[zzleeper]

(Honest question) Is there any user-friendly alternative to Ubuntu?

I switched from Win7 to 12.04 a few weeks ago, but it's full of tiny-yet-annoying bugs. EG: sometimes a program disapears from ALT-TAB and I need to minimize everything else to find it. Or the resize-window border that is barely half a pixel thin.

[montecarl]

I haven't liked Ubuntu very much in the past couple of years. I just don't care for the UI at all. I have really liked Linux Mint (http://linuxmint.com) so far. They still maintain a Gnome 2 desktop that is very stable.

[columbo]

It really depends on what you consider user friendly. If you want fast access to the top ten applications you will normally use and an OS that is almost entirely hidden go for crunchbang (http://crunchbang.org/) (video demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBuqWPcsTig&feature=relat...) . CB has been my distro of choice for several years now.

[shardling]

Crunchbang is pretty awesome on low-end systems, too.

I recently tried about 10 different "lightweight" distros on an old P3 with ~128 MB of RAM, and Crunchbang was the only one that ran ok and felt polished. (IIRC puppy linux was the only other one that ran fine, and it's just hideously ugly.)

My favorite distro was one that prominently mentioned that it could run on low end systems like mine. It turned out that the installer needed more RAM than the distro... I suggested to the developer that this be mentioned on the download page, and he seemed confused/offended! :(

[zupreme]

CrunchBang looks very interesting. I'm surprised that I've never heard of it. I'm downloading a copy now.

Thanks for mentioning this.

[BruceIV]

If you want to avoid the tiny-yet-annoying bugs, switch back to Windows (that's what I did) (OS X is good too).

[freehunter]

Yes, unfortunately with all the things Linux gets right, there's always those tiny but annoying bugs. Windows and OSX have fewer because they have huge budgets and strong management to make sure things are polished.

[shardling]

On the other hand, I've encountered issues on OSX that I simply couldn't fix. With Linux, if you care enough about a bug you can generally find some workaround. (Assuming it's not driver related!)

[BruceIV]

Fair - but too often the bugs are driver-related. I realize that this is kind of unavoidable for open-source software in our economic system, but it doesn't make it any less annoying.

It was the driver bugs that drove me back to Windows - doing multi-monitor is a pain in the rear, and suspend/hibernate would often break on distro update in the rare cases they worked before. Getting an up-to-date Web browser is a big plus for Windows over most Linux distros too (I know about Debian testing, Arch, PPA's, etc. - I said "most").

[shardling]

I believe Firefox now stays up to date on vanilla Ubuntu.

[freehunter]

Yeah, Ubuntu updates Firefox usually the same day it's released.

[BruceIV]

What about Chrome/Chromium?

[BruceIV]

Good to know.

[viraptor]

Not sure if joking or not... I keep running into big bugs in windows all the time and I'm using it only as an outlook box.

[cooldeal]

> I keep running into big bugs in windows all the time and I'm using it only as an outlook box.

Examples of said big bugs?

[viraptor]

Service host (was that the correct name?) crashes at least once a week. Service host suddenly takes 90%+ of cpu. Start bar hiding behind windows. Sleep randomly causes hibernate or reboot instead. Network doesn't work properly after resuming the system (take cable out, plug in again - works). System update hangs forever. Copy anything formatted + paste into outlook -> rarely causes whole machine to freeze for ~2min. Wifi direct popup shows up again after closing. Changing location of a network printer (same printer, just moved) requires downloading its drivers again (ubuntu has them by default). Bluetooth just doesn't connect with Galaxy S2 (no problems under ubuntu). I could go on...

And that's a proper laptop with a clean system, part of an AD, running only outlook the whole day.

On the other hand ubuntu natty used at the same time as the main machine, usually handling heavy development, testing and a number of VMs didn't surprise me once.

[cooldeal]

Interesting. I don't see any of those issues on all four Windows machines I use daily(Work PC, home desktop, laptop, HTPC). There might be something with your setup, network or hardware causing this.

[viraptor]

Xubuntu has some tiny bugs like anything else, but I can't say I've seen anything annoying so far.