My recommendation: Arch Linux. Focusing on "bleeding edge" is nothing to scoff at, a lot of the software coming out lately get major improvements almost weekly.
There is also the fact that you're running a clean system. You install once, grab what you need, and you're left with a stable system where every potential problem has a very easy and well-documented fix. You do not suffer things like screen tearing because some unwanted compositor you do not actually use is conflicting with your Desktop Environment.
There are plenty of good distros, and they all have the lack of Ubuntu in common, my favorite is Arch, but your own opinion is the only one that matters, take an afternoon to check out the various favorites.
After having used Ubuntu, Arch and now Debian testing, I can say that Ubuntu is a great way to get to know Linux. At least it was when I used it with Gnome 2.8. At some point I grew tired of all the unnecessary software bloat, though. I loved Arch, until the moment I had to unexpectedly fix a non-booting system after some update. It just wasn't for me, although the minimalism of it felt great.
Now to Debian testing. It's almost perfect. I'm missing a bleeding-edge software update from time to time, but usually you can cherry-pick from Debian sid. There haven't been any issues with updates breaking stuff. I'm using XFCE, so it is fairly light-weight. I can even install Steam and play a game from time to time. It gets out of my way when I want to be productive, but I can still customize it without it getting bloated.
I have to disagree. Ubuntu is a great way to get to know Ubuntu. Debian, while _incredible_ has somewhat the same flaw, but in its case is worth the tradeoff.
Slackware or Arch are great ways to get to know Linux.
I must disagree with you in turn, in most particulars. Arch's wiki is an information source par excellence, and I find that the information contained therein is often just what I need to get my Debian system working correctly. The init systems will likely diverge at some point, but as far as I know that decision is not final yet, and I prefer systemd anyway. Are there some particulars you can divulge?
Ubuntu, like most mainstream distributions, has design choices and UI that abstracts away as much as possible the act of administering a Linux system. A lot of things you will do on Ubuntu are specific to Ubuntu systems, and even more so with distros like RHEL and Gentoo. Then you have oddities like GoboLinux.
It's one of the oldest sayings in the community that "if you know Slackware, you know Linux". This is somewhat less true for Arch but pretty close and still has the same spirit.
I've run Slackware, Debian, you name it and built my own LFS systems and run those as well. Slackware is as "raw Linux" as it gets, but due to frustrations with recent versions, I switched to Arch and haven't looked back for my Linux systems. It makes administration much simpler without having to do much that's specific to the distro and different from what you should expect in Linux.
That isn't something even remotely true about Ubuntu -- and apparently getting less so as time goes on.
tl;dr: what I'm trying to say here is that there are users and there are administrators. If you can't administrate your Linux system, you don't know Linux. Ubuntu tries to be a Linux system for users without needing to be a sysadmin. This is an idea that's "okay" I guess but in my opinion still not ready for primetime. Using a Ubuntu system isn't "knowing Linux".
While great points are made in each successive post, my child poster specified "Ubuntu with Gnome", which is a long time ago, in fact that was back when Ubuntu (IMO) was the best entry into Linux.
Now, I feel Ubuntu took away the administrative capabilities of a system that has not yet grown out of its need to be administered.
What stops you from saying that "Arch is a great way to know Arch" then? It's not as if it doesn't have its own package manager and all, like any other distro...
It's not the having a package manager that makes it specific, it's that it's ports-like. It's also a great feature that I'm a huge fan of.
It doesn't do nearly as much patching as other distros (save for Slackware or CRUX) to packages making reporting bugs upstream much more straightforward.
Arch is one. Continuous updating (never having to reinstall, nor running an LTS with 4 year old software), pretty much any software you might ever need in the official repositories or in the AUR (Arch User Repository), lots of freedom to tinker.
Updating it needs some care, since once every few months a breaking change is announced requiring some manual intervention. But that's not a problem if you subscribe to the mailing list.
> Also, would anyone talk about FreeBSD vs Linux? What are some reasons to choose each?
As a huge FreeBSD supporter, I feel there are many great reasons to choose FreeBSD, between the theoretical: well designed kernel, unified system; direct lineage to Unix; to the more legal: permissive licensing model; and the more technical; UFS support, BSD Jails, security work leaching over from OpenBSD. And personally, Ports being my favorite (source) packaging system.
But Linux has the killer feature: GPU support. Now, this is generally down to better community on the desktop, and the entire ecosystem is better, between drivers. Windowing systems, Video Games.
So even I, a massive FreeBSD supporter, have stopped running FreeBSD on my desktop out of pure practicality. It just isn't practical to do such.
Head over to distrowatch.com, and just download a handful of distributions that look interesting to you. Either run a liveCD or install to virtualbox. May be I'm a dork but I find seeing what other people put together quite interesting.
For the non-linux experienced I would recommend starting with Mint (of which there are 4 versions, Cinnamon, MATE, KDE, Xfce.)
I use Arch in my personal machine but Linux Mint for work (http://www.linuxmint.com/about.php). It is also based on Debian and Ubuntu, but they're not set on simplifying the desktop the way Ubuntu is. In fact, they have an experimantal desktop (cinnamon, http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/) which aims to be a modern desktop for people who want more than gnome offers, and looks great.
I recently changed a machine to Arch after a failed Ubuntu 13.10 upgrade. Its very strange. I was able to build a cross compiler following clear instructions:
Arch is great, but you can get yourself into a world of hurt if you do not remember to do a system update every couple of days. I've b0rked a couple of Arch installs this way and fixing them is an hour or two of frustration usually.
I've used FreeBSD as my desktop for a long time and would continue using it if it supported the hardware in my new home machine (no drivers for this particular WiFi USB adapter, and not that great support for Intel graphics[1], unfortunately I was in a hurry and didn't have the time to pick and choose the hardware). I have only the best words for FreeBSD. The best way I would describe the experience of using it is you can just feel the clarity of thought that the commiters have. Almost everything is really well thought out, clean, logical and backed with fairly good arguments. Documentation is excellent -- I never had to dig around the internet to find a solution. Everything is well explained in The Handbook[2] or the man pages. A few corner cases you might encounter usually get solved quickly on the very helpful mailing lists. The community is likewise excellent. Aside from a few snide regulars (just users, not developers), people are very helpful and polite.
Ever since I switched to Linux (it's been a few months now) because of those drivers issues, a small part of me dies every time I sit in front of this machine. :) What comforts me is that FreeBSD is focused on the server side, and doesn't compromise that for desktop battles which IMHO are lost to proprietary systems anyway. I would gladly accept using any convenient piece of crap on the desktop, such as Ubuntu or any other Linux distro, if that means FreeBSD stays focused on serious business(tm). On the server, you can take it from my cold dead hands.
Now, to get in the right state of mind for using it on the desktop you have to understand one simple fact -- no desktop related software is part of FreeBSD. FreeBSD is a whole operating system developed in unison consisting of the kernel, standard BSD and POSIX userspace and some necessary third party software without which it would simply not be a complete Unix system. Everything X (and desktop) related is part of the Ports system (i.e. third party software ported to FreeBSD but not part of it). This means that if you want Ubuntu level integration and functionality of your desktop you'll have to configure it yourself. I've seen many people who didn't understand this point clearly get frustrated and angry and miss the beauty of it.
So, for desktop use:
Pros (in no particular order):
* The sound system -- unlike the Linux mess, FreeBSD always had a sound sound system. ;) No need for PulseAudios of the day or whatnot to get multichannel, etc. it's all working right there in the kernel.
* The Ports -- you simply get the latest versions of applications as soon as available. Note however that sometimes Ports contributors and commiters can lag and you might end up waiting, but since the Ports tree is unique and shared among all supported releases of the system there is no policy of keeping outdated version of applications (it's partially a side effect of the fact that Ports are not part of the system and as such need not be stable, although some important things, and where it makes sense, have multiple versions maintained). High profile software usually gets updated within a few days.
* One of my favourites is GELI, the GEOM[3] module for disk encryption. It's so straightforward and easy to use (command line tools only) it's a real joy. It supports cool stuff like having a USB stick as a token in addition to a password. Because it's part of GEOM you can layer things completely freely, although with some caveats if you use GPT partitions.
* Some enterprise/server class features that might come in handy on the desktop -- Jails, GEOM in general, ZFS, PF...
* For Linux only applications there's Linuxulator (kernel translation for system calls) which works great although it's a bit dated (I think it doesn't support stuff added since Linux 2.4, may get updated eventually). Works with no performance penalty.
* Sanity and peace of mind (granted, this is subjective)
Cons:
* It may not have the drivers for some popular desktop hardware. FreeBSD is really server and enterprise oriented and it shows in driver availability. YMMV and always check the Hardware Notes for a particular release. Nvidia cards are fully supported with the proprietary driver.
* My personal pet peeve -- for years and years TeX Live wasn't available for FreeBSD. It's slowly changing and it should go into the Ports replacing the ancient teTeX (similar for Sage Math).
* The Ports -- yes they are in the cons too. While it didn't bother me that much, building stuff from source can be a burden. On faster machines it's not that scary, but each time Perl, pcre or something other that a lot of stuff depends on gets a version bump, if you're not careful, things can get hairy. On the other hand PKGNG, the new binary package management system, is great and once the new format packages become widely and officially available all of this will become a non-issue.
* As I said, you have to configure most things of interest on a desktop machine yourself. Apart from what vanilla desktop environments offer themselves, there is very little system level hand holding. OTOH, most if not all of it is documented.
* I'm not sure of Gnome 3 status right now, there were some problems. KDE 4 on the other hand has a great ports team supporting it and it's regulary updated, no problems there.
General remarks that are neither cons nor pros:
* Flash works fine in my experience (since it's Flash for Linux it requires Linux emulation enabled) but since HTML 5 become the norm I never bothered with it (for stuff not supporting HTML 5 video I just used applications which use Mplayer to stream flv and that's actually how I prefer it).
* Gaming -- if it works in Wine it will work in FreeBSD (having an Nvidia card is recomended).
[1] The basics work from 9-RELEASE onward at least up to Ivy Bridge graphics, but going to console from X via Alt+Ctrl+F<n> doesn't work and I think there are some other minor issues. Nothing absolutely critical, but I like things that work to work properly, it's the FreeBSD way after all.
