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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."
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'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
I tried many different Linux distros about 6 months ago, and could not find anything that worked out of the box. I couldn't get all my hardware working even on Ubuntu, the most hardware-friendly (for me) distro that I tried.
The average user has enough trouble keeping his machine from being hijacked and free of viruses and malware. If Linux is ever going to be the OS of choice for a consumer desktop, it has to be something a consumer can get running just by popping in the CD.
I was fed up with Windows and I couldn't get Ubuntu usable (to my satisfaction) even after spending several days on it. Result? Apple sold me a laptop.
I'm a supporter of Linux in all its flavors but getting it set up is, for the vast majority of people, still going to be a huge problem.
It's a mistake to act like it isn't an issue, because every person who pretends it isn't an issue pushes further out the date when it will no longer be.
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
Should have been Mandriva PowerPack. That's what's on my various desks -- all 4 of them.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
That's what happens when you release on schedule, and not when it's ready. That's one of the reasons I like Debian Sid so much. Bugs crop up from time to time, but usually they're fixed within a day or two of me noticing them. If it's not, I can always apt-pin a working version until it is fixed.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I actually like the Xandros included on the EEE PC more than Ubuntu. There's a few things here and there that are more Windows-like and just simply easier to use. The only downside is that the software repositories. For the Xandros repos, there's only a handful available, but with Ubuntu, there's quite a bit more. Eh, maybe I'm nitpicking.
well, on the plus side, the intel sound card on my laptop works under hardy. on the minus side, i have had issues with the keyboard driver under gnome 9illustrated by this post0. this same bug with modifier keys also seems to lead to program crashes. running the keyboard prefs app fixes the problem when it crops up.
overall, hardy feels very rough, and the upgrade process is even rougher. the upgrade removes the network manager applet, so i had to configure wi-fi from hand and sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome.
all the problems i've run into have been reported, with the exception of an acpi related boot issue 9e.g., laptop won't boot when running from battery0. i'm going to check my laptop initramfs before looking into that one. i have various acpi related problems including the inability to resume from suspend that may be bios specific.
i'd recommend looking upon hardy as a 'beta' release. it's promising, but not something you want to install on your non-linux friends' machines yet. i've been using it for some months now starting with the beta release, and it's still seems to be in the fix two bugs, create one new bug phase. if feisty doesn't have any obvious hardware problems on your setup, i'd stick with that for a few months yet. i really missed having sound though. the new sound architecture is interesting and has features that might prove useful to some people.
overall, i'm ok with hardy; i can deal with its oddities. i'm a little happier running under xfce, which also leaves me more room to run virtual machines. bottom line -- a few people will be somewhat happier with hardy, many will be considerably happier with feisty, at least for a few months yet.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I recently installed Ubuntu on laptop (my 1st linux) and had problems with wireless as well. Thing is, the wireless card problem can be easily fixed, but for some strange all tutorials, manuals and forum posts offer long, non-working instruction lists, that involve "wget" and "make". It's like asking - please, go away. The real solution was to open synaptic package manager, configure it to use 3rd party repository and install ndiswrapper. That's it! Ndiswrapper found and downloaded the drivers automatically and everything was bright and sunny again. Why isn't ndiswrapper in standard installation I have no idea.
I've had really mixed experiences with hardware on both sides. I'm using a mix of Win2K, XP, SimplyMepis6.5, and Ubuntu7.10.
*Webcam: old Philips. 2K/XP doesn't work at all, no drivers exist. Mepis can be coerced to work without much trouble.
*NI PCI GPIB controller card: 2K doesn't work at all, XP works great once I install the official drivers off the disc (although the downloaded ones don't work.) Mepis can be coerced to work with lots of trouble.
*USB PIC microcontroller programmer: 2K doesn't work at all. XP used to work but suddenly stopped. Mepis doesn't work at all.
*Canon LiDE flatbed scanner: 2K works when drivers loaded. XP works when drivers loaded. Mepis and Ubuntu work flawlessly right out of the box.
*Olympus digital cameras 380, 420, 4040: XP works when drivers loaded from original CD but not with downloaded drivers, Mepis works right out of the box.
*Creative Zen MP3 player: XP works when drivers loaded, Mepis works right out of the box.
*iPOD -- as above.
*Homebrew OBDII interface: XP sort of works, Mepis works well.
*Linkskey 802.11g: XP claims to work when I load the drivers but the card can't actually connect. Mepis and Ubuntu both fail completely.
*Microchip PIC programmer: XP works with the drivers on the original CD but not at all with downloaded drivers. Mepis and Ubuntu work perfectly out of the box.
So, *my* experience is that if you have the official, proprietary drivers in hand, XP does better than linux, but if you don't, linux consistently does better with 'any hardware you throw at it' -- and in many cases, it's hard or impossible to download functional drivers.
Which is to restate what has been said many times: if it's brand-new hardware, Windows will probably be better, but if it's older hardware, linux will probably be better.
Given that most customers will be using late-model hardware, since they've bought into the whole buy-a-new-one-every-two-years model, they'll be better served by Windows, but most geeks are, through a combination of cheapness and knowledge that it doesn't HAVE to be this way, keeping ancient hardware alive, they'll be better served by linux.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
It is a kernel option called fair group scheduling. If you could recompile your kernel you can change that. I know I had huge issues with this where any disk intensive operation would slow the machine to a halt. That said, the last time I used Ubuntu was years ago and the developers on the forum told me I should never compile my own kernel on Ubuntu, maybe that has changed by now, but it was easy on Gentoo to fix.
I'm not not licking toads.
Ndiswrapper isn't standard because it is a hack, an ugly hack. It is a last resort if there aren't any native drivers. It isn't very ideal to run windows emulation on a driver to get it to work and depending on the hardware some weird things could happen.
On that note I just want to say, you did a fresh install of an operating system on your system. With the exception of OSX on Apple certified hardware, I would be hard pressed to find any operating system that will work on every single piece of hardware on the planet. Many Linux distributions have done well with it and even XP has improved in detecting some hardware out of the box (compared with 2000, ME, and 98) but it won't catch everything. When things just automatically work, is usually the work put in from the OEM when they ship out a pre-installed version of an operating system.
It is the same in the world of Dell where you may install a fresh install of Windows XP and find out that none of your network components work or your video drivers aren't found. You have to go to dell's website and find those drivers and download them. This usually takes about an hour of downloading and configuration depending on the model. It is the same way with Ubuntu. A fresh install may find many devices that work but depending on your hardware, it may shortfall in the same places XP does on a default install. Keep in mind that Canonical, Microsoft, Novell, and other desktop OS companies need to test their works on an insane amount of hardware. Microsoft may have an edge with being the de-facto standard and can more easily forge deals with hardware vendors to release those drivers (I would say, the hw vendors are dependent on their products working with the dominant player in the market).
Does anyone remember windows 98 and the nightmare of setting up things like scanners and printers? You follow the directions and something didn't go right. Drivers are a sad fact of life. With Linux and most notably Ubuntu (All Desktop Linux discussions seem to use Ubuntu as a benchmark for this) it will be a uphill battle not only with hardware vendors but also die hard open source fans who not only want the driver but want it open sourced. If you look at the situation with ATI and NVidia, it isn't an overnight feat. Companies have their trade secrets, patents, and third party code that they aren't authorized to release.
My point is, if you are planning on installing Ubuntu on a computer, you are most likely going to hit some software that doesn't work. You may have to look for the drivers and do the extra work. It sucks but, if you want something that just works out of the box, look to OEM offerings. System76 and Dell offer desktops and laptops with Ubuntu. I personally haven't purchased from either and I am not sure if they have an OEM cd that accompanies the machines, but they should. If you don't think you're tech savvy enough to accomplish this, go look up a local Ubuntu LoCo or find somebody savvy enough to do it for you. Average PC users don't install their own copies of XP either without being prepared to do a little extra legwork.
Sure, and that is also why the reception of Windows Vista among ordinary users has been so lukewarm. They have a working system (Windows XP), so why switch to a system with widely reported incompatibility problems and driver issues?
they just shrug and say, "what do we care about your niche geek OS?"Just like they'll say, "What do we care about your craptastic Windows downgrade? I'll stay with XP, thank you.". As you can see, this isn't only a problem with "geek OSes", but also a problem with OSes developed by multi-billion-dollar corporations.
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. :-)