Review of New Distros

When the new ver­sion of Ubuntu comes out, I tend to install it right away, but always seper­ate, never over the old install (I’ve been burned too many times by try­ing to upgrade in place). But when Karmic came out, I found it seri­ously wanting.

So I decided to go dis­tro hop­ping to see what else I could find. Three other major dis­tros released new verisons recently, so I thought I’d give them a go. I tried out:

• Man­driva 2010
• Open­SUSE 11.2
• Fedora 12

After spend­ing a week or so hop­ping between the three, I decided Ubuntu’s set the bar so high for Linux desk­top dis­tros that I might not have a choice but go back to the Krappy Koala–even with its bugs, Ubuntu is the best desk­top dis­tro out there.

Man­driva 2010

I enjoyed my time in Man­driva. I rememe­ber when I first got into Linux, Man­driva was one of the few dis­tros I had heard about, or rather, its for­mer incar­na­tion, Man­drake. With a new ver­sion just released, I thought it was worth a go. Over­all, it seemed like a nice, well-put together dis­tro with the best hard­ware sup­port of any­thing I tried. But being RPM-based, the pack­age man­age­ment tools just didn’t feel right to me.

Good

Per­for­mance on Man­driva was very snappy. The default art­work was very nice, and the installer han­dled my nVidia card very well: as I booted, it threw up the nVidia splash to let me know the card was loaded (which it did w/o me hav­ing to fight to get it to work)

Bad

Text ren­der­ing sucked, par­tic­u­larly in Fire­fox. This seemed to be a com­mon thread among all the distros–fonts in Fire­fox look like crap and mak­ing changes in the Gnome appear­ance dia­log to sub­hint­ing, etc, seemed to have no affect what­so­ever on any­thing dis­played in Firefox.

Pack­age man­age­ment was mysterious–the GUI installer searched poorly and didn’t seem to be able to show me what repos I had installed. Installing codecs, etc, was opaque–I don’t know if I ever installed xvid prop­erly. Too, the com­mu­nity and doc­u­men­ta­tion was small and not par­tic­u­larly up to date. I could find infor­ma­tion about old ver­sions of Man­driva, but now new.

Open­SUSE

I spent a lot of time in Open­SUSE as well. I was look­ing for­ward to try­ing it–I had heard their imple­men­ta­tion of KDE4 was the best. The first time I tried it, I only installed KDE4 and ended up hav­ing some strange prob­lems with my wire­less. I could con­nect to the AP and ping my LAN, but I couldn’t hit the internet.

Later I installed Gnome and added KDE4 later–networking seemed to work fine.

Open­SUSE seems like a good dis­tro, but as one of the biggest dis­tros, it has to stack up to Ubuntu, and while there’s clearly some thought put towards design in Open­SUSE, the tools aren’t pol­ished enough from a user perspective.

Good

The over­all theme for Open­SUSE 11.2’s brand­ing looks cool. The ten­drils might be a lit­tle 2007, but in their defense, they’re try­ing some­thing new and cool, and they get kudos for tak­ing the risk. Also, the included sounds are very ele­gant. Most supris­ing to me is that press­ing the win­dows key actu­ally brings up the menu (tell me again why I can’t do this in Ubuntu?)

Bad

Like in Man­driva, text ren­der­ing sucked–antialiasing just looked weird and didn’t seem to have any affect on text fire­fox, which is a jag­gie night­maer. Pack­age man­age­ment is also a bit weird. The one-click-to-install-from-web thing is cool, but I like the idea of adding a repos­i­tory so much.

Their imple­men­ta­tion of KDE4 is cool-it looks great and runs snap­pily. But while the KDE4 devs might have a really inter­est­ing new metaphor to replace the desk­top metaphor we’ve been stuck with for the last 20 years, it’s really hard to tell because KDE4 is still bro­ken in lots of lit­tle ways (two exam­ples: the twit­ter wid­get never showed any tweets and Fire­fox wouldn’t load gmail or twit­ter in KDE (worked fine in Gnome)). I’m just not going to stick around to try to fig­ure out the metaphor when my browser won’t load my email.

The main menu thing in Gnome is just as bad–it seems to offer to search for you, but launch­ing appli­ca­tions via it is vir­tu­ally impossible–instead of launch­ing an ap, it brings up a search of lots of eso­teric con­fig files. The installer wasn’t bad, but the par­ti­tioner could only be described as cryp­tic. Also, set­ting the root pass­word in the installer was weird–I some­how set my user and root pass­words to the same thing.

Fedora 12

I down­loaded Fedora 12 before I knew it was out. To be hon­est, I mis­read the release date some­where, assumed it was already out and down­loaded it the day it released.

Fedora was the clean­est, most pro­fes­sional of all the dis­tos I tried. Whereas Man­driva feels very slick and friendly the same way KDE 3.5 used to, and Open­SUSE feels quirky, classy yet unpol­ished, Fedora feels very lean and Gnome-esque. That lean Gnome phi­los­o­phy isn’t quite my style, but I can appre­ci­ate the idea and Fedora pulls it off well.

Unfor­tu­natley, my expe­ri­ence with Fedora ended in dis­as­ter rather quickly. Unlike the other dis­tros, Fedora didn’t seem to have any good way to install my nVidia card. I fol­lowed some instruc­tions I found on a forum. Upon reboot, X wouldn’t start. Next dis­tro please.

Good

The installer was nice, as was the out of the box expe­ri­ence. Very clean/lean system.

Bad

Fedora’s installer found/installed Win­dows 7 in grub, but not Jaunty? Explain to me again why a one Linux sys­tem can’t see another? This kind of stuff has been work­ing great in Ubuntu for at least a year now, prob­a­bly longer, and Fedora can’t inte­grate some­thing sim­liar and a bit for stable/solid? Of course, not too long later, cryp­tic online instruci­tons about installing the nVidia dri­vers borked my bango, so I called it quits.

Karmic Koala

All this dis­tro hop­ping was kicked off by the bad taste Karmic left in my mouth. I’ll say this, after this expe­ri­ence, I’ve found I’m an Ubuntu fan boy. Karmic was (is?) a buggy pile of crap. But the tools Ubuntu has put together for desk­top man­age­ment put every­body else to shame. The jockey-gtk tool, ie. Restricted Dri­ver Man­ager, alone makes most other dis­tros look bad.

On top of that, the com­mu­nity, doc­u­men­ta­tion and sup­port behind Ubuntu is so much stronger than any of the other dis­tros. When you google for help on Linux, most often, you find infor­ma­tion about solv­ing the prob­lem on Ubuntu. You don’t find that for the other distros–nobody offers solu­tions that say “su -” and “urpmi install conky”.

The depth of the Ubuntu repos­i­to­ries kicks the other dis­tros in the can, and what’s not in the repos­i­to­ries, or what isn’t up to date, prob­a­bly has a PPA, where you can always get the most up to date ver­sion of a package.

Good

The new PPA sup­port is genius. The doc­u­men­ta­tion and devel­op­ment behind Ubuntu is also great. Text looks good and things are inte­grated well.

Bad

Gwib­ber was bro­ken. Flash was bro­ken. OSD-notify was bro­ken. That’s a good chunk of every­thing I use on a daily basis. That was enough to kick me on this big adven­ture in the first place.

Final Sum­mary

After a week or two on other dis­tros, I’m just about ready to give Karmic another try. Maybe by now, they’ve ironed some of the bugs out. Even if they haven’t, it just might be worth it.

Clearly, this isn’t a fair review–I began biased toward Ubuntu (although hat­ing Karmic) and my frus­tra­tion with other dis­tros might have some­thing to do with their refusal to act exactly the way I expected them to (ie. the Ubuntu way).

Still, while Ubuntu has a long way to go to catch up with Mac’s pol­ish and inte­gra­tion and Win­dows’ ubiq­uity and breadth of soft­ware, they’ve taken Linux a long way and set the bar pretty dang high for the other dis­tros. Fedora, Nov­ell and every­one else have a lot to live up to.