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4 Linux Distros Compared To Win XP, Mac OS X

Posted by timothy on from the from-a-certain-point-of-view dept.

Morf writes "The Australian Consumers? Association has evaluated Xandros, Linspire, Mandrake Discovery and SUSE personal and compared them to Mac OS X and Windows XP in its latest Computer CHOICE magazine. The article is very much focused on "mums and dads", and concludes Linux is just about ready for consumers, although installing new software could pose some problems for those who aren't really computer savvy. The report is available free for a short time."

2 of 729 comments (clear)

  1. Get a real distro by dsauron · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Linux has really come a long way from the 90's. They should have tried using a real linux distrobution. Slackware is one of the greatest distrobutions out there. You can use swaret to keep the OS up to date, using the best 'FREE' software out there. You can use pkgtool to install software. Also, you can use netconfig to setup the network. NVidia has some of the greatest Linux drivers to help improve the benchmark tests. Everything can be setup with ease using just a few commands. Did I mention slackware is completely free to download It installs within 15 minutes and KDE can be setup with ease, ready to go out of the box. When people compare Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, they should be using a real linux distrobution to test with.

  2. Article wrong about OS X by Brian+Brian · · Score: 0, Redundant

    They got the price for OS X wrong by $100. They also said they would like to see the firewall on by default. Well it is in the sense that all sharing is turned off by default. So you have to turn on the sharing and then decide what to not let through with the firewall. And it continues to make errors. They say that Apple computers come with the latest version of the OS. Not always. You should update it as you would update any OS. But maybe they mean if you buy a PC box you can choose something other than XP and then not have the latest OS. They say that on XP you can't limit a program to one user account. I am thinking a 3 year old wrote this. This all reminds me when NewsWeek did a review of an old word processing program I worked on. Because so many things were wrong in the review I called them up. Turns out that the reviewer was a computer newbie and had never used a word processor before.