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Tell us what you think are the features of a perfect distro and if any existing distros come close to this?

After spending the better part of three years trying many different distros., I've come to the conclusion that I'm looking for an OS that meets all of your choices above with a couple of exceptions:

Speed is relative with Linux. Add some more RAM and a system drastically improves. I've got some older boxes still in use, so I'll sacrifice some speed in order to get functionality.

I also lik things up-to-date, but I've found that "bleeding edge" isn't something I'm particularily looking for. I'll sacrifice the latest and greatest version of applications for stability.

Because of the position I'm in (that is, answering many newbie questions about Linux), ease of use has become a little more important to me... at least when making recommendations to others.

Which brings me to a solid support system. Non-Linux users/believers always use this "trump card" that there's no official support for Linux users. It's not true, but novice PC users tend to believe it.

You'll probably already guess what I've found that best meets these points I've listed. For me, Mandriva seems to be holding this course the best. It's what got me started in the Linux world and it's what I've now come back too.

Is there any way to pick more than 1 option? Or are you asking for the single most important thing in looking for a distro?

I echo a lot of what Judland has said above. But for me, personally, speed is a the killer. I can deal with a poor package manager, but when that packamanger and other configuration tools are extremely slow, it's tough to deal with.

I was tempted to cast my vote for a package management system. While I love slackware, the package managment system is no where near the capabilities of apt or pacman. These days I find it a bit easier to go with packages instead of spending time compiling.

The problem with bleeding edge is that there is a lot of cool stuff out there I want to play around with. So if I'm not running close to the bleediing edge, I cannot run this software. But bleeding edge tends to be a bit more problematic. Ahhhh, the dilemma!

I picked "up to date software" because I think that brings most of the rest with it (except maybe speed). I don't care about speed, because even my 500 Mhz laptop runs fast enough on any modern distro I've tried.

As far as ease of use, if something doesn't work I can usually fix it or automate a solution with a script so I don't have to deal with it.

I guess flexibility is important, but a lot of distros are pretty general purpose these days, and can be customized to a specific need.

Package management doesn't even really matter, I just don't want to have to learn a bunch of different tools. I have yum. It works. I don't care about anything else. If I had started on Debian, I'd probably use apt and not care about anything else.

I still haven't found what I'm looking for! Arch would of been perfect for me had it not had the major breakages a while back. I like it a lot but you have to have a decent amount of stability. I'm sure Arch will improve with time. It's still a very young distro. To me it's all of the above with certain things more important. Package management is the bane of most distros.
If all distros adopted apt-get life would be much easier for us all.

dann wrote:I can deal with a poor package manager, but when that packamanger and other configuration tools are extremely slow, it's tough to deal with.

So, when Dann's package manager breaks a system, he wants it done FAST! Get the suffering over as quick as possible!
-poke- -poke-
-jab- -jab-
-nudge- -nudge-
-say no more-

I picked Up to date software, because I like having newer versions of like KDE (KDE, Kontact, KOffice, Konversation ...) and GNOME stuff (GStreamer, Mono ...), but in reality it's really a combination in specific ways of all of the above that makes a distro fit my needs.


Speed, it must be fast
Speed is important to me, but it's not so important that I'd wanna calculate dependencies myself, that is just too painful of a process, because I don't like the idea of accidently having even 10 packages installed that I would only need the day I used FVWM as my primary window manager. Another good example of this is when I tried Mac OS X, which I hate today, it installed emacs right out of the box, and I feel that emacs is just too complicated for my tastes in what makes me wanna learn to use an application, I love GNU nano in this area.


Good Package Management
Being a geek who like to try out all kinds of stuff, decent package management is huge advantage.


Flexibility
I'm a huge fan of having my distro be flexible and usable for all kinds of tasks, for example I like distros that both make a good desktop and server OS, which I think both Fedora and SUSE (I don't include 10.1 in this) does really well, but I also like FreeBSD in this area.


Stability
This is another one I really like. After having used Windows for years I really really appreciate a system that you just install tweak to the point where it works the best for you, and then it just works and works forever. And a lot of Linux distros does this very very well. Although I love stability, I'm not gonna sacrifice running some relativly recent software for stability, case in pont, Debian 3.1 is just too outdated, already, for me.


Ease of Use
I love having a system that's easy to use, especially in the season where exams are in the air, this is a period where I really like to be able to focus on my work and not having to worry about remembering all sorts of commands when I don't have the time. For example, YaST provides an interface that I eaisily can use when time is short, but also the flexibility for me to hack config files during the summer holidays!
So ease of use also means a lot to me, but it's not something I am willing to sacrifice stability, flexibility, security and relativly up to date software, for.


Up to date software
Being a geek, of course I like to play around with new stuff, and I enjoy having recent cool features in my KDE, and the apps that it provides, such as newer versions of Kopete having a lot of handy-dandy features here and there, also Konversation has a lot of features that I really love, that Kopete doesn't when it comes to IRC chatting.
Being up to date is nice, but I don't like being bleeding edge, because I want a system that's recent, but I also want a system that just works when it needs to. I am not willing to sacrifice stability, reliability and security for up to date software, which is why I am not interested in running Arch, Debian unstable (Kanotix, Mepis etc. etc.) and others in that area.


All of the above
As you can see from my descriptions of each option, they all have dependencies and requirements of each other, in different areas, different things matters differently!
I can't say that there is a single most important thing that matters to me, because all kinds of things matters, and together they form a distro that satifies my needs.

When I first started using Linux, I used Mandrake 10.0 PowerPack, because it offered ease of use and a lot of things I felt was important to me as a new Linux user at the time, Mandriva is a distro I keep coming back to when I try to get my friends migrated to Linux, because they are one of the only distros that really has done a great job on internationalization, which is a subject we rarely discuss, but here in Europe where we have so many languages, it is crucial. My mom is 56 years old, and my guess is that her last english leason is about 28 years ago, so her english is pretty outdated, and she rarely uses it in her daily life, so it stays dormant, and only awakes when we talk to some friends from another part of the world, for example we have some good friends who is from Tahiti. So having the environment being in danish is important for my mom, and I have to say, even after all the nice things I say aboyt SUSE, they have done a terrible job in this area so far, it really sucks in this area, when you pick danish, KDE is looking OK, but when you pull up YaST, some parts is in mixed danish and english, some parts are in danish, and some parts are in english. Mandriva has it's issues in other areas, for example, the reason I left it, in favor of SUSE, was that SUSE, pretty much every time since then has had a more recent version of KDE and GNOME in it, it has managed to stay very stable and yet still be very recent (I know 10.1's introduction of ZENworks has been a disaster, but to the SUSE guys' credit, the rest of the system is very good), but in terms of being good at internationalization, Mandriva has done a great job.

It all comes down to who you are, different kinds of people will have different needs, but thanks to the freedom that we get from Free Software and Open Source, we get a solution with the options to customize it to meet our needs, demands and expectations.

Judland wrote:

dann wrote:I can deal with a poor package manager, but when that packamanger and other configuration tools are extremely slow, it's tough to deal with.

So, when Dann's package manager breaks a system, he wants it done FAST! Get the suffering over as quick as possible!
-poke- -poke-
-jab- -jab-
-nudge- -nudge-
-say no more-

Yeah I was gonna say, seems like if things need to crash on Dann's desktop, they need to crash fast!

Well first of all since I cant choose more then one here are my opinions on what I like in a destroy.
Up-to-date packages.
Massive library of packages. (I don't want to have to add anything)

Two simple things, and why I choose gentoo. I don't really need to know how to install a program with the ./config, make, make install way because I have gentoo. Also when you complain about installing apache with php and mysql on gentoo its set 2 use flags and hit emerge. Sure its takes a long while to emerge, but on my gentoo box I set emerge to niceness of 18 and do other things when it happens. So in conclusion I use gentoo because its easy to install stuff and its all there and up-to-date.

I said "Ease of Use" and for me, what that means, is a distro that is simple, straightforward, and does not try to automate things or do things for me. I don't like GUI tools that overwrite my manual edits to config files, for example. I don't want to have to wrestle with the OS. I had enough of that with OS X.

I want to be able to tweak anything and everything and be in full control. So, while all those other things are very close in terms of importance, the "ease of use" or "hands off" approach is ultimately what I want.

Package Management is number one for me. I need to be able to easily install, and remove applications without having to hunt around on the web for dependencies. Speed, and stability are usually pretty consistent from distro to distro, with a few distros being the exceptions. Debian is pretty close to being a perfect distro, It's flexible, it can be as up-to-date as you want, there's 15,000+ packages, it has robust package management... it runs on a dozen archs, it's got great QA, etc, etc, etc. For desktop, and laptop use, I think Ubuntu also has alot of those qualities as well, along with some nice improvements.

I've always considered powerful package management an essential part of a distro, which means I favor freebsd/debian/gentoo. However, recently I've been drifting (back) towards slackware because I've come to realize I don't want that much package management.
1) I use obscure software which I end up having to build manually any ways.
2) I like to customize my builds with varous compile options. Automated package management takes this power away.
3) As a developer I need to be able to have multiple versions of the same lib on the same machine at the same time. Almost impossible to maintain automatically.
Slackware takes care of the essential packages like X and perl, and leaves me to do the rest, as I like it.
Or perhaps I'll write my own package manager .

Good package management. I almost picked flexibility as well, which is very important to me. Obviously, being the gentoo user that I am, I don't care too much about the speed of the package management, but I want it to basically do what I tell it to, and offer great control over the system. The speed of gentoo, not counting installations, is a nice fringe benefit, though.

I have gentoo running on my desktop at home, on an ancient P166 I'm using as a webdav server for the calendar at work, and on a G3 at work as well. A modern desktop with KDE and the occassion time spent in Gnome on my desktop at home, a lightweight fluxbox desktop on the G3, and a server at work that has never given me a problem. I just feel like I can install anything out of gentoo's huge selection of packages, configure it to use the options I want those packages to use, and know that it will take care of everything else for me. It's beautiful.

Speed, ease of use, configurability, reliability, stability. They are all things I need and more often than not, I choose Slackware for just those reasons.

Think I am kidding? Try it for yourself.

what linc said. The only real problem with slackware is that its only official port is to the i386 People who appreciate slackware are bound to have a variety of hardware lying around. (I noticed from the other thread that there are amd64/ppc/sparc project, but unstable ports scare me).