So what does Mint have so special that it has been able to gather a major userbase and an active community? The trick is that Mint strikes hard to the weak spots of Ubuntu, while relying on it’s solid base and maintaining binary compatibility. The improvements that the Mint developers have made are obvious from the first boot into the system – Linux Mint makes the Ubuntu suck a whole lot less.

First of all Mint fixes the ugly desktop theming that Ubuntu is often criticized for. You can’t find a single pixel of the original Ubuntu brown/orange looks in Mint. Instead you are greeted with a rather conservative but pleasant grey/black theme with pastel green highlights. The Gnome interface has been rearranged to a single bottom panel, which is definitely easier to consume by people migrating from Windows. The original Gnome menus have been replaced with a Mint menu, which is somewhat of a mix-up in between openSUSE Kickoff and a traditional Windows XP style menu arrangement. With these changes Mint is very easy to use and welcoming for people with little experience on various Linux desktops.

Another feature which is welcomed by new Linux users is the inclusion of most critical proprietary software elements that one needs for everyday basic usage. These include Sun Java, Adobe Flash and support for a number of proprietary audio and video formats. This means that a vast majority of the world’s top web pages and services work out of the box and so do your music and video files too. Mint also introduces a set of small Mint-specific tools like the MintUpload FTP client and a slightly different package update manager. However, my gut feeling is that the importance of these little tools is a lot smaller in comparison to the out-of-the-box confifuration done right. While the Linux hardcore always remind me that you can customize Linux to be whatever you want, I’d still say that more than 95% of people settle to what ever is shown after the first boot. They may change the wallpaper but thats about it and that’s why the first impression is most important.

While Linux Mint seems to be targeted for the newbies by design, I have to say it has the weirdest start-up wizard popping up of the first post-install boot.  Yes, the first things that Mint asks for the user after installation are 1) Should the root account be enabled/disabled 2) Should there be fortune cookies shon in the terminal. I really can’t decide whether to cry or laugh when I see these questions on my laptop screen. The root account issue is obviously a very important one, but does the 1st time Linux user know anything about the significance of using ’sudo’ or ’su’? The fortune cookies on the other hand are the most insignificant feature ever in an operating system – fine, if the Mint developers like them, so put them in your distro. If not, then get rid of them, but why on earth you have to bug the new users with such a stupid question? Oh well, I guess no distro is perfect.

Overall it is safe to say that Mint delivers a lot of added value on top of Ubuntu. It looks better, feels better and sounds better on your tongue. It offers one of the very best out-of-the-box experiences on the market, while relying on the stable Ubuntu/Debian core. I been watching the website, releases and the community every now and then, at so far it has been making a good progress release after release. The Alexa statistics graph below gives you an idea how it matches up against the contenders (click on the graph for more details). Mint is definitely one project to keep on eye on in the future, and let’s hope that it doesn’t fade away as the years go by.

Find out more about Mint at: http://www.linuxmint.com

As before our focus is on typical desktop and Internet usage, seeking an open-source alternative to Windows. We value a good out-of-the-box experience, polished desktop design and usability over other features.

What went wrong since the spring of 2008

In my opinion the the ongoing half year period has been a disappointment as many distributions have been rolling out rather medium or even bad releases that don’t earn many recommendations.

In September our guest starring editor Siku raised concerns about the KDE4 desktop. The birth of KDE4 has been a lengthy process and even now, in December of 2008, we can’t say that the next generation a PC desktop is ready or even a contender to the other alternatives. Even thought the stability and features are improving release after release, the basic problem of KDE4 still exists – what is the additional value it delivers to the end user? Sure, it does introduce new features and changes some of the traditional desktop environment fundamentals, still to me it looks like it complicates things rather then resolves any usability issues. All KDE4 distros I have tried appear bloated, cluttered, more complex and slower than their KDE3.5 or Gnome alternatives. No killer applications or improved use-cases have been found.

Mandriva 2009 shipped the KDE4 as the primary desktop, but unfortunately with poor results. This release had more bugs than their 2007.x or 2008.x on release date and even though most of them may be now resolved via updates I simply don’t see the point of making beta quality releases. All they do is generate negative feedback towards the distribution and Linux in general. As release cycle of 6 months is short and the distributions come with very short support for updates (12-18 months), it is crazy that the first few months of the support period are wasted for making the release even stable!

My old favorite PCLinuxOS seems to have encountered the resource problems, as in many times is the case with small distros that focus on just a few or even a single developer. The 2008 MiniMe release was awesome and they managed to release a preview of 2009, but otherwise the updates of this rolling release distro seem to have stalled. I wish all the best for the PCLinuxOS project but at the moment their star is going down rapidly.

Ubuntu’s Intrepid Ibex we had a look at just a couple of weeks ago, and found it to be intermediate at best and definitely short of ‘intrepid’. Very slight improvements from the 8.04.1 Long Term Support version released in the spring and most Ubuntu experts still recommend the 8.04.1 edition as the primary choice, unless the newer software components are absolutely required for hardware support.

OpenSUSE 11.1 is ready to rock!

It seems that this release cycle is no different from the previous ones – openSUSE v11.1 is simply the best desktop Linux distribution out there. With the failures of the contenders during this fall, the openSUSE wins with a huge margin. The openSUSE 11.1 will be the baseline of the next commercial SLED release, so Novell and SUSE have put of huge amount of effort to this release. Our evaluation is based on the RC1 release candidate.

SUSE is often seen as a KDE minded distribution and some consider the 11.1 release to be the ‘make it or break it’ release for KDE4. Unfortunately it seems that even capable developers of openSUSE and Novell can’t get any real improvements out of it. Luckily openSUSE also has the best implementation of Gnome desktop out there – a very polished and usable desktop out-of-the-box with great attention to detail. The single bottom panel configuration with SLAB menu just works and keeps the most used applications at your fingertips.

openSUSE comes as Gnome or KDE4 LiveCDs with a very fast and easy installer. The hardware support is top notch, and it has the latest upstream improvements from Gnome v2.24 and Linux kernel 2.6.27. YaST configuration tools offer an excellent set of GUI based tools for managing your system. The Zypper package management seems to improve in every release as well. They have excellent repositories and good availability of backports which prolong the life-cycle of their releases. The community offers one-click installation links to typical end-user needs, such as restricted formats.

It is often asked that ‘when Linux is ready for the desktop?’ and I don’t think it can get much readier than this. No matter what operating system you are currently using I highly recommend you give openSUSE a look once the 11.1 stable release is out.

Go get it: http://www.opensuse.org

First of all I have to say that I am a big fan of Ubuntu because they do a lot of good for Linux. They productize the most popular(?) Linux distribution, provide good infrastructure for the user communities and gain a lot of positive publicity for Linux. I have also the understanding that Ubuntu contributes significantly to the upstream projects (Gnome, Debian, GNU/Linux). On the other hand I have a hard time understanding parts of their strategy, which in my opinion leads to intermediate releases. Pretty good, but boring, non-innovative and after all pretty damn close to the mother Debian.

From the live CD boot the latest Ubuntu looks and feels…well Ubuntu, and there has not been a lot of development for the last couple of years (6.10 Edgy Eft was the first Ubuntu version I tried). I have to say that the improvements so far to the visual aspects were a big turn-off. They consisted of a few changed icons, slight gradients in Gnome panels and a new (rather good) wallpaper and thats it. Oh yes, there is the new theme called ‘dark room’, which is even more brownish than the default. I really expected a bolder approach in re-working the user interface as Ibex is the first release after the previous Long Term Supported edition, so it would be justified to drive more radical changes and development. There are many small distributions that have been able to come out with slick visuals, so the required pieces for the puzzle do exist. For an example openSUSE, Ubuntu’s strongest contender on the Linux field, is able to deliver much more pleasing visuals that are more professionally finalized, well thought and more intuitive.

Under the hood the Ibex brings many improvements from the upstream. Gnome has been updated to 2.24 with slight improvements, the new Network Manager being perhaps the most interesting one as it now provides improvements for Wiress and GPRS/3G connectivity. The 2.6.27 Linux kernel should improve the hardware support in many areas, which is always welcomed and always an issue with Linux on the latest or less common hardware. New X.org 7.4 brings improved multi monitor support, but caused a gap in graphics card drivers which have not been updated to latest X.org revision yet (this should obviously improve over time).

The word intrepid mean something like ‘fearless’, ‘brave’ or ‘courageous’. Unfortunately the Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex does not live up to it’s name. It lacks any ground braking changes, innovation in design or brave new approaches on the visuals and usability. I would really like to see the most popular Linux distribution to innovate something that would make it stand out from the crows, and especially Debian, more. Competitors like openSUSE and Mandriva are much better in this sense as they are delivering their own value adding features like YaST or Control Center for system administration. Version 8.10 Intrepid Ibex is a small incremental upgrade on the solid foundation of Ubuntu (or Debian), but are these changes worthy a new release? They seem more like a ’service pack’ to Ubuntu v8.04 Hardy Heron, if a Microsoft Windows expression is allowed here.

So there I was, happily using PCLinusOS 2008 MiniMe edition. It is a one damn fine distribution, that is stable, has rolling update strategy and light weight. It happened however that the instant messaging network ICQ started blocking my version of Pidgin with a message that the client should be updated to regain access to their network. In the world of Windows this would have been a no-brainer, simply a matter of visiting Pidgin website, but for some reason or another PCLOS had not received an update for some time. This was problematic as I often work on Linux, but I have some key contacts in ICQ, which I was not able to reach using Pidgin. Of course I could have recompiled my own packages, or used another IM client, but those alternatives were not my piece of cake. I want to use Pidgin and I like that things “just work”. What ever the reason was, there was a slight pause in releasing updates for PCLOS and it was hurting my work.

From that I got the idea that I should give Ubuntu’s rather new Hardy Heron 8.04.1 a whirl. It was supposed to be stable, even stable enough for corporate usage and as a Long Term Support version it would receive patches for years to come. So I went on installing Hardy and using it for some days, and I was actually quite happy about it – it is a rather simplistic desktop environment and most things just work…until I started having issues with the WLAN of my IBM Thinkpad T41. After couple days of usage I noticed that WLAN was very unreliable. I would have to tinker with Network Manager a number of times, or perform several reboots in order to get a network connection up.

I started Googling around and discovered that Ubuntu had switched from Intel originated Pro Wireless drivers to a 100% FOSS alternative, and the new drivers were buggy as hell. There was some flaky workaround in Network Manager in attempt in order to “fix” the issue, but the fact is that a lot of people are now having WLAN issues with their Ubuntu setups – issues that were not present in previous releases. The Intel Pro Wireless series of chipsets can be found in  IBM/Lenovo, Dell and many other major label laptops, and the user base of such laptops must be counted in millions. What kind of an idiot includes buggy drivers to a most common PC component in a LTS release, which many Ubuntu fans have been waiting for to install? And all this after successfully shipping the Intel’s “ipw” driver for several releases. As a software industry professional, I just can’t understand who would make such a choice, just to get a pure FOSS driver to the release. I wandered to Ubuntu’s IRC channel to talk about it, but only got an arrogant moderator on my face, so it was time to dump Ubuntu again and look for better alternatives. What a shame.

My next pick was openSUSE 11.0, which I already was somewhat familiar with. It is a very nicely productized desktop environment and has some nice repositories available for backports. After installing and fine-tuning everything in place, I went on to watch a video in YouTube that a friend has sent me – Firefox crashed. Restarted it and tried a couple more videos, and got just as many crashes. YouTube is roughly the 3rd most popular website in the world, and openSUSE has managed break that in their production release (at least after some updates pulled from the repos). How on earth can that happen? Does anyone actually perform any testing on these things? Another example of an issue that would never occur in the commercial software world – no one in their right mind would ship a browser product that would crash on YouTube if they were doing it for business. And believe I know what I am talking about, as I work in the field of software development involving web browsers.

So now my hope is on the Mandriva 2008.1. I am bit sceptic about their short release life cycles, and how well will there be any backport updates available to the key applications. After all, I can never know when some IM network decides to block some Pidgin version again. I have to give Mandriva some credit though on their 2008.x releases, as they are very well productized and user friendly. Let’s just wait and see what is software component going to fall apart next time….

If you are a new reader of BitBurners.com, be sure to check out our Mythbusting Linux articles too.

In case you have read our articles, you know that I’ve been doing plenty of distro hopping recently. The freedom of choice is one thing that Linux fans often boast about – you can choose in between hundreds of Linux distributions, a number of desktop environments and so on. Initially this freedom seems appealing and interesting, but after a number of hops from a distro to another I have started wondering about the meaningfulness of the huge variety of distributions. And then I happened to read an article at the Linux Hater’s Blog, who makes an interesting statement:“This “choice”, as loudly as it is trumpeted, is a key reason that Linux has not made it on the desktop.” - and he is damn right about it!

The website DistroWatch.com currently lists 570 Linux distributions in their database. A majority of distros are something that you or I have never heard of, while the top of their list features corporate backed Linux distributions like Ubuntu, openSUSE, RedHat and Mandriva, but also some smaller spin-off projects such as the PCLinuxOS (my current favorite) and LinuxMint. But as we go down the list I really have to wonder what do we need all these distributions for? Do they actually contribute something for the common good? Last time I checked it was the mega distributions contributing most to the up-stream. Due to the enormous number of distributions the talent and effort needed for developing free and open-source software is fragmented, and inefficiently utilized.

And the excess freedom of choice is not limited in the distributions itself, obviously, and it actually gets even crazier under the hood. Why does every distro want to introduce their own package management system? Based on my experience the Synaptic / apt-get damn right works. RPM-based distributions on the other hand love to use their own package managements. OpenSUSE’s old ZMD plain right sucked, so they decided to make a new one called Zypper. Zyp sucks less, but still seems to be outperformed by apt-get (atleast in terms of performance). At the same time Mandriva is using their own urpmi, which has worked nice and fast for me. RedHat of course has their own package management as well – why there is no joint effort in between these RPM based distributions? I read somewhere that Conary (Foresight Linux) would be somehow revolutionary – all exceptional I found in Conary was the amazingly slow system updates. And if we go outside the package management and discuss the configuration features that the dsitros offer, it doesn’t make much more sense. Various ‘Control Panel’ -kind of graphical configuration interfaces also seem to be something that every distribution has to make them selves. Mandriva has the excellent Control Center, while openSUSE’s YaST is extremely powerful, so why they arenot utilizied by other distros?

And I don’t even want to start about the various desktop environments. KDE (3.5x) is the better desktop, and no doubt about that, but thanks to this awesome freedom of choice the killer applications seem to coming from the GTK/Gnome neighborhood, so I am either stuck with the Gnome desktop or running GTK apps on my KDE desktop.

Lets jump back to the distributions and talk more about these ‘one man shows’ that are common, but also perhaps a dying breed in the Linux world. It seems that every now and then a talented developer decides to start his own distribution. And with any luck and hard effor he may actually succeed in building a very good one, which typically gathers a small but fanatic crowd of users. The problem however is that these ‘one man shows’ tend to be developed behind closed doors, and problems arise when the one man army runs out of human resource. Mepis is an great example – several excellent releases but now the project is quickly going downhill as the developer was forced to re-enter working life. At least in Mepis they are trying to increase community involvement. PCLinuxOS, a wonderful distribution. However, just a while ago an upgrade to Pidgin upgrade was required in order to continue using the ICQ instant messaging network – I have not yet seen the updated package for PCLOS, and neither can I make one myself. The developer(s) of PCLOS have done amazing job in forking Mandriva and providing the rolling update model, but at some point the resources are going to give in and cause issues.

The total freedom of choice is a problem and the Linux bandwagon is being pulled to various directions. Unfortunately the average user does not want choices – he want’s a reliable system that “just works”. Linux Hater’s makes an excellent comparison to the web server world, where Linux is de facto standard, due to the fact that the choice almost exclusively is the so called LAMP environment – Linux Apache MySQL and PHP. Nobody seems to want an alternative to Apache, MySQL and PHP because these things just work! Why cant we have a LAMP for the desktop? Should we all just shut up and use Ubuntu’s long term supported release to for the common good?

More about ‘choice’: There is plenty to be found via Google

Again we immediately run to the problem of defining that what are we actually comparing. As said before, Linux actually refers to the kernel of the operating system and that Linux comes in all kinds of shapes as sizes from mobile phones to super computers. To narrow things down we focus on modern desktop oriented Linux distributions. I have personally tried most of them, and have experience in openSUSE, Ubuntu, Mandriva and I am currently writing this using PCLinuxOS 2008. Windows also comes in various versions and editions, Windows XP being the market leader and Vista (various editions) being the most recent. I have very little Vista experience, so I will only touch that in this article, and focus on XP.

First of all I have to say that Windows XP is actually pretty good. It has been matured, service packed, patched and updated for seven years or so. That is actually an incredibly long life cycle for the operating system, and even today XP can tackle basic desktop needs very well. If good quality drivers are available for your hardware, it will be solid as a rock, unless You ruin it yourself by installing low quality software. Windows is the dominant operating system on the market, so you are likely to get good drivers for the hardware, or at least updates if defects are found. The quality of the software one installs on top of Windows defines the overall stability experience for the end-user. My desktop PC has Windows XP that I installed some 1,5 years ago and it has served me flawlessly.

Modern desktop Linux distributions have a furious development cycles releasing new versions once or twice a year. This means that the beta and release candidate testing periods are very short, usually only matters of weeks. Unfortunately a fresh Linux distribution on release date tends to contain a lot of bugs. Linux distros, like Windows, have on-line updating features and patches and updates are usually released a lot right after the release. Download and install Ubuntu 7.10 (from October 2007) today, and a huge load of fixes are available via the updater right after install. So Microsoft is not the only one pushing out service packs to improve their product quality. And the bugs of Linux distros can be very visible ones too: My Ubuntu suddenly lost all theme and icon settings, the Start button equilavent of Mandriva was visually broken, and openSUSE opens unnecessary Xconsole window if I enable clock synchronization via NTP Internet server.

Drivers and hardware support is a whole another story under Linux. Unfortunately hardware vendors are not keen on the idea of releasing their drivers open sourced, which has lead to the fact that Linux driver support is far worse than on Windows. I cannot use a native ATI driver on my Thinkpad T41, since none is available, so I have to use a 3rd party developed open source equivalent. And speaking of my ATI card, all Linux distros except Mandriva incorrectly configure this laptop for 3D desktop usage, so I have to manually edit the settings to make it work. Even with everything configured properly, 3D games seem to be a bit unstable on this computer and tend to crash or jam occasionally – I am not yet 100% sure what the issue is, but based on what I have learned from the net is that the problems are in the drivers.

So if one thinks that “I will intall Linux over Windows and never have problems again”, then one will most likely be disappointed. But there is a different side to this story as well. Linux at the core is rock solid. We here have been running our own web server for few years, and not once it has crashed, jammed, booted or had any issues with it. I haven’t checked recently but I think we around 500 days of uptime on this server since we did a complete reinstall due to mandatory update. And all the time the server is working, serving millions of database queries and sending the content to thousands of readers. In server usage, such stability simply does not exist in the Windows world, and that is why Linux has conquered the server market.

Just as I am writing this, our tech admin Xfiler dropped in to brag about his new Lenovo Thinkpad. He said it had Vista preinstalled, and it had crashed on him on the first day of use. I don’t have enough Vista experience to make conclusions myself, but based on the stuff I have read and heard, it has some maturity issues. So did Windows XP several years ago, but most likely Vista will mature after one or two service packs, just like the Linux distributions will mature after receiving a few months worth of updates.

So is the myth busted? To some extent I think that it really is. A user installing XP or a modern desktop Linux is more likely to find bugs on the Linux distro. Keep in mind that I am talking about basic desktop usage here, in other environment the situation can turn around completely. No matter what operating system you run, it is also a matter of configuration. At my work we have a customized Windows XP installations made by the IT department, and they are far less stable than my home setup made by myself. So your mileage may vary.

In making a Windows vs. Linux comparison we have to be distinct that what are we actually comparing. Linux comes in all shapes and sizes, and actually Linux only refers to the kernel itself, while various Windows editions have been released as well. Therefore we are comparing performance of systems designed for similar use cases, focusing on modern desktop Linux distributions in comparison to Windows XP and Vista.

When Linux fans are ranting about Windows XP’s performance, they tend to forget that it was released back in 2001. This means that it works with the hardware of that time,which of course were very modest in comparison to the PCs today. Minimum system requirements were 233MHz CPU and 64 megabytes of RAM. From my first hand experience I can tell that you can run XP on 233MHz CPU, but the 64MB RAM is not enough. 128 MB is sufficient however, I have installed and used XP on several occasions with such hardware.

On system boot the WinXP consumes around 60-80 MB of RAM, and with a little tweaking you can go below 70. Now if we start comparing to modern desktop Linux distributions introduced in 2007, their average memory consumption after system boot to Gnome or KDE desktop seems to be around 120-170 megabytes. No matter how much you like Linux, don’t come telling me that your fancy desktop distro is easier on the resources than Windows XP. Of course there are special light weight Linux distros that can achieve this goal, but that is not the point here.

So obviously Windows XP will fly if you use it with modern powerful hardware. Of course you can make it slower by installing crappy software like Norton’s security suite, and making every possible application to start on system boot and stay lurking in the system tray, but that is your fault and not Windows’. On the other hand, if one has processing power and memory to burn, Linux is much better at making use of these resources, especially RAM. Linux consumes all available RAM for useful purposes such as caching, which improves the performance.

Windows Vista on the other hand is a different story, and I have very little experience using it, as I try to avoid it as long as I can. The system requirements have grown to 800MHz and 512 MB of RAM, but the figures are seriously optimistic. I have installed Vista to a brand new budged PC with 1GB of RAM (can’t recall the CPU speed) and it was crawling. My friend had it running on a HTPC with only 512MB RAM, and I can’t say it was comfortably usable. In order to get fancy 3-D Aero desktop running, you really need a modern and a rather high performing computer. Now if you compare Vista to modern desktop Linux distros, it really makes the latter look good. With Vista’s minimum requirements, you can get nice performance out of Ubuntu, openSUSE, PCLOS or whatever comparable distribution, and you most likely can even enable the fancy 3-D desktop visuals. After system boot you will still have more than half of the 512MB RAM available for the applications.

So definitely Windows XP is less resource hungry than typical desktop Linux of today. On the other hand, Linux can make better use of your system resources if you have plenty. Vista is a different story as it has turned out to be a resource hog, and is easily outperformed by Linux distros.

So what is the verdict – is it true that Linux is faster than Windows? Yes it is, especially when we are comparing the latest editions, which means that we are looking at Vista and not XP.

I have been using computers since the early 80’s and they have been PCs since 1987. I am rather advanced Windows users, and I have used all of them extensively, except for the new Windows Vista which I have barely tried. I have always had an eye for Linux and I had my first touch with it the early 90’s and I have spoken with Mr. Linus Torvalds himself on the phone. I have tried Linux distros as a desktop every now and then over the years, but my experiments have always failed and I have returned to Windows. So I am a real novice in Linux, although I have learned a LOT during this year, even though I know my way around computers very well in general. I will not go in-depth in this article. I simply want to bring out my personal and totally subjective overlook of the currect desktop Linux distributions.

The best Linux distributions for the year 2007:

The winner: openSUSE 10.3

openSUSE is closest to a commercial quality operating system among all Linux distributions. From installer to first boot it has professional design, visuals and it offers a good balance in between the ease of use and configurability. openSUSE has traditionally been considered as an KDE oriented distribution, but interestingly they also have the best Gnome offering as of today. No matter which you pick, you will get very pleasant visuals out-of-the-box. YaST2 offers good tools for various configuration and administration tasks, and make a Windows refugee feel like home. One-click-Install adds simplicity to certain installation procedures, such as Compiz Fusion or restricted formats.

However openSUSE is not perfect. The packet management (Zypper) is much better than the old ZMD (openSUSE 10.2 and older), but still a pain in the butt in comparison to Apt and Synaptic. it is slow, the GUI is awkward and dependency issues can occur. Luckily one can install Smart package management as well, which seems to be a much better choice. The release also has/had a handful of nasty bugs, but updates are rolling at a good pace. The installation seems to have issues with computers that have both IDE and SATA soft RAID hard drives installed – it does detect and even suggests mount points for Windows RAID partitions, but for some reason the installation of GRUB fails. If someone knows a fix for this, other that disconnecting hard drives or disabling SATA from BIOS, please let me know. I think it is a real show stopper and such an error should not occur in a stable release.

The 2nd: Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

In many aspects the strength of Ubuntu does not seem to be the distribution itself, but the popularity of this distribution, which results in a lively community. If you have any issues with your setup, then Google is your friend and you can be almost certain to find a solution. Ubuntu is so popular that at least all of my issues have been reproduced by someone else and help was found – I can not say the same for any other distribution!

In general Ubuntu works well out of the box. It uses a very basic implementation of Gnome combined with an ugly orange/brown theme. For some reason I always find the font rendering of Ubuntu worse than with openSUSE (KDE or Gnome), even with MS Fonts installed. Ubuntu offers an excellent and well working starting point, but I presume that a lot of people want to change some things to make it look and work better. Luckily in the Linux world one can change and modify just about everything as one sees fit.

In terms of software quality, the Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy seems to be a bit rushed. I was able to find a number of issues in the desktop environment itself, and the developers have been rolling out updates very frequently (which is a good thing). If you rule out the benefits of popularity, I really couldn’t figure out what is the Ubuntu hype all about? It is a good distribution for sure, but what really made it stand out from the crowd?

The 3rd: Mandriva One 2008

Mandriva, formerly known as Mandrake, was one of the first distributions with a mission to make Linux a user friendly desktop environment. This distro has a long and colourful background with it’s ups and downs, but since 2007.x versions, they have been making a strong comeback.

For me the hardware detection of Mandriva was superior. It installed worked on (old) PCs that Ubuntu would not boot on and it is the ONLY distribution to correctly configure Compiz 3D desktop on my Thinkpad (ATI RV-250) out-of-the-box. It has nice configuration tools for managing the computer – not as extensive as openSUSE YaST, but very user friendly. The over all look and feel of the operating system is clean and polished – quite professional. I have only used the KDE edition, but based on what I have read their Gnome offering is decent as well. So in many aspects Mandriva seems much better than Ubuntu!

But the issue is that while Ubuntu has a great community support, and openSUSE has some (and they are working on to improve), the user community of Mandriva is almost non-existing. If you have problems, then who do you ask if nobody uses it? Well of course there are a lot of Mandriva users, and even commercial customers, but really the difference is evident when you are on a search for information. Also the software selection and availability is much smaller than with the above two (especially Ubuntu). Mandriva has also slipped some bugs to the release, even though the ones I found are minor, but the frequency of released updates has been a lot slower than with the above two.

If you feel like exploring, here are some others to try:

LinuxMint 4.0: Mint is basically just a modified Ubuntu, which improves the visuals and provides a lot of non-free stuff out-of-the-box. This means that all multimedia formats etc. will work out of the box. Mint is more or less a one man show with no clear road maps or upgrade paths in between versions, which makes is non-suitable for professional use. It is still an attractive choice for your bedroom PC, kids or whenever you want a setup that needs minimal configuration.

PCLinuxOS 2007 (PCLOS): PCLinuxOS is a fork of Mandriva, which has a small but fanatic fan groub. Like Mint does for Ubuntu, PCLOS also provides a lot of non-free stuff for the default install. Besides configuration, PCLOS has also changed the package management to use Synaptic, so the changes go deeper than surface. Like Mint, PCLOS is a more or less one man show, but suitable for many secondary uses.

SimplyMEPIS 7.0: Mepis is literally a one man show, that used to be based on Ubuntu, but the just recently released 7.0 is built from Debian Etch. Mepis comes with a very nice and clean KDE setup, and binary compatibility with Debian gives it some credibility. It is an exotic alternative to try, if you do not like Ubuntu – at least the KDE implementation is much better than in Kubuntu. While Mepis has been around for few years, I would not choose it for business usage due to obvious reasons.

This article was written using openSUSE 10.3.