I can recommend Fedora and Arch... but "good" is a pretty individual thing. I measure by ease of maintenance and breadth of repository. Some people measure by WM/DE which is strange to me because you can replace that in about 30 seconds with one command.

Xubuntu is close to perfect for me, fast, stable, has everything I want, they don't stop the boat mid ocean to redesign it.

Used it for years and have basically no complaints.

Just wish Gnome would lighten up on their GTK chokehold.

Agreed, I wish GTK was isolated from Gnome like Qt is from KDE but I can't see it happening.

Ubuntu pre-Unity was pretty good.

Yeah we have two CentOS 4 boxes. They aren't connected to the internet just an old fashioned DUP to receive and send text from a client's mainframe and wrap it in a SOAP request and post to an internal host on an internal LAN. One of them had an uptime of 6 years until our UPS blew up.

Have you tried recently? The first few versions of Unity were awful - but I tried again (Trusty, 14.4), and whoa - realized I like it better than the Mac and Gnome2 I'm still using occasionally.

It took a while to take off, and I still meet the occasional bug - but it's extremely usable right now. YMMV.

Yeah, once you turn off the internet search crap, Ubuntu is pretty comfortably the least terrible desktop Linux distro.

I simply don't have the time these days to configure X and everything from scratch, and Ubuntu mostly manages to take care of that for me. Then it gives you a desktop environment which looks a lot like my OS X setup, and is perfectly fine at doing basic things.

Thanks for the heads up - I havent tried since 13.04. Will have a bash in a VM today.

I've not got on with OSX since 10.5 TBH so I'm with you there plus I'm allergic to MBPs for some reason; end up with bad rash on palms.

I use OpenBSD on the desktop and am perfectly happy with it. Does everything I need it to do. That does not mean it's right for everybody, of course.