I would have to say, pick something stable that doesn't change much, go with that. Personally for dev environments i prefer VM's because you can snapshot them and revert anytime you want so you can let your code eat the VM, see what it did, and then revert and fix whatever needs fixing and try again.

Centos is the epitome of not changing much. and that would suggest it meets whatever you need. Just as a desktop environment of choice and you are ready to go. 

On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 8:57 PM, Matt Graham <mhgraham@crow202.org> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 7:39 PM, trent shipley <trent.shipley@gmail.com> wrote:
What is a good, simple desktop oriented distro not derived from
Debian or Ubuntu? GnuCOBOL currently has a significant bug on Ubuntu
14. (No. Red Hat and SUSE are not desktop oriented distros.)

What, precisely, do you mean by "desktop oriented distro"?  I wouldn't recommend SuSE for anything or anyone (it's too buggy), but CentOS 6 with KDE has worked fine for me on a Dell box as a workstation-ish thing at work.  (I have been using Linux for a long time, though, so YMMV on this.)

At home, I use Gentoo, because there's no systemd requirement and upgrading is incremental instead of "guaranteed downtime while you reinstall the whole darn OS every couple of years."  Gentoo may not fit your criteria of "desktop oriented" though.

On 2015-01-05 20:04, Stephen Partington wrote:
you could try the fedora "desktop" release

Fedora is not a stable thing.  As such, I wouldn't recommend it if you're going to be writing code.  The *last* thing you want when writing code is a system that's b0rked because update 2345 ate libxml2.so.2.9.2, which means most of your GUI desktop applications no longer work....

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