Ubuntu 14.04 rounds out my enterprise challenge this week after I was unable to install OpenSuse 13.1.

Trying to find the ideal GNU/Linux experience for stability turned out to be pretty straight forward. I looked at the top consumer distributions that offered over two years of support and came up with three great contenders CentOS 7, Debian 8 and of course Ubuntu’s Trusty Tahr.

Ubuntu was the easiest to get up and running and made the best use of screen real estate it wasn’t a clear winner. CentOS and Debian are far more stable both gave me no errors whatsoever and required fewer administrative updates after installation. CentOS turned out to be rather limiting and only offered core packages while Debian was far more robust once contrib and non-free repositories were added.

Ubuntu 14.04 was very impressive and worked best with my laptops small 720p screen and it’s HUD provides an efficient alternative to hunting through application menus and panels. So who wins? Well, I’d have to go with Debian, even though GNOME doesn’t work too well with smaller screens it integrated best with online services like Google Calendar. Ubuntu on the other hand didn’t offer that feature outside of a web app that seemed to think I was running an old version of Safari.

So my advice to anyone looking for stability and usability is to try Debian Stable for a week and run it through it’s paces. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised how well it runs.