current installations

Here are the distros I currently have installed, across four different computers; desktop environments/window managers as shown:

- HP G72: Debian Wheezy Xfce

- Compaq Presario CQ56 (a): Debian Wheezy GNOME; Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Unity; also GNOME Shell); Arch Linux (Xfce); openSUSE 13.2 KDE (also Fluxbox); Bridge Linux (Xfce; also Window Maker)

- Compaq Presario CQ57: Kubuntu 12.04 LTS (KDE; also Openbox); Debian Wheezy KDE (also Openbox); ArchBang (Openbox)

- Compaq Presario CQ56 (b): CrunchBang 11 ("Waldorf") (Openbox)


Sometime soon -- probably in early 2015 -- I plan to replace the Debian Wheezy installations with Debian Jessie, which is still in the "Testing" stage. I like to move from Stable to Testing once Testing has been "frozen," but this time around I might wait until Jessie moves to Stable, just so that any systemd bugs in Debian have been taken care of.

Not sure yet if I'll continue on with CrunchBang when the Jessie-based release comes out. That certainly depends on whether or not the developer, Philip Newborough (aka "corenominal"), decides to continue on with the project, and what direction he decides to take. I'm hoping that he'll stick with Openbox, which I really enjoy using. I think it would also be nice if he offered Fluxbox. If Newborough drops the project (hey, it could happen!), or if he switches to Xfce for the default DE, I'm thinking that I might switch to the MEPIS/antiX project called MX; if I do, I might add Openbox or Fluxbox to that.

All four of my computers -- they're all considered to be "notebooks" -- are very similar; they seem to belong to the same family of laptops. They're all very Linux-friendly, and have worked out fine with every distro I've thrown at them. As you can see above, I actually own two CQ56 notebooks. One thing to note is that I don't know how well wifi on any them works with the distros installed; I've stuck with using an ethernet cable in each case -- just seems easier for my situation. I use my laptops/notebooks only at my desk.

I consider Debian Xfce to be my "primary" system, but each of the distros here has been great. I think I actually spend more time using Arch (and the Arch-based Bridge and ArchBang) than anything else, but lately I've been using openSUSE (which I'm posting from at the moment) quite a bit, mainly because openSUSE 13.2 is my most recent installation.

Besides the Debian and CrunchBang (or possibly MX) installations (when I'll go from Wheezy to Jessie), I don't foresee doing any other distro installations in 2015, unless I decide to upgrade Kubuntu 12.04 to the 14.04 release. More likely, I'll be installing new releases of Ubuntu and openSUSE in 2016, when Ubuntu 16.04 comes out, and when openSUSE 13.2 reaches its End Of Life. I'm thinking that I'll stick with my current Kubuntu installation until the 16.04 release. Arch, Bridge, and ArchBang are rolling-release distros, so there should be no need to re-install -- in theory, at least.