My Favorite 3 Linux Distros

What? Only 3?

Yep. To be honest I was going to list my 5 favorites but  there have only been 3 in my life the last 4 years and these 3 are the ones that I keep coming back to. So without further ado lets get to it. This short list is in order of my personal favorite for the task that I wish to do at that time.

AV Linux

Since I drive a truck for a living and I get home 2 or 3 times a week my time is somewhat limited. When I was in a band I was off work every Saturday and basically guaranteed time to do my longest running favorite thing, which is play my guitar. I love to put on the headphones and just crank it up. Although it feels and sounds best when you’re standing in front of a half stack with the volume and gain set on 11, the headphones are much more friendly to the rest of the family and the rest of the neighborhood.

As a musician I love to record my music. The best distro to do that with is, without a doubt, AV Linux. While it is based on an outdated version of Debian it’s purpose is not to be a state of the art, bleeding edge distro. It’s purpose is to make a computer into an appliance that records and produces audio and video in a stable and reliable environment.

From their website:

AV Linux is a free custom shop modded and rodded 32bit PAE computer Operating System designed to turn a regular old (or fairly new) PC or Intel Mac into an Audio/Graphics/Video workstation appliance. An appliance..? Yes, imagine your Workstation computer being as reliable as that old Frigidaire in the garage!

AV Linux has hundreds, if not thousands, of audio/video apps that allow you bring the creative ideas out of your imagination and into to the real world. It has sound card drivers preconfigured, and the documentation on how to use this distro is outstanding! The latest version sports the XFCE desktop environment and uses conky to display system information for you to monitor as you are putting the machine to work. I use it mostly for my guitar stuff when I record. I have it on my desktop in the dungeon and boot into it only to record and play around with. If you are a musician or video/graphics producer I strongly urge you to give this distro a try.

Ubuntu

I know that many of you have probably heard that name. It’s without a doubt the most popular linux distro in the world. Ubuntu is produced by a company named Canonical which was founded by Mark Shuttleworth. Ubuntu has a certain knack for splitting people up in the Linux world. There are those who don’t care about the tracking, licensing, yada-yada crap. “That’s for the company to deal with.” They just want an operating system that works. And there are those that put on their tin foil hats and scream about a company spying on you. Canonical tracks statistics about the installation and usage of Ubuntu and has built Amazon search into the desktop environment.

Canonical is a company, and needs to make money to continue providing Ubuntu to users for no cost. That’s fine by me. I just turn off Amazon search results in the dashboard. Yes, you can do that. Kinda makes the aforementioned argument a little silly now doesn’t it. OK enough of the rant.

Ubuntu has been going through a transition since 2011 with it’s desktop environment. It used to have Gnome but they created their own desktop called “Unity”. It’s truly unique and instantly recognizable. With a launcher that spans the monitor top to bottom on the left hand side. It’s out of the way and makes it much easier to have more screen real estate on smaller monitors. Plus it look pretty much the same on any device. Hence the name Unity.

But Unity is not why I use Ubuntu. I use it because the support is very easy to find. Just google whatever your problem is and you’ll find a hundred thousands results on how to fix it. Plus, because the usage base is so large you will find just about every app will run on it. If an app doesn’t run on Ubuntu, just ask politely and you’re bound to find a college kid that would love to give a try at making it for you for beer money.

And this leads me to my favorite and daily driver.

Elementary OS

Elementary OS is on all of my machines. I sync all 3 of them with BitTorrent Sync and have them all tweaked to look the same. It’s a beautiful, and simple, distro. It’s elegant enough out of the box that you don’t have to put any effort into it to make it pretty. Here’s a screenshot.

I’m using the default theme and the numix circle icons. The theme on Plank (the dock) is called rounded glass.

The current version is called “Luna” and is based on Ubuntu 12.04. The next one, which will be released soon, will be called Freya and is based on Ubuntu 14.04. They release when it’s ready. They don’t push out an upgrade just to have an upgrade, which is one of the reasons I like this distro so much. Plus it just works on all of my machines. I wish they made a mobile version because then I would probably take the plunge and wipe my android phone to install it.

But I digress

Luna uses a desktop environment called “Pantheon”, which was developed by the Elementary OS team. It runs absolutely smooth as butter and fits my workflow perfectly. The keyboard shortcuts seem to be in all the right places, and it creates as many desktops as you would like simply by pressing the super key and the down arrow at the same time. Because Luna is based on Ubuntu, it has that excellent support that I mentioned. If you need support go to Elementary OS first. Then in the unlikely event they can’t help you, looking for your answer on Google with the search terms “Ubuntu 12.04″ usually works. And with Luna, you get that whole “nearly everything will run on Ubuntu” thing again.

Bonus Distro

Okay, I just realized that all of these distros are based on Debian, which is the grandfather of all them. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it here. I have used Debian a lot on my servers, and here at home. It’s stable and rock solid reliable. They have a version that will install on just about any piece of hardware you can imagine. There is a reason Debian is known as “The Universal Operating System”. You should give it a try but be warned that it can be a daunting installer and can easily screw things up if you don’t read the documentation first.

If you’re new to Linux, I recommend that you try Ubuntu first. It’s the easiest to use and understand.

Until next time… dont stick your finger where you wouldn’t stick your face.