlinux - a rolling release distribution with a very user-unfriendly installation method (using Manjaro or whatever for their installers should be better) and with a tendency to be left in an unusable state if one forgets to update it frequently enough (which is a problem where Manjaro won't help you). Arch is fast and free of fluff, but you need to have a lot of discipline to update it frequently enough or you're screwed. * Fedora - seems nice and usable, but I still prefer Mageia. * CentOS - also usable and stable, but upgrading between major versions is reportedly unsupported. * Debian Testing . * Ubuntu - I dislike its default Unity desktop, but I can usually install Xfce or whatever instead easily enough. I haven't used it a lot outside VMs. Regards, -- Shlomi Fish > --- Omer > > > -- > The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing. > Mike Haertel (original author of GNU grep) > My own blog is at http://www.zak.co.il/tddpirate/ > > My opinions, as expressed in this E-mail message, are mine alone. > They do not represent the official policy of any organization with which > I may be affiliated in any way. > WARNING TO SPAMMERS: at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html > > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-il mailing list > Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il > http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il > -- ------------------------------------------ Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Chuck Norris helps the gods that help themselves. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
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