<p>Hello all,</p>

<p>I wanted to get a poll of what distros are currently popular with researchers working in bioinformatics and related biological data mining fields. </p>

<p>Mainly: </p>

<ul>
<li>What linux distribution do you currently (or have previously) use(d)? </li>
<li>What software and language (packs) do you use on a daily basis? -</li>
<li>Where does this distro outperform the rest? Where does it fall short? </li>
</ul>

<p>I'll start; I currently use Ubuntu and have for the past two years. I mainly use vim with BioPerl scripts. Ubuntu, which is debian based makes installing foreign libraries almost painless. It falls short when it comes to software updates.</p>

<hr />

<p><strong>Currently in use: Arch Linux</strong></p>
<p><strong>Software packages:</strong> </p>
<ul>
<li>R (statistical analysis)</li>
<li>Scala (programming tasks)</li>
<li>Perl /  BioPerl (simple pipelines)</li>
<li>blast / bwa (local alignments)</li>
<li>LaTex / Inkscape (presentation and visualization)</li>
<li>Processing (Visualization with java)</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Pros and cons:</strong> (decide yourself what is pro and what is con)</p>
<ul>
<li>Very clean and lightweight</li>
<li>Hard to configure</li>
<li>Very configurable</li>
<li>Best documented linux</li>
<li>Your learn how linux works</li>
<li>Great community</li>
<li>Always current versions of packages</li>
<li>Sliding releases</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Conclusion:</strong></p>
<p>Perfect distro if you know what you are doing.</p>