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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.
Here
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.