When I started as a Research Software Engineer at the Uni of Sheffield a year ago I was given a lovely Dell XPS 9550 laptop to work on. The first thing I did was to install Arch Linux on it, which has so far proved to be extremely stable despite the rolling release model and the main Arch repository offering very recent versions of most FOSS packages. Large engineering apps say no to bleeding edge Linux distros However, the one main issue with running Arch at work is that some commercial engineering software supports Linux but not all flavours: there are a fair few commercial packages that are only supported and only really work with RHEL/Centos/SLES and Ubuntu.