Gentoo
Gentoo is the ultimate power user distro which gives the user a complete control over any aspect of the system by empowering the user to thinker, customize and DIY right from the installation onwards.
However, there are 2 things which prevents it from entering the top 5 list:
- It’s an advanced users oriented distro, not suited for beginners.
- Compiling everything may take a long time, especially on older hardware, thus it requires a lot of patience.
Despite all that, Gentoo is one of my favorite distros, in fact, I use it on my production machine at the time being. For more info about Gentoo check out – 5 Reasons why use Gentoo-Linux.
Debian
Debian is one of oldest Linux distros to survive to date, it is the base component in almost half of the Linux distros out there (including Ubuntu directly, and Mint and eOS indirectly).
It has a large user-base, and a very large app repository and is considered one of the most ‘rock solid’ distros to exists.
Yet in order to be a stable distro as its reputation indicates, some sacrifices must be made – a new Debian version is released approximately once every 3 years, which makes it out-dated for a lot of uses.
Albeit, you can choose to upgrade your Debian and use testing or unstable branch, but you will then lose some of its stability power by doing so, and that’s a point to consider…
These are iWillFolo’s best Linux distributions picks for 2014, yours is probably slightly (or a lot) different than these, if they are please share your thoughts in the comments below…
