My choice of Linux distributions depends on one   programme. Revman. I spend a few hours every week in this programme, which organizes meta analyses.   This programme depends on java 6, and when Debian upgraded to jessie my unstable machines broke. Moreover, I have not been able to get this working with fedora.

Which annoys me: I prefer Xfce or Gnome 2 to more modern interfaces — and I prefer Gnome 3 to ubiquity or KDE or even cinnamon. So I pulled out a test machine and got it functional for work. From the base Ubuntu CD I have had to do the following.

1. Install openjdk6 runtime. This is easy with the Ubuntu software centre.
2. Install Libre office. I prefer to have the most up to date version possible, because some people in management think writing complicated word and excel documents is a good thing. The instructions for this are here.
3. Install revman. This is a java programme, I download and install with sudo. This allows the graphical installer to take off and work.
4. Install, on dual monitor machines, the Xfce 4.12 repositories so dual monitors work — instructions here.
5. Install rkward. I need a gui to help when I am doing statistics, and Sofa Statistics (which is an excellent product) does not do the odd psychometric and latent class analyses I spend a fair amount of time working on.
6. Finally, install the ubuntu Nvidia drivers and audio codecs. I have too many music files encoded (by hand, by me) as .mp3 files.

Your mileage, may, of course, vary.  And this is not pretty. But I want function, not fancy transitions.

UPDATE.

I’ve been working on the work machine and added one more peogreamme to the list — Zoter, the bibliographic manager.  I’ve also done almost everything here in the command line except the down load of Zotero which I extraccted into downloads in its onwn folder.

The commands were.

sudo apt-get install openjdk6-jre

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install libreoffice

cd Downloards.

sudo sh RevMan_5_2_unix_java6.sh

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xubuntu-dev/xfce-4.12

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

cd Zotero_linux-x86_64/

sudo sh run-zotero.sh

sudo apt-get install rkward r-cran-rcmdr

Please note tthat you will  need to go into settings and then display to get two screens running, and that the zotero plugin is still flakey with libreoffice. (However, there is now a LyX plugin.)  and I have installed both R cnimmander and Rkward — that is two gui to the same statistics programme.