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Debian, Xandros, SUSE, Redhat, Linspire, Gentoo, and Ubuntu

Linux isn't ready for the desktop yet. With Click n' Run, moving "edit the .conf file!" into a GUI, and other streamlining, it can be.

I fear the day that Microsoft makes a "great" OS (by /. standards), because that's the day we lose our choice in the marketplace. Linux is making the right moves, but until there is a single, unified distribution, there's even arguments within the Linux community on which distro is best -- and how can a consumer decide?

• Windows XP home
• Windows XP pro
• Windows XP corporate pro
• Windows XP media center
• Vista home basic
• Vista premium
• Vista business
• Vista Enterprise
• Vista Ultimate
• Windows 2003 server
• Windows 2003 small business server
• Windows 2003 enterprise server

The ultimate irony here - Distrowatch.com. It just kills me. I guess they must be fabricating the stats, just like Wikipedia and everyone else.

MICRO$HAFT WINDOZES R TEH DYIEING LOLZORZZ!!!!!eleventyone

Heh.

This idea has been around for a little while. See the ByzantineOS has had releases on Distrowatch since 2003.

It was a pretty cool idea. Basically the whole desktop is a web browser and you write apps as XUL extensions. There is possibly a future in this as corporate and institutional thin client platforms to run custom apps.

Its interesting then that you have the Windows Update control panel open. It just "happened" to be open when the popup "mysteriously" appeared. Sorry, I don't buy it.

RedHat and Mandriva don't; you can easily login via X with root.

So you're saying that putting a cd or dvd into a drive isn't a user initiated action?

With the CDs I've inserted, I do get the proper autorun prompt.

Yet you've provided nothing except saying that some command line should be shown instead.. which doesn't help your typical user anyway.

The more knowledgeable users likely won't even bother opening the details. And I've already agreed that it is kinda useless.

I agreed with that already, but I have a feeling most won't bother with the details.

Typical users don't care

and advanced users already know why the prompt appeared.

I can see it now, late-night home shopping channel ads

"Protect your computer! Buy our software!"
"Getting divorced? In a lawsuit? About to be? Buy our software!"
"Save thousands in legal fees or worse!"
"How much would you pay for all this?"
"For not $1000, not $5000, $200, not even $100, but for only $99.95* you too can have our amazing software*!"

*Plus $5.95 shipping and handling. Vendor support not included.

Maybe you should read through the other comments on this page to see how different people feel about Ubuntu and other distros. Personal preferences are all over the map. There's good and bad things about all distros. Usually a distro is started because existing drivers don't fill a particular need.

Head over to DistroWatch and read a little about some of the distros, you'll see what the unique purposes of most of them are. Ubuntu is a relatively new distribution, and before that I messed around with RedHat/Fedora, Suse, Slackware, and Gentoo. Now I've settled on Ubuntu, because it has the look and feel that I think a computer should have, and because it works for me. Other people I know prefer Fedora or Suse, and that's fine. I still use Gentoo at home on my Mythbox, and for me, it's alright for that purpose. But on my laptop I use Ubuntu. In the last week, I tried out Suse and Fedora one more time, and realized I still like Ubuntu the most. To each his own, but at least we're not all stuck with the same distro.

Maybe I'm missing something about this article, but it's very short, makes no real points and doesn't back up its claims. How can we ever know which distro is the most used? Distrowatch? Their methods are hardly reliable!

Sadly it seems this article has been written to get people arguing on social networking sites instead of bringing anything new to the table. Yes, I know: I must be new here. :)

While MS may want to lead you to believe that:), I believe there are ways, not to count the users, but to guage a relative amount.

Go to distrowatch, look at the Page Hit Rankings, and then compare it Year to Year.

http://distrowatch.com/index.php?dataspan=2002

To put things into perspective -- so far in 2007, 16th place Kubuntu has slightly higher numbers than the 1st place in 2002 -- Mandrake. And 1st Place, Ubuntu, has 5x the number of hits than Mandrake in 2002. 2003 ranking went up ever so slightly, so I don't think the site became popular overnight.

That is one metric. Not terribly scientific, but indicative of something.

why don't you just pay the upgrade fee and get a complete, well-tested package instead of a bunch of disjoint shareware utilities?

Because the well tested upgrades cost nothing:

• Mepis
• Debian
• Fedora
• Xandros
• and so on and so forth

In the free software world there are no "disjoint" utilities because everyone can share their libraries and common routines in ways no two commercial applications ever can. "Smooth" and "unified" begin with freedom.

http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularit y
by happy coincidence, lists 357 distros.
Redmond has bought off a couple already, and certainly a healthy chunk have a userbase in a low power of two. That leaves a couple hundered in the middle somewhere.
So the strategy can't be to try to bail out the ocean. Redmond's business acumen is way beyond that.
I'm thinking that this is all about hedging against further anti-trust litigation:
"But dad! We played nice with a whole bunch of those kids. That pile of human wreckage over in the corner is just a bunch of lazy whiners."

OpenSuSe has, in fact, been dropping in the Distrowatch rankings. The default view shows data from up to 6 months ago. Change that to 3 months, 30 days, or 7 days and you'll see that it's dropped from 3rd (1784) to 4th (1277), a significant difference of ~500. Unscientific, but notable.

Also, check out their web logs. OpenSuse usage has dropped 0.5% from May 2007 to June 2007 on Distrowatch.com However, it's not clear if this is a result of their agreement with Microsoft.

What concerns me is that in spite of all the rallying on Slashdot, there seems to be no negative impact on the vendors that sign these deals. openSuSE is still third on distrowatch's rankings. This may not be an concrete indicator for installed base, but it does show that people are still reading about it and linking to their website.

We need to completely drop any Linux vendor that signs a deal with Microsoft. Change distributions to a "clean" one, remove any currently installed software, and contact the vendor for refunds on any boxed software purchased through them. I don't expect anyone to get refunds, but the calls will serve as a reminder.

This is serious people.

Yeah boy! Hey, maybe Microsoft is trying to help standardize Linux for everyone. Maybe we will have just Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora/RHEL? That would be cool.

Hey, MS, here is a nice list for you. Don't worry about Ubuntu/Debian or Fedora/RHEL, they won't sell out to you.

It would seem that based on the last 7 days Xandros is 42 (^176HpD), or the past 6 months 28 according to Distro Watch. That puts it as significant, does it not?

The question I have is, why go after a player like Xandros, which seems to have lost a bit of the hype? Surely Canonical would have been a better choice or Mandriva? (no offense Xandros; actually, Damn you!)

If you're really interested, DistroWatch has a large, searchable list of Linux distributions (that link leads specifically to a search for distros aimed at old computers).

Distrowatch, maybe?

I started out with RedHat 6.x, and kept with it until about Fedora Core 2, at which point I started looking around at some other distros. I settled on Ubuntu, and while I think Fedora is great for certain people, I think Ubuntu is a better general-purpose distro.

There's one install disc, which contains everything most users need to get started, then users can use the "Add/Remove Programs" app or Synaptic to get whatever else they need from the repos. Fedora on the other hand, has 5 or 6, unless you use a dvd iso (hope you don't run into bandwidth cap problems), and if you try to skip burning one CD, but the installer decides it needs one package off that CD you're screwed (I don't think there's even a way to cancel the install at that point, or go back and change which packages you want installed). On the other hand, it looks like Fedora offers a network install option, which would be very handy, I think.

I don't know about Fedora 7, but I do know that the latest Ubuntu has put a lot of effort into making it easy to get binary drivers and proprietary codecs if you want them, whereas past versions of Fedora didn't include those.

Ubuntu, on the other hand, doesn't include any development packages by default, so if you want to even consider building anything from source, you have to install the build-essential package. Fedora includes most of the common development stuff by default (or at the very least, you can choose to include it during the install).

For me, I just prefer the look and feel of Ubuntu's default Gnome setup over Fedora's. The default Fedora desktop gives me a headache. Same goes for the respective KDE desktops.

So, in all, I think Ubuntu is a better all-purpose user distro, especially for those new to Linux. Fedora would probably be better for developers, or for someone who wants to customize their installation more, to get exactly the type of system they want.

I call BS on your claims of FF being "nimble" on a 233MHz Pentium II. I don't doubt it runs, but I'm going to guess it's not a pleasant experience. Just a wild guess.

With free software, there's no need to guess or convince yourself without evidence. Install for yourself or just boot Knoppix, Mepis or something easier like a 40MB Austrumi image. Austrumi FF works about as fast as regular Debian Iceweasel installed. It works well, thank you.

I run IE on XP and that's nowhere near your mythic 10GB. Hell, even if it were I can get a 320GB hard drive for under $90. It's up to me to decide if I think that's excessive or not. Certainly not to you.

I don't have a gun to your head, Bungi, and you are free to sell yourself all day long. It brings me some pleasure to think of you sitting around watching your disk thrash, but you might be more pleasant if that did not happen to you so often. You won't convince me to waste my hard drive space and time on Vista or XP. Let me know when you can get XP, Firefox, GIMP and other useful programs into a 40 MB live image.

You are assuming that the Dell+Ubuntu deal will change every aspect of the GNU/FreeSoftware/Linux movement. It will probably change the way that mainstream business users see Linux but the deal won't change much else. http://distrowatch.com/ has as many distros as it does because it's easy to scratch an itch with Linux and go your own way whenever you choose to do so. Most Linux/Windows/OSX users don't care about ROI or even know what it really means. Most Free Software hackers don't really care about economic feasibility and will continue to plug away with their preferred tools if given the opportunity. Dell is not going to change any of that.

Well that makes me sad, because you *should* have left for that reason.

And please don't try to claim you deveoped the best desktop distro at Novell, that title clearly belongs to Ubuntu [ http://distrowatch.com/ ]. Sure you developed technology, but linux isn't just about technology, it's about community. And Novell has burned its bridges and doesn't have a real community, it's just a soulless corporate entity. Just look at the reception de Icaza got when he pops a boner about Silverlight [ http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/07/05/03/2033219.s html ]. The only people who speak highly about Mono are people who come from windows, they just speak highly because they didn't have to lose their skill set and re-train. Nobody starts on true unix-style tools and with linux and then moves *to* Mono, for good reason.

I thank you for your contributions to open source, paid and otherwise, but don't pretend Novell-MSFT is a good idea, that you were the best distro, or that anyone should care about Mono and the rest of the clusterfuck that is Novell.

Informed

• BBC news
• Slashdot
• Distrowatch
• Linux.com
• Newsforge
• El Tiempo

Entertained

• SA
• Digg
• Degenerate Cesspool
• CTRL+ALT+DEL
• questionablecontent.net
• halturnershow.com

Contrary to current trends, the only site out of all of those in which I participate regularly is Slashdot. I don't even have accounts on any of the other forums. Some I only really visit because it's an old habit, notably the two webcomics and eltiempo.com. And yes, Digg is firmly in the 'entertainment' column, for its AWESOME PICTURES! and INCREDIBLY ADDICTIVE NEW FLASH GAMES OH EM GEE!

And if you already did the mistake, do as he did:
http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/07/03/25/1944209.s html

Then head to the distrowatch.
http://distrowatch.com/

Because unfortunately we sometimes get all excited and tend to want to be number one at DistroWatch http://distrowatch.com/ Then one day you group up and realize we are all on the same team. However, a little friendly competition makes us all strive to be better at what we do, so looking back I don't regret pushing myself harder as I tried to get us over Ubuntu.

Tell me again how a more secure Windows OS becomes good news for Symantec.

RHEL...include[s] a lot more software than the base OS for Windows.

Is RHEL equivalent to the baseline Windows install --- and it is really so very different from the typical - not the minimal - Windows enterprise install? Red Hat Enterprise Linux

If I was running a server and wanted to contract out the admin, I would probably go with Red Hat, because you can currently in Australia get a larger range of contractors with the skills to properly administer it.

Believe it or not it is all penguin cool, freedom of choice and all that stuff. So Ubuntu, is currently winning in the Linux desktop stakes, and from their web page "Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'Humanity to others', or 'I am what I am because of who we all are'. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world", makes it a bit more fun and a bit more in spirit.

Not that you need to use it, so feel free to mentally substitute the distribution of your choice where ever you see the words, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu or Xbuntun be that Red Hat, Suse, Debian Gnu Linux etc. please go here if I left your preferred version out http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major and many apologise for being a bit 'slack~ware' and not writing down every Linux distribution available today.

It is easy to Upgrade Windows Vista, Just Follow these Steps: HERE. If your hardware doesn't support that configuration, try This Procedure. Otherwise, Just Switch. http://distrowatch.com/

On such a large volume purchase of Macs, does Apple give them a University Discount?

I always enjoyed the significant student discount Apple gives to University students and school age students.

Unfortunately, even OS X is a proprietary operating system, and can never hope to succeed against the unlimited evolutionary power that is Linux.

Unbuntu, SUSE, and Red Hat are rapidly replacing Windows throughout the world.

The only way Apple OS X will survive is to become GNU Open Source - otherwise Apple's famous software is bound to die a slow painful death like Windows Vista.

There are more variants of Ubuntu on that site than there are flavours of Vista.

Hard to obtain how exactly? Go to ftp.redhat.com, look at a directory listing. RHEL5 isn't up yet, because it's not released, but there have been publicly available beta ISOs for months, so approximate versions are widely known. For example, distro watch has a table listing versions of the major packages.

Scoreboard

The only story I want to hear about Vista security is what it fixes. We already know what Microsoft broke.

I've been telling you for years and I'll tell you again. The fix is:

• here
• and here
• and here
• or here

Diversity is the only solution to internet security. The user gains immediate security in the short term. The community gains security in the long term as weak platforms are eliminated and can no longer be used to attack strong ones. Everyone wins when the monoculture ends. Free software provides both transparency and a diversity of hard targets. Confronted with rising costs, criminals will go back to their usual meat space businesses.

It skips the extra click.

Ok. Yes. It was inevitable...
(So mod me an AC Troll, if you like.)

They're still good solutions for this perniscious problem.

http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://fedora.redhat.com/
http://www.mandriva.com/
http://www.debian.org/

or any other flavour of choice:
http://distrowatch.com/

You can even try CD-based versions to see how you really like it before touching a thing on your current system:
http://ubuntu-releases.cs.umn.edu/6.06/
http://www.knoppix.com/

__________

Booting your machine from a CD or DVD ISO to try it out - free.
Selecting your Open Source OS of choice, installing it, and using it however you like - free.
Discovering that, for most things*, it just 'works', will never blue-screen again, and that you've escaped the Microsoft lock-in treadmill - priceless.

* seriously folks, if you want esoterica, it's there too, and yes -- as with all things -- 'your mileage will vary'. But for sane and reasonable interpretations of 'most' this is still true, and not an exaggeration.

Simply follow the directions outlined here.

Once you have updated your software, send a letter thanking them for motivating you
to update your OS and Applications to the latest and greatest software.

More and more people are up-to-date with help from the New Improved Windows Updater.

While compiling from source is will certainly give you optimisation for your given architecture, I often wonder at the situations where this should be imposed on you. I've seen people spend hours setting up gentoo users desktops and have to ask at the necessity for this. On a production environment expecting high load leves, 'yes, build from source,' however on a user desktop, I think it's waste of an organisations time and money.

Gentoo's portage system gives one the illusion of hackerish control, but having been one with hackerish control, I look at emerge and am not so satisfied. I was recently trying to build perl and wanted to fire off configure options, so I fired up emerge -vp (which shows you valid USE flags). It seems that in many places it completely curtails what you can do, depending on what the port maintainer has decided to expose in the ebuild - so I couldn't fire off half the configure options I wanted to. In my personal opinion, this leaves me wondering why I'd even want to use emerge package. Further, i was also unable to direct the build to another PREFIX directory, which is generally handy when you want to have multiple versions of components. Obviously this breaks the packaging system's world of dependencies.

Portage might be more attractive to me, if packages came as in both binary and source flavours and if there was more control over your interaction with build process. I don't like the fact that updating one emerge package seems to break your whole system and end up costing time. If I'm maintaining a desktop, I don't need this kind of hastle. I don't like emerging cpan modules, which are not consistency named. I don't need to see a large GUI application building for several hours.

SO, I ask myself, which is the best packaging system I've used. Strangely, I'm surprised, when I arrive at RPM. I've used RPM on production systems and have been surprisiingly happy with it. ebuilds are no harder than rpm spec's, however the real beauty is something which I think is essential for modern enterprise systems; transactionality. RPM v4 + allows you treat package updates as atomic transactions and in turn one can roll back from these to the previous itteration, of touched files, without having to manually manage these. SO, what happens if you break the build? You rollback.

I have a lot of friends who have used gentoo and loved it for a couple of months. I don't know anyone who hasn't shagged up his/her system and further I know a lot of these people have tired and gone back to some other distro. And we're not talking about people who didn't know what their way around a linux distro - it's typically frustration with portage. Anyway, I'm still going to give it a run for it's money and see if I end up with a different attitude.

SME Server http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=smes erver

I'm throwing a bit of cold water on the Ubuntu recommendations. Ubuntu isn't the best for turning a Windows system into a dual boot. Perhaps Ubuntu has improved in 6, but the Breezy version's installer could not handle NTFS partitions. Had to boot up Knoppix to get a partition editor that was up to the task, then install Ubuntu. Another nuisance, for those who want gcc, is Ubuntu doesn't install gcc by default. It's not obvious that the "build-essentials" package must be installed as well as gcc. And for me, I'm not too keen on being constantly nagged to install updates, a feature that Ubuntu and Windows share. Other than such nitpicks, Ubuntu is a fine distro. One more thing: if a more responsive faster desktop experience is wanted, and Ubuntu is still the #1 choice, maybe try Xubuntu instead of Ubuntu.

Anyone mention Distrowatch yet? Great site for info about dozens of Linux and BSD distros. There's the Linux.org listing of distros of course, but I prefer Distrowatch.

A nice way to test-drive a distro before installing it. Check out distrowatch.com. Since your inclined to torment yourself with Advanced Math, you might be interested in Scientific Linux.

1) Debian == Knoppix, Ubuntu
2) Redhat == CentOS, Fedora, Mandriva, Scientific Linux
3) Slackware == Slax, Vector Linux
4) SuSE == Microsoft (see: techp.org )

This is very much my recommendation too. LinuxQuestions is excellent even if you don't have any questions; simply looking through old threads revealed so much information that I'd otherwise not had a clue it existed. Trying out various distro's and installing a few for few times can learn you a lot about what's available and possible, http://distrowatch.com/ provides information about which distro's are available and where to get them. Distrowatch's motto "Put the fun back into computing" proved to be true for me.
Be careful when installing a dualboot system and make sure your Windows data is backed up.
My favorite isn't Gentoo, it's Fedora Core 6, but chances are you're more bothered by a choice of windowmanager or software-update-mechanism than actual distribution.
Enjoy!

I recommend PCLinuxos. It has the right mix of ease of use and fucntionality out of the box so you can see what the ins and outs of linux are with a minimum of transfer shock. Then you can try other distros once you have this under your belt.

The only whine I have is that the beta flash player doesn't work well for me as compared to other distros. But that's more adobe's fault than linux's. Hopefully this will be fixed shortly.

Try Blag Linux out of Brixton, England. It is a single CD Fedora based distro that seems only to issue a release every other cycle (FC3, FC5), plus it uses apt-get (as well as YUM). It is updated frequently (the FC3 version, for instance has Firefox 1.5.0.8 in its repositories). it is one of only a half dozen distros certified by the FSF as only having free software in the distribution image or package repositories, but still comes with support for mp3s out of the box, unlike Fedora. It has a friendly, helpful community. It has got to have one of the easiest installation routines ever. If you want it to take over your disk just boot the disc and type blagblagblag.

This applies to the majority of my Linux-using friends as well. Perhaps this is because people already know the name of Red Hat

I think this was definitely the norm about 3 years ago when it was created. Certainly, before that, Red Hat had incredible name recognition, and as it result, most new Linux users tended to get Red Hat (sometimes even get retail copies at the time).

However, I would claim that Ubuntu has now usurped Red Hat's (and Fedora's) position as the most recognized distribution among Linux newbies. Certainly Distro Watch agrees with me. Not that DW is conclusive evidence, but it tends to be a good indicator.

I do agree with you though; Fedora is important, even if it is not quite as popular as Ubuntu among newbies.

Distrowatch is a great place to find forensics/recovery distrobutions. When I have to recover a system (be it Windows, Mac, or Linux) I've found that pretty much any Linux liveCD or USB forensics distro will do the trick. From editing/fixing partitions to recovering data from a dead OS to fixing a botched install of an OS the tools are all there.

Distrowatch says this about Mandriva: "Cons: Some releases are buggy". Sadly this has been exactly my experience with them. Granted, I may have run into some obscure bugs by my own bad luck, but having Distrowatch say what I quoted seems to support that it wasn't just that (and I kicked myself for not listening to Distrowatch).

This was around a year and a half ago, so perhaps things have changed.

People WANT TO BUY Photoshop.

They do not want to learn GIMP.

People want to buy nvidia and ATI video cards.

They do not care about binary blobs.

And they do not want to be educated about how evil closed source is.

They will never look at the source. If they did they would never understand it.

OS/X gives people the choice to buy the stuff they want instead of hoping that someone will write it.

Just what percentage of people compile FireFox for Windows?

What is the ratio of source to binary downloads?

They include packages 'apache' for v1.3.34 and 'apache2' for v2.0.55. Only apache2 is officially supported -- package 'apache' is in the universe repository.

References:

distrowatch page

Ubuntu edgy package search - apache

Yes, but you also have to have a lot of other 32 bit libraries installed just for the browser to run. I think that one of them is glibc.

My understanding is that there are libraries that emulate the 32-bit stuff, so you don't have to install all of it.

Ladislav Bodnar of DistroWatch was quite happy with 64-bit Mandriva and, like many, he noted a substantial speed boost. Try getting the latest Mandriva.

Only 6 users? I think Debian has a bit more users than that.

In "2006 Desktop Linux Survey" by desktoplinux.com Debian was the second most popular distro with 12.2 % of all the votes. Ubuntu won that poll with 29.2 %.

http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-bin/survey/survey. cgi?view=archive&id=0821200617613

DistroWatch statistics show that 32.2 % of their visitors use Linux. 7.7 % of their visitors use some version of Ubuntu (or their derivatives) and 4.3 % of their visitors use Debian or its derivatives (excluding Ubuntu and its derivatives, which actually are also Debian's derivatives). So Ubuntu's percentage of the Linux-using DistroWatch visitors is over 20 % and well over 10 % of the Linux-using DistroWatch visitors use Debian. That must be more than 6 users. :-)

http://distrowatch.com/awstats/awstats.DistroWatch .com.osdetail.html

Of course, Debian is mainly used on servers and less on desktops. However, Debian testing/unstable works quite nicely as an up-to-date desktop system. (Ubuntu is a popular desktop distro but it has yet to establish its position as a server distro.)

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/03/14/fedor a_makes_rapid_progress.html

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/12/05/stron g_growth_for_debian.html

http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=205

Slamming linux and the kernel developers immediately before your release, and having it posted on distrowatch. Nice going, guys.

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20061002

A new Slackware and a new Mandriva! What a time to be elive!

Ahem, released the last week :)
http://distrowatch.com/3720