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Linux Desktop Distro Shootout
An anonymous reader writes "InfoWeek has posted an open-source OS comparison. Linux Shootout: 7 Desktop Distros Compared pits openSUSE, Ubuntu 8.4, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva Linux One, Fedora, SimplyMEPIS, and CentOS 5.1 against each other. And the winner is ... Ubuntu. Author Serdar Yegulalp writes: 'Ubuntu 8.4 remains one of the best desktop distributions for many good reasons: it works with almost any hardware you throw at it, and has tons of features for both existing Linux users and prospective converts from Windows.' He also gave openSUSE points for ease of use on the desktop, and Mandriva kudos for ease of administration."
8.04.
Isn't CentOS the free version of Redhat Enterprise Linux? Why is it in a desktop linux shootout?
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Here
It is Ubuntu 8.04 not Ubuntu 8.4. http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download
1 - Make a live disk of each.
2 - Build many identical robots.
3 - The round starts upon insertion of the disk.
Last standing robot wins.
THUNDERDOME!!!
Gentoo uber goober!
No fair! Who gave OpenSUSE that AK47?!
My blog
I'm quickly finding that I prefer 7.10 to 8.04. The overall system seems a lot more bogged down, lots of freezes with programs that never occurred in earlier versions. I do like a lot of the new functionality but I hope that they iron out some of the outstanding issues (especially considering it's supposed to be a LTR).
No matter which distro takes the #1 spot, the real grand prize winner is
THE USER !!!!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Fedora 9 comes out 8 days 3
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Slax has been improving and it's really a great desktop now. I've been using it on and off for a while now.
I sincerely enjoy the Linux experience and appreciate the community, but this statement is positively absurd. Ubuntu's own help files contain extensive lists of wireless cards that have a big fat "No" listed under the "Works out of the box" column. And that's just wireless cards.
One of the primary reasons that the average person abandons Linux is the frustration caused by these types of misleading claims. Somebody says, "Hey, virtually everything works out of the box!" and they think... wow, well, I buy my stuff at top retailers from top brands, surely then my stuff is supported.
Unfortunately for them, their stuff may not work at all, or may work partially. Lots of gotchas for Video cards, scanners.. the list goes on and on. Nobody is well served by making statements that indicate anything except that hardware support is still a major obstacle for the adoption of Linux on the desktop.
Ubuntu flawlessly and effortlessly enables a standard set of desktop functions. Kit doesn't matter much. This is bottom-line success for the casual *nix lusr. Little else matters. In particular, no tools exist to allow bullet-proof (CNL) modification or extension of the std-fun-set. Local networking stands out as a prime example of such (lack of) "extension", which CNLs evaluate (and disregard) as a cost-of-doing-business in UBUNTU. Gawd help the Lusr should he get 1/4 step off the automagically trodden path.
even claim to be a desktop distro? I use Fedora on my desktop, but I don't think they claim it to be a desktop distro.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Mandriva sounds too close to "Mangina" for my liking.
Why did they opt to use Mandriva One, over Mandriva Free? Mandriva Free is a bigger download, but comes with a lot more software on the disk. It also seems more suited to an actual install, whereas Mandriva One is more of a Live CD.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Fedora 9 comes out in two weeks, but we are comparing the nw born Ubuntu to 6 month old distros. Ugh. Let's compare apples to apples people!
I need to start out by saying that I am a web developer and other than very basic work deploying code to HPUX boxes at work I have had 0 exposure and no formal training with *nix Operating systems. I started playing around with Ubuntu during the Feisty release on my windows desktop with Wubi. Once I saw that I could get all my work done reliably and how stable Ubuntu was I knew that It would be my main operating system... someday. When I purchased a laptop with Vista preloaded on it I realized that Ubuntu was going to have to come to the rescue sooner than I was planning. Right about the time gutsy came out I put in on my no frills middle of the road laptop and haven't looked back. I had my fair share of issues and there was a learning curve for the administrative stuff but the. For day to day uses Its a rock and couldn't be more intuitive. My girlfriend who is not tech savy thought it was the neatest thing and demanded that I put it on her aging 6 year old laptop that came with Windows ME but had been limping along on Windows XP with a slim 128 megs of ram. Xubuntu loaded even easier on the old lappy and everything worked out of the box including a pcmcia wifi card. It brought new life to a machine that had been used mostly as a coaster for the past couple years. Then came the big upgrade to Hungry Hippo I mean Hardy Heron there were some hiccups but I reminded myself that windows has a similar trouble shooting learning curve that I had 10+ years vested in. The fact that I was able to upgrade to a new version of the OS with such few issues and trouble shoot the ones I had in a couple hours is really a testament to how Robust and friendly Ubuntu and the Ubuntu community has already become. Not only is Ubuntu becoming easier to use but with another few years of experience under my belt I'm sure that fixing the rare problems will be a snap.
Our bugs are smarter than your test scripts.
I've tried several times to install Ubuntu, I can get through the install, but when it boots, it freezes up. I've tried this on several different machines to no avail. I think I'm Ubuntu cursed. =]
It looks slick and easy to use, but the Linux gods just don't want me to use it.
I've been running Slackware for 10 years and for me it makes a fantastic desktop and server.
Yeah! All the cool kids are illiterate!
I'd be interested to know why debian was left out - it's widely used, and it's different enough from Ubuntu (despite Ubuntu being a fork of debian).
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The guy simply didn't do his homework. For starters, he thinks MEPIS is based on Mandriva - but it's based on Debian. Then, uses the latest beta of Ubuntu to compete with older distros. Finally, there is NO COMPARISON CHART.
What kind of research is that? He just shows a separate review of each distro, to finally announce "and the winner is...". I call this bull. Much more informative is the "girlfriend linux test" article.
Mod article down.
I installed 8.04 on two of my machines so I can do testing and I had problems with Gutsy at first, but it is not possible to get the bugs out unless people are willing to help support the new versions. I get the ISO and install a new partition on my main machine and use it as an opportunity to repair some of the mistakes I made on the last upgrade.
Thanks to the huge success of the Eee PC, Xandros is gaining a lot of new users. And I, for one, am finding it very nice (once you switch to the "Advanced desktop" on the Eee). Things seem to work fine, and I can launch the apps I need - and that's pretty much all I ask of the OS.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I'd like to order 1 copy of Ubuntu 8.4.
Thank you.
These kinds of articles harm practically everyone. They eliminate variety and here's how.
1. Focusing on a couple of winners. In Ubuntu's case they've got PR hucksters doing the shouting for them
2. Eliminating new features. These shootouts leave no room for testing new features, programs, etc. It's yay or nay and the nay's always win when something is -really- new.
3. There are a number of "What about distro X, Y or Z?" comments and they are, for the most part legitimate questions. Most of those non-chosen distros simply haven't made a good enough impression in media circles. Those aforementioned "good impressions" usually cost some money.
4. Eliminating new distros. There are -lots- of other linux distros who's first purpose is _not_ a desktop. The problem I'm pointing out is multifaceted and troubling. To boil it down: "Everyone knows that Linux is that other computer system they buy for less and put their stolen XP OS on."
My 2 cents: Debian Testing -still- manages to be completely ignored when it's a good apples-to-apples comparison to whatever new version Ubuntu puts out.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
They threw seven distributions at five random computers and saw that most of it worked, what's wrong with reporting that again? Put another way, how is telling the truth misleading? Lying, like the Microsoft people did about Vista is a huge mistake but no one said everything works - that's a commercial software thing. The situation is worse for people who make the Vista mistake, so places like Inforworld are starting to recommend software that works.
no Debian?
This review/comparison is posted May 4th or 5th, when the distros out there are Ubuntu 8.04 release (not beta, and featuring FF 3b5, not b4); Mandriva 2008.1; openSUSE 11.0 beta; and Fedora 9 preview. Thus, the selection of distros compared is outdated already at the time of review, and worse, unfair between distros (bias?). Compounding this, there are factual errors and lack of in-depth coverage.
This review sais very little about the current state of affairs and is of minimal real benefit to anyone not already initad in the Linux world. It might even do a misfavour to newbies wanting to take the plunge.
Admittably, it takes some time testing seven distros on five platforms, but that doesn't change the fact that it fails to represent the actual state of LinuxLand and the distros pitted against each other.
Is it an AMD processor? If so, try out the powernowd package. I've had good luck with it in the past, but it sometimes requires some work to get it working correctly.
That opensuse start menu looked pretty slick. Is there a way to get that into UBUNTU??
hi twitter!
Mebbe you should consider controlling the speed of the CPU rather than trying to blow harder on it.
Ubuntu installs and activates this stuff by default. I am sure all the other genuine desktop
distros in the current roundup do the same.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I do have cpufreq working on my machine which I believe achieves the same goal. It runs relatively cool (and slow -- ~800MHz) when I'm not doing much but when I kickstart the CPU with say glxgears the CPU temp jumps back up again.
Also, to whoever modded me offtopic: booooo....
Life would be easier if I had the source code.
Oh, brilliant! Users were almost universally disappointed with Vista's inability to live up to its hardware support claims, so why not ride that train right through Ubuntu's face?
I mean, come on, folks. Microsoft could have setup 5 computers that would have run Vista flawlessly as well. As my links pointed out above, claiming that Ubuntu (or Vista) supports almost everything you throw at it is not "telling the truth". It is just another irresponsible claim made by overzealous writers and marketers that would prefer to use some nice fuzzy language to breeze over an issue, rather than actually stop and address it.
- "Lying, like the Microsoft people did about Vista is a huge mistake but no one said everything works - that's a commercial software thing."
- "Ubuntu 8.4 remains one of the best desktop distributions for many good reasons: it works with almost any hardware you throw at it"
Linux to Infoworld: please leave the ridiculous hardware support claims to Microsoft. Vista drivers should make the Vaporware top 10 list, Ubuntu has never made any claims such as the one you just did, primarily because it isn't true.
Does it run hot when you do the same thing in Windows? I.e. have you run seti@home, BOINC, or something that maxes your cpu under windows? You say it runs at 55 deg Celcius without doing anything in Linux, is this with glxgears running, or does it get hotter?
Steer them to a vendor that provides models with a distro of Linux pre-installed. Period, full stop.
Otherwise, they need to have somebody to resolve the problems that come up because no Linux distro can test on every possible combination of hardware. It's not hard to do for US. It's an insurmountable frustration for the. So unless you are prepared to always be there for them, find a vendor that supports them.
Dell, I know, has a narrow but adequate range of choices with Ubuntu preinstalled. Since they provide Ubuntu support, they hopefully chose Linux friendly hardware, and in the worst case there's somebody to call if you aren't there.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I want to be a 'Linux Guy' - I downloaded the Ubuntu ISO yesterday and I'm ready to do it. Only problem is I can't get online.
I'm going to go to BestBuy *TODAY*. Can anyone here tell me which wireless network adapter will work 100% out of the box. I'd like for it to support WPA and WEP and not require any WINDOWS DRIVERS or any of that crap.
If someone could please provide a link to a wireless network adapter from the www.BestBuy.com website; I'll go and buy it and use Linux and tell everyone how great Linux is.
Since Linux is ready for the desktop and all that jazz, I'm sure this is an incredibly easy question, but I haven't found a simple concrete answer yet.
I'd seriously be very grateful to anyone who can help me.
This article is just a comparison of 7 different distros, and actually not a very good one at that.
The writer seemed more focused on stupid things like sleep and hibernate.
Never was there a declaration of an actual "winner".
I've been a Linux guy since 1995 and as much as I hate to say it, I have given up. There needs to be a singular distro at the heart of it all which is steered by either Linus or a committee that focuses on one vision and goal. Chaos is great for creating a million cool bits, but not for organizing them into one unified, cohesive unit.
Let's finally get over the aversion to one main distro, or one of each tool and app. No one cares about choice when all it means is 40 buggy half-assed apps and no single solid one. It is a lot of wasted talent, time, and effort. With some direction and drive Linux could surpass anything out there.
Until people begin to wake up, I'll keep it for servers only. Oh, and I'd personally like to thank the genius who decided to go with a beta version of Firefox for a long-term support version of an OS... now THAT is how to FAIL.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
nuff said.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
I cant say I read TFA but i have to say that because of its stated goals it was fairly pointless to anybody whos already on linux. Ubuntu (and to a greater extent mint) are aimed at being trouble free, transition distros, the thing is ive already transitioned.
/etc/ files
Id like to see a comparision of linux distros for people like me:
We're already on linux
We have a basic idea of the command line
We know some of the more important
We dont mind fiddling about to get stuff working
Which distro will suit us best?
(I suspect there maybe 2 answers 1 for stability & 1 for cutting edge)
In fairness i think i have a fairly good list (arch,debian,just tweaking ubuntu,fedora) and when i get a spare moment im going to install a few and try them out, but it would be nice to see a few different comparisons instead of yet another report saying that ubuntu is the best distro for new users.
Id also ask for a report for which is best for an experienced linux user, but in fairness that will simply become a flame war and any user whos experienced will be able to get similar results with any distro.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
EQck ogpreq gpoem fmeqro;n a; nvdsa; nvjkads nvlks;
Apparently this was the wrong thread to discuss Linux and CPU heat on notebooks. I rarely get such fiercely negative moddage. Yikes.
It appears to run cool no matter what I do in Windows. I can get it under 40C by letting it idle in Linux, but if I run glxgears for 60 seconds it'll ramp up to 60C and start setting off all kinds of alarms and warning messages.
I'm considering hotwiring the fan so I can control it with the COM bus, because none of the kernel modules are touching it right now.
Life would be easier if I had the source code.
There used to be Microsoft vs Linux or Microsoft vs. OSX. These days it's Ubuntu vs rest of Linux. I draw an analogy with supporting Ron Paul for president. I have been using Linux from Red Hat 6 days. I drifted towards Gentoo & centOS for a couple of years my distro of choice these days, OpenSuse. I tried Ubuntu twice with frustrating results. Once about 2 years back on a 64 bit AMD, It was a joke, I don't know why there was even a version out. I tried 7.04 recently, again it lasted for 1 1/2 day on my dual core laptop. To get it to level - where it was usable was taking too long. In addition Ubuntu ws insisting on using Non-smp kernel. Bottom line, I don't think I will easily give up on Opensuse unless I see polish.
And the winner is... the distro most like Windows!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
A shootout between desktop distros days after the new Ubuntu is out seems to be in favor of Ubuntu. As others have mentioned, Fedora 9 is imminent. It's also worth mentioning that RHEL5.2 will be released soon (in a month or so), and will sport Firefox 3 along with new versions of Openoffice (2.3), Thunderbird (2.0) and Evolution. CentOS follows RHEL closely, so CentOS 5.2 won't be far behind.
The distro selection was done for a reason: TO ALLOW UBUNTU TO WIN, of course. Or they were stupid and unqualified to do valid comparison; you choose.
They have taken a page from Microsoft's comparison practices.
"We have met the enemy and they is us." -- Pogo
suspend to ram, suspend to disk, suspend, sleep, hibernate, whatever you wanna call these features.
:(
On most hardware, this doesn't work as flawless as on Windows, if at all.
I use these features all the time on Windows. When I press my power button, my computer suspends to RAM. Takes a split second. When I press power again, the computer is up and working again in another split second. In the meantime, the computer says nothing. All fans and harddrives are turned off.
This is the feature that always makes me go back from any Linux distro
I have yet to find a single distro that's "stable" immediately upon release. Fact of the matter is beta testers aren't your average user, so there's always going to be stuff they miss. Never get ANY OS right out the gate (Vista users will be happy to tell you this as well).
I always gave Fedora about 3-4 months before I moved to the newer versions. Ubuntu I give about the same buffer. My main problem in my last upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy was that ATI started going in a new direction with their drivers, and the X1250 drivers being open sourced had _just_ saw the light of day, so I lost my tv-out. Aside from that, no complaints whatsoever. I think I took the upgrade about 2 months after the release.
But these things are expected with OSS, particularly when it's a fairly new project (I think AMD open sourced the ATI radeon drivers around about summer of last year, just before the Gutsy launch). Always takes a year or so for the project to mature. I'm intrigued as to how well Hardy does it but again, I'm going to wait another couple of months to see. It ain't broke right now (I can use an old SGI O2 for tv-out for now) so no reason to fix it.
I updated from 7.10 to 8.04 on a new-ish Dell, and the 8.04 kernel won't boot without adding a parameter to workaround an unfixed bug.
I so want Ubuntu to be the girlfriend-compatible Linux, but I guess they're not quite there yet. I hope they're still dedicated to being "user friendly" though.
OTH, Fedora 8 has been hell (I've run every version since RH9). Sound stopped working in the switch to pulseaudio. I had to give up on my soundcard and bought a USB headset, and then some update killed that off too. And hibernate-resume is hit-or-miss. Honestly, Vista has given me less problems than Fedora 8.
But then I sort of expect that from Fedora, where they don't have the same heart for the end-user. (Which is why they lost so many of them to Ubuntu.)
Since the manufacturer either doesn't MAKE drivers, doesn't tell anyone else how to make them, or changes chipset without giving any clue to the buyer that this has happened.
ALL HW manufacturers fault.
And how much hardware out there works 100% with Vista? Drivers again.
So, basically, two versions of RedHat were included and no Slackware?
I guess they were scared of Slackware's awesomeness!
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Fedora for sometime now have supported RAID. The newest Ubuntu doesn't. I would love it if they did.
If you follow Ubuntu's history you will know why this was done. They are looking to jump ship and want some publicity before selling.
... Kinda of like mostly pure 99% soap. Ubuntu is just crap wrapped in tinfoil.
Noticed they didn't pit it against the other industry leaders, debian, slackware, yellowdog. Personally I can't stand Ubuntu, it makes me feel like I'm drinking diet coke, "tastes more like real coke."
Yes, but... that's not saying much.
"I've been a Linux guy since 1995 and as much as I hate to say it, I have given up. There needs to be a singular distro at the heart of it all which is steered by either Linus or a committee that focuses on one vision and goal. Chaos is great for creating a million cool bits, but not for organizing them into one unified, cohesive unit."
You don't sound like a Linux guy to me. You sound like a BSD guy.
What, no slackware love?
boobs and butt... Must have something to do with all those images they tested us with in grade /middle school...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Free software works with hardware people already own, Vista does not. Microsoft might be able to scrape five computers together that run Vista but it won't match free software or even XP performance. Vista probably won't run on any of a random collection of machines put together by Infoworld, except that T61 but even that will suck. Meanwhile, people are pleasantly surprised when free software actually runs. This is what people keep seeing and saying. Why can't you admit that this is a massive free software advantage? Are you afraid of success?
That has been a law in every state I have lived. I'm willing to bet it's a law in every state.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
I routinely put Linux on older machines because of obvious performance issues with bloatware like Windows. Just a few examples of what I've tried recently are lampshade Macs, Compaq Presario laptops and Thinkpad I Series laptops. I can't remember the other handful of older models I've tried (If you really want to know I'll go look at them) but the results were the same so consistenly, could it really be a concidence? Ubuntu couldn't deal with the hardware. With the lampshade it wasn't a matter of having the right drivers available: the hardware killed the installation dead. What has worked for me? Fedora (the least cool distro I guess, but I think it's just fine) and Vector Linux. I'm VERY impressed with Vector's ability to load on just about any old piece of crap. Although I'm sure there will be someone else shortly who will relate all the Vector Linux hardware issues they have, and they would recommend X distro, and someone will trash X distro in favor of blah blah distro ad infinitum. Maybe I shouldn't have brought it up. It just burns me when praise is heaped upon Ubuntu for awesome hardware compatibility when is it NOT awesome. At least in my experience.
The user still struggles because of lack of uniformity. Too many Linux support pages are of the form: If Ubuntu or Debian, then do this. If Fedora do that.
For Joe and Jane Sixpack, uniformity is very important to get effective support. THis is one of the reasons Ubuntu loads only one app of a type by default.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In good /. tradition I really quickly browsed the article and before I saw the last of it typed in my comments:
1) Informationweek is utterly clueless. Calling CentOS (aka RHEL) "probably the slightly friendlier of the two distributions" is silly as we (who actually work with/know both of them) know that CentOS/RHEL is the conservative *server* version and is way behind in features & functionality to Fedora. Compare the F9 featurelist with the latest CentOS/RHEL (beta) features list and all I can say is "nuf said".
2) Informationweek is even more clueless when talking about hardware support and declaring Ubuntu the winner: "it works with almost any hardware you throw at it". Maybe someone should tell those clowns that hardware support is pretty much generic amongst distro's because they all use pretty much the same kernel. Hell, even Slackware is up to 2.6.24 these days.
3) Informationweek has reached a rare state of cluelesness: "Most of the software in CentOS is also similar to what you get in Red Hat". Hello?! For your information, Informationweek, they are actually the same.
This is as much a shootout as I am Steve Balmer going into I-wont-throw-any-more-chairs-please-me-let-me-keep-my-job-after-messing-up-the-yahoo-deal therapy.
WTF? No Debian Desktop?
Help us build a better map!
do you think most hardware works out of the box on xp? say the 2002/2004 release with sp2 built in.
do you think most hardware works out of the box with vista?
if so then yes, most hardware works out of the box on ubuntu 8.04, cause this very recent gigabyte s-series completely fails to work out of the box with the above ms oses, not even the network card works. which means that if i ever lost the cd full of drivers, with their installer that requires you to actively avoid filling the computer with toolbars and other malware, i would be unable to even get on the internet to get drivers.
This review is rather good on Fedora; I'm actually rather relieved to see that it doesn't mention very much about it. As a Fedora advocate, I like to think that Fedora makes an excellent, high quality general-purpose system, and part of fulfilling that role is not getting in the way of the user; the user shouldn't really have anything to complain about, and conversely doesn't necessarily need to find anything noteworthy about the system. Also I hate to see nit-picky analysts pit one distro against one another (eg Ubuntu vs Fedora) for silly reasons. Not that it's bad to compare systems, but if you spend enough time on the Linux desktop you realize that all distros are the same--same kernel, same libraries, same programs. The only difference really is the presentation (including administrative tools). Can't wait for Fedora 9, by the way... only a few days left to go. :-)
All jokes aside, I'd say the biggest screw-up in this article (from the personal perspective of a openSuse user) is no mention, whatsoever, of Suse's truly fantastic configuration tool Yast. There's a lot of good stuff in Suse, but I'd go so far as to say Yast is *the* reason I use it. Everything from server configuration to driver management to partition/mounting management to package management to X configuration all in one place, with excellent help tools and generally fully as much control as one could get by editing the config files manually (some of them, like the bootloader config, actually allow this - with helpful information and comments). Add the ability to run it in a console using a very well-done ncurses interface, and you have the perfect tool for administration via SSH or fixing an xorg.conf SNAFU.
What is really odd is that considerable mention was made of a few other distros' config tools, and while I can't claim to have used all of the reviewed distros, I would state that Yast blows away the config tools of, for example, SimplyMEPIS (which was promoted largely on the basis of such tools, and which I'll admit are good - but hardly as comprehensive or permitting so much control).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Actually yast is the reason why lots of people hate suse.
Yast is really slow and a huge resource hog when it comes to package management or software updating time. It was really slow in the 10.2 days and apparently a dev said 10.1 was slower than 10.2 when I complained.
In 10.2 it's not unusual for yast to use up about 200MB of memory just to open the package management screen (and take nearly a minute or more to do it).
I'm fine with the idea of yast (some don't like the idea), but it needs to be much faster and less of a hog.
I have tested hundrets of distros on mini mac. .. KANOTIX...
The only that survived was
Even not mentioned
IMHO this review reminds me of something I might read in a freshman writing class. Good intent, maybe, but the focus is weak and I sense a lack of experience with Linux in general or perhaps this is a Ubuntu user's perception of other distros. (bias?) I agree that Ubuntu seems to have fewer hardware compatibility issues, but every (K)Ubuntu distro I've tooled around with for a few hours makes me feel like I'm wearing clothes that are two sizes too small.
OK, this is like two weeks old by now, but I just got it in metamod, and marked the off-topic as unfair. I read thru all four pages of comments and there were others discussing config and stuff, tho nothing quite like this one. Still, it wasn't OT given the context of the other threads, and the fact it WAS about Linux desktops (maybe the mods didn't consider a laptop close enough to a desktop?).
FWIW... make sure you're comparing the same probe temps. At least my AMD (desktop/workstation, so may be different) system has cpu core temps, and cpu case temps. The core temps run higher (typically ~5 degrees C), but due to volatility are *NOT* the temps AMD tells its system vendors to standardize on for system thermal regulation. It's thus entirely possible that (even if they are labeled core) the MS Windows reported temps are the case temps that the system is regulating on, while it's likely the actual core temps that you have chosen to have reported on Linux.
Of course, if your thermal regulation isn't working and the fans aren't coming on or speeding up when they should, it'll hit warning territory pretty fast regardless, but just in case you weren't aware of the possibility of confusing the two readings. Of course if you only have one of them...
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman