* Ubuntu. Works fine (I used kubuntu and xubuntu).
* Mint. Tried it and it seemed to work okay until I upgraded it one day and ran into issues that I think were related to the system having an identity crisis over who it really was (ubuntu or mint?).
* Fedora: had a few more driver issues than ubuntu but still worked okay for the most part.
* Debian: pain to set up and a lot of issues - there wasn't a bootable ISO I could find that would let me boot into a USB and test run the latest version with all of the (nonfree) drivers I needed.
* Arch: ran into more bugs than on ubuntu/fedora: the project maintainers don't do QA as effectively as ubuntu, debian and fedora. There seems to be a pervasive attitude that since its the distro where you get your hands dirty, that you should hand-fix a lot of bugs too. I tried manjaro as well because I wanted to try Arch and didn't want to configure every little thing until I saw this horrifying post and then ran far, far away: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/31yayt/manjaro_forgo...
* Gentoo: tried and failed to install firefox due to dependency issues and then gave up. Waste of time.
* Opensuse: tried and again got bogged down by the package manager crashing when trying to upgrade some pretty basic part of the system.
For me the decision comes down to comprehensive driver support out of the box and QA. Ubuntu still seems to be the best at those although Fedora isn't far behind. Arch has the most up to date packages which is nice but IMHO its instability caused me way too many headaches.
> Debian: pain to set up and a lot of issues - there wasn't a bootable ISO I could find that would let me boot into a USB and test run the latest version with all of the (nonfree) drivers I needed.
Good. Both worked out of the box, upgrades (seemingly the most fragile part of every distro) pretty much never broke anything in ~5 years. Clean UIs.
I'm not 100% satisfied with it, but the only problem I have that is actually fixed by another distro (Arch has more up to date packages) went hand in hand with more instability than I was willing to tolerate.
* Ubuntu. Works fine (I used kubuntu and xubuntu).
* Mint. Tried it and it seemed to work okay until I upgraded it one day and ran into issues that I think were related to the system having an identity crisis over who it really was (ubuntu or mint?).
* Fedora: had a few more driver issues than ubuntu but still worked okay for the most part.
* Debian: pain to set up and a lot of issues - there wasn't a bootable ISO I could find that would let me boot into a USB and test run the latest version with all of the (nonfree) drivers I needed.
* Arch: ran into more bugs than on ubuntu/fedora: the project maintainers don't do QA as effectively as ubuntu, debian and fedora. There seems to be a pervasive attitude that since its the distro where you get your hands dirty, that you should hand-fix a lot of bugs too. I tried manjaro as well because I wanted to try Arch and didn't want to configure every little thing until I saw this horrifying post and then ran far, far away: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/31yayt/manjaro_forgo...
* Gentoo: tried and failed to install firefox due to dependency issues and then gave up. Waste of time.
* Opensuse: tried and again got bogged down by the package manager crashing when trying to upgrade some pretty basic part of the system.
For me the decision comes down to comprehensive driver support out of the box and QA. Ubuntu still seems to be the best at those although Fedora isn't far behind. Arch has the most up to date packages which is nice but IMHO its instability caused me way too many headaches.