Personally, I never heard of most of that stuff, except OpenOffice (which I usually delete) and Ruby (that I've never looked at). I've been enjoying the Arduino Uno virtual serial port over USB. Made a little tcl/iWidgets monitor program to set the virtual port properties and communicate with the Arduino device. Enjoyed the Wiring programming language, and have been adapting a "Tiny Basic" interpreter for the Arduino. (Mostly making the C more readable using a great old editor, nedit.) On another effort, I keep working on an RS232 program that allows the user to play with the modem control lines using the Linux ttyS posix driver. In yet another effort, I've updated the XForms library wrapper in FreePascal. It all works for me on opensuse. And it is what I like to do with Linux; explore computing capabilities. Perhaps you never heard of stuff that interests me either. But I don't rate my stuff vs. your stuff. I think many of us would prefer learning to judging. Jason Hsu wrote: > I noticed that Debian-based distros now occupy all three of the top spots on the DistroWatch 6-month rankings. Linux Mint is still far ahead at #1, Ubuntu is now ranked #2, Debian itself is close behind at #3, and Mageia is close behind at #4. I'm not sure why Ubuntu has moved up, and Mageia has moved down, but I'm guessing that Debian Wheezy (which recently moved from testing to stable) has been a big hit. > > During my tenure as a Linux user, I've been gravitating towards Debian-based distros, for basically the same reasons many others do. Except for Damn Small Linux (based on Knoppix, which is only loosely based on Debian), Debian-based distros have always had great hardware support and one of the largest software repositories (due to full Debian or Ubuntu compatibility). A large software repository means that software support goes beyond the common apps (like Sylpheed, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, etc.) and includes much more specialized apps (like Octave). > > I know that people criticize Debian for having old software. However, I value stability over having the latest and greatest software. When you add the fact that I'm much more reluctant to change distros now than I used to be (I've been busy boning up on Android and Ruby on Rails development), this gives me even less reason to try out more distros. >