[sf-lug] RPi3 distro recommendation

[acohen36]

Thanks to all respondents so far for your recommendations and 
clarifications.

As far as this particular RPi3's use-case scenario, let's see if all
this below makes complete sense ....
- General-purpose desktop system to basically replace Windows 7/8
on an occasional on-and-off, non-continual basis
- Externally-powered 6-port USB hub for peripherals, e.g., printer, 
USB-powered speakers, webcam, microphone, 64GB=< USB 3.0 thumbdrive
- Skype for Linux (yep, you read that right!) 
- "Something like" the Windows-like desktop and its themes (??)
- Straightforward "My Computer"-like app (unsure why I couldn't
just rename the link/"shortcut" to default file manager?)
- One or two MS multimedia-like player and iTunes-like apps (again,
unsure why I couldn't just rename the link/"shortcut" to VLC?)
- Chromium & Firefox browsers; ready and complete support for
playing YouTube vids
- An _easy_ photo-editing app that's certainly _not_ GIMP
- Smaller MS Write-like applet (am favoring Scite)
- Full LibreOffice suite
- Printing capability
- Maybe a very few other Wine/PlayOnLinux apps
- Little to _zero_ need for the extraneous Mathematica, MindCraft,
development tools, Vi/Vim, Emacs, VNC-server,...etc.

I also am tending to go with a "properly" configured Raspbian distro for 
the above, b/c
- Raspbian has typically been one of the most supported and flexible 
out-of-the-box RPi distros
- Have my own excellent experience using both Raspbian and its Debian base 
of apps
- IMNSHO, RPi's default PIXEL desktop is a _whole lot_(!!) better than 
Unity

As a related aside, although I haven't used Ubuntu's port for the RPi3's 
Broadcom BCM2837 SoC with its 64-bit Quad-core ARMv8 Cortex-A53 CPU, I 
_have_ tried out Arch Linux's port in the past. Other interesting but 
definitely more advanced installer image ports that have been mentioned 
for the RPi3 64-bit ARM architecture are Slackware ARM on a Raspberry
Pi's (SARPi's) hard float sarpi3-installer_slackcurrent_fd0.img, 
Void Linux's hard float void-rpi3-20170220.img (rootfs), and fairly 
recently, Devuan 1.0.0's embedded devuan_jessie_1.0.0_arm64_raspi3.img. 
Any of you reading this are welcome to share your experiences with these 
64-bit ARM ports; especially for the systemd-free Devuan's.

-A


acohen36 at sdf.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.org