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How Should One Review a Distribution?
Chilliwilli asks: "Why are are good distro reviews so few and far between? Every review I've read recently seems to follow this unoriginal pattern. Big cheers about a nice easy graphical install followed by one or two driver problems blamed on hardware manufacturers. Then the rest of the review seems to be everything worked out of the box. Menus contained usual items. Software versions are X, Y and Z. See OSNews for many examples of such reviews. From the reviews I've currently read all distros seem pretty much the same, is there a reliable source for interesting, impartial and full reviews? Are there any guidelines for distro comparisons? What should people really be looking at when reviewing a distribution? I guess the broader question is what sets distros apart?"
2. Make sure you are _qualified_ to write the review. This should involve some formal educational background in usability engineering at the very least. No one's interested in uninformed opinions.
...or is there some twisted irony in this comment being on slashdot.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What pisses me off about distribution reviews is the emphasis most reviewers put on hardware detection. When is the last time anyone here installed Windows and it automatically came up running with the latest video and sound drivers with all of your USB devices working perfectly? How about never? Why do reviewers, and just new Linux users in general, expect this from Linux? Then, in ignorance, fault the distro for the problem without ever bothering to see if the packaged kernel even comes witha a driver and on top of that, never even bother seeking support or learning how to use fskcing modprobe. If I see one more review talking about "It didn't detect my sound card!! woe is me, Linux sucks.", I might have a breakdown.
The only REAL difference between the big distros is the package manager. All the other stuff is cosmetic or trivial. Comes with somewhat recent GNOME, KDE, blah blah blah, who cares.
Gentoo is probably only mainstream distro out that that doesn't try to spoil the user during install but instead teaches them the fundamentals right off. So once you got the system running, you already know how to do things like mount drives,format drives, install drivers, install a new kernel, configure X windows, etc and your not floundering around like some idiot. All those skills are distro independant and are transferable to any distro you sit down at.