[thaumaturgy]

I switched from a rolling release distribution (Chakra) to Debian because I got tired of the rolling release system constantly breaking things. If you fall too far behind on updates in Chakra, the maintainers basically tell you you're screwed. I finally complained about it in their forums and was politely told to go away.

My computer is just a tool. I just want it to work so I can get things done. Debian has been good about that in the past and enjoys the support of a very large, dedicated, active developer community.

Maybe Arch is better than Chakra at managing their updates (although Chakra was basically a modified Arch distribution), but my experience with Chakra left a really bad taste in my mouth for the rolling release approach.

FWIW, Debian's "update EVERYTHING" every few months never broke things as badly for me as Chakra's frequent smaller updates did.

[keithpeter]

"My computer is just a tool. I just want it to work so I can get things done."

Then Debian stable or even CentOS (10 years support) is definitely what you want, you are almost the definition of an Enterprise Linux user/adopter.

How in your opinion could we signpost that idea to people who are new to Linux?

[thaumaturgy]

Yeah, Debian stable is basically what I'm on now. (Sort of. It's complicated.)

If I can be unabashedly honest for a moment, I think the problem with Linux advocacy isn't the software any more, it's the advocates. The advocacy seems to be coming from a lot of people that are always after the latest, newest, greatest thing, people who are actually uncomfortable when features aren't changing all the time. They tend to be very vocal about recommending anything that comes with frequent updates, whether it's browsers or Linux distributions.

But that's not what the larger untapped home market wants. They just want things that work, and they want things not to change on them all the time. They only have enough space in their daily lives to learn new features every once in a while; any more than that, and they get frustrated. I hear this from our customers all the time, and as I get busier, I'm really starting to understand their point of view better. (As an example, we've recently been seeing more of our customers switching back to Internet Explorer on Windows 8 systems.)

So as far as signposting goes, I think boring, stable, slow-moving distributions like Debian stable should be the default recommendation, and then Arch or similar recommended as the really cool cutting edge thing for hobbyists and early adopters. That is, Linux by default should be marketed as stable and safe and not changing all the time, with the option of making it a bit more fun.

We almost opted to recommend Linux to a bunch of our customers who were moving off of Windows XP this Summer, but the feedback wasn't great on a couple of experiments and finally we decided we were too small to really afford the support costs. It was a big missed opportunity though and I'm going to take another look at doing it next year.

[keithpeter]

Very interesting.

So perhaps some demos using an Ubuntu LTS usb stick (xubuntu or stock Unity) might be best. 5 years, pretty stable.

I find Stella Linux 6 (CentOS remix with multimedia) has had some acceptance with a friend, but the NuX repositories are 'one man and a git account'.

[pjc50]

Well, it's already pretty well signposted; the three most well known consumer distros are redhat, suse and ubuntu, all of which have this stable release model.

[cmelbye]

Arch suffers from the same problems, or at least it used to. I had a system that was out of date, and it became essentially impossible (or at least very, very difficult) to get it up to date.

[xiaomai]

Even if you keep it up to date there is frequent (relative to other distros) manual action required before running updates. An example from a few days ago: https://www.archlinux.org/news/java-users-manual-interventio... .

This is the sort of thing I expect my package manager to do for me.

That said, I like the rolling model so I use arch. I wish I could find a better rolling distro to choose.