Debiam lost its way. Bugfixes get burried into political bullshit far too frequently. I have issues with Ubuntu but I dont have the time or the patience to support the crap reasons why they for instance keep an outdated intel driver in their distrib ("the serial number of the new one does not look like a stable release". Nevermind that it solves many bugs) or decide that mounting a USB drive is a privileged operation.
I may try Arch, I heard a lot of good from it, but from people who have more time on their hands than me. Right now it is Ubuntu for me and it is working fairly well.
I started using Arch after a new built computer couldn't install using an ubuntu disk. After the initial setup work (~ 1 hour as I wasn't familiar with it, though the documentation is great[0]) everything Just Worked™ and I've installed it on every system since.
I've had the occasional small technical hitch but the forums[1] are some of the most helpful I've found and that in combination with the standard google-fu/stack exchange approach has made quick work of any bugs I've had.
My favourite thing about Arch however is the AUR[2] which makes installing any small command line tool that you just heard of (on hacker news) as effortless as installing a supported package, even though they're unsupported (officially) they most often work and I rarely find something that doesn't already have an AUR package to build it.
N.B. if anyone wonders, the only other distros I've played around with are ubuntu, debian, and open suse (and I've actually liked them all). So I don't have too much comparison.
> Debian lost its way. Bugfixes get burried into political bullshit far too frequently.
You know, that's funny. Debian has neven been as pragmatic and apolitical as it's now. Bugfixes never had so little red tape. And yes, they often get lost in political discussion; it's just your memories that are too rose-colored.
(By the way, I'm a happy Debian user. Wouldn't switch to any other main distro, altough a few niche ones look promissing.)
Haha! Man, you've never been happy with any Linux distro, or even OS for that matter! (and no, your usual answer is wrong; if you have a problem with everything else, maybe the problem isn't with everything else).
I'm surprised about your issue with the Intel driver, which I've found to be quite stable on Linux, but then I don't do any 3D in Linux. Is this on your System76 laptop? As for mounting a USB drive, that's patently false, see my comment above. Nowadays you can either use udisks, udiskctl (depending on which version distro you're using), or even good old pmount.
I also contest your comment about how political bullshit overruns Debian and Ubuntu. If you think it's different or even worse than before, you're falling for nostalgia :)
I mean, I sympathise with your issues, and I understand the frustration of having to fight something that you'd expect to just work, ("it's 2015 for fuck's sake! Why am I still dealing with this bullshit!?"). Of course, you're doing much more cutting edge stuff with 3D and computer vision, so you're probably tickling the bleeding edge of driver support in Linux. Nevertheless, you've had this class of complaint for 15 years. Haven't you bitten the bullet yet? :)
It is the ThinkPenguin, yes. I bought it at an extra and with an underwhelming GPU exactly because it is designed to work nice on linux and only has devices that work with open-source drivers. Yet, the GPU fails under debian. After hours of tinkering and googling, I concluded I have the same issue as this guy: http://blogs.fsfe.org/the_unconventional/2014/11/12/debian-x...
Add to that that the basic install does not allow USB to be automounted by a user. I did manage to get this one to work after a wasted hour or two, but I don't consider it normal that this is not default behavior or at least very easy to configure. In 2015.
Both these things worked flawlessly out of the box on a Ubuntu with KDE.
As for nostalgia, I actually do not remember stumbling on a case like the intel GPU before: "We are holding bugfixes because we don't like the name of Intel's package". Actually, every time I try to go back to debian, I arrive with a ton of motivation thinking "this time I am going to look deep into the issues and solve them!". This particular issue had no good solution: it would have required me to install the intel driver and accept that my system would probably break at the next big update.
I am used to the old proprietary vs open debate and the horror of binary blobs. Here it is not the case.
I may try Arch, I heard a lot of good from it, but from people who have more time on their hands than me. Right now it is Ubuntu for me and it is working fairly well.