Linux

For a long list of reasons, Ubuntu One SSO login for everything being the latest, I am abandoning Ubuntu and looking for something else. For a while I have been looking to get away from windows as a desktop and was planning on running in Ubuntu with VMs for the few windows apps that I need.

I am a developer part of the time, so I really need a good package manager, gcc, legacy gcc, eclipse, etc. I also don't want allot of per-installed apps that I can't get rid of. I found it annoying to no end that when I uninstalled the cups printer driver, gnome got uninstalled as well. For some reason, someone thinks that my not needing a printer means I also don't need a desktop.

...anyway, I like a minimalist system where I can install only what I want and need. I like the gnome desktop, but that is not a must as long as I have a good package manager and reasonable configuration options. I don't really care which distro this is based on. At the moment, I am looking at Mint, Fusion, and Poseidon. Other than the development stuff, I would also have some scientific, math, statistics, applications installed. It is also pretty important to have a reasonable community infrastructure so that questions can be posted and answered in a reasonable time frame. I don't mind paying something for support, as long as it's competent.

Are there any suggestions for distros I should be looking at.

Thanks,

LMHmedchem

I ran Arch Linux for several years (both at work and home). It's a pretty minimalistic (based on Slackware) distro that let's you pretty much add what you want and/or need. The package manager (pacman) is very good. I will warn that it is a "rolling release" so if having the latest and greatest isn't preferred than it might not be the distro for you. However, if the goal is to keep certain packages at a specific release version it is possible to configure the package manager to omit upgrading them. Also their wiki is extremely helpful in terms of setup and/or troubleshooting and the community is very helpful.

Good luck.

Arch is another distro that I am looking at but forgot to add to my list. Thanks for the feedback, that sounds promising.

LMHmedchem

A possible replacement for Ubuntu may well be FreeBSD. The package manager and ports system may appeal to you.
If you write programs in C, there's gcc. You can install a variety of desktop environments including GNOME. I too am an Ubuntu refugee ( or more correctly dissident ), however, of all Linux distros , Ubuntu probably has the best hardware support. This is where the BSDs falter. The point of emphasis is on stability rather than the slickest hard/device support.If you like to have the following:

i. greater control over software installation
ii. the facility to compile from source
iii. command-line utilities etc

...check out FreeBSD.

A minor correction: Arch is not based on Slackware (or any other distro). It was developed from scratch, without ever borrowing code.

Regards,
Alister

Since this will likely be at least a dual boot machine, a support forum is very important. It is still a mystery to me why it continues to be difficult to have a bootloader that is easy to install and configure. It would seem like it would be easy to have an application that would examine your file system, find all the bootable images, and give you some menu options for how to configure your bootloader. Instead we get this mess of conf files and different versions of grub installed all over the place, installers that insist on installing grub somewhere even when there are already 12 other installs, and every OS trying to make sure it's the only one that ever gets booted. Since this can be such a mess, it is pretty important to have a place to ask questions.

I have been looking at poseidon linux, but I can't find a support forum for then at all. That will be a deal-breaker if there is actually no forum (as opposed to my just not being about to find it).

LMHmedchem

Thanks Alister. I meant to imply that Arch shares a lot of similarities to Slackware. Especially the KISS principle. :-)