Finding the right distro can be a challenge. Over the last two years the various distros have become more mature and professional. You can’t go wrong with any of the major distributions, really, so it comes down to a matter of personal taste. I focused on three distros when researching and here is what I found. YMMV.
My criteria for selecting a distro was pretty simple – it has to work. As far as I am concerned, an OS is an appliance – it either is a help or a hindrance. I did not elect to use Linux over some religious or dogmatic belief about what OS is better. They are all unbelievable engineering achievements: Windows, OS/X and Linux. I went Linux because Eclipse runs so much better on Linux than Windows – pure and simple.
No OS is a pure unless you buy it installed so a major decision point was community and mind share – could I make the OS run on my hardware easily? Will it run VMWare Player and VirtualBox easily? I still need Windows, so VM support is critical. Support for real-time kernel for recording is a nice to have, but not critical. The question really came down to could I make it work easily and could I easily find help for the things that were broken.
Fedora Core
Fedora does not have the eye candy of the others, but it promises latest bits. It installed quickly and somewhat easily but immediately had issues with multi-monitor support on my laptop (HP dv7 with an Intel video driver).
I went to the Fedora forums and pretty much decided against Fedora after a couple of hours. The people were generally helpful, but most responses dropped to the CLI, were complicated, and seemed in some cases to be undocumented. It seems that the “bleeding edge” nature of Fedora equates to a lot of maintenance. It looks like a great distro if you like to spend a lot of time fiddling knobs and really dialing in your experience, but that’s not me. I like my OS’s to call less attention to themselves, TBH.
OpenSuSE
I had to look at this. As the best known Mono host, evaluating OpenSuSE was really a requirement. The support model is professional and well documented and the organization behind it has a well established track record.
First, I have to say this. The Plasma shell (KDE) is stunning – without a doubt the most beautiful shell I have ever seen. Seriously, the KDE deserves team deserves some hefty kudos for the look of the shell.
It installed without a hitch, the community is excellent, and when it finished, you had a lizard and lot of eye candy. Unfortunately for me, the experience of living with KDE does not live up to the promise of the eye candy.
I have had this issue with KDE before, but had not looked at it in a while. KDE’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness: there is something for everything. The control over the UI is extraordinarily granular, but it is spread out in a lot of places and there is very little integration. The overall experience lacks cohesion. Maybe that’s not fair – it doesn’t feel cohesive.
Still, I could have lived with that. You set it up once and then work with it right? But there was one deal killer: the network management widget. A functional and flexible network manager is no longer just nice to have – on my laptop I connect to multiple different networks - wired, wireless, VPN – regularly and the KDE manager is just not up to snuff. I know you can wire up the Gnome manager in KDE, but I would really have preferred to stick with one desktop’s dependencies.
This failing of KDE is shocking considering how much thought went into the rest of the experience. But ultimately it is a metaphor for the KDE desktop: each individual little tool is a gem and usable, but taken as a whole, all of these little gems add up to an impression of fussy inefficiency. I found the desktop intruded on my workflow and that was something I could not live with.
I considered putting Gnome on, if just to keep access to yast which is an awesome tool. But this was starting to get complicated and other distros default to Gnome.
You could accuse me of not giving OpenSuSE a fair shot and there may some truth to that, I plan to investigate it again with Gnome down the road, if only to gain access to yast.
Ubuntu
10.4 LTS is immediately friendly and warm and fuzzy. The Wubi installer is a stroke of genius. Ubuntu really makes it easy to adopt, making all the usual barriers transparent. The installer handles dual boot seamlessly (I’ll cover this in detail in another post) and the whole experience was flawless.
I guess I just prefer Gnome at the end of the day. Once I got rid of the bottom panel and set up my top panel, I felt comfortable. Gnome is solid and has excellent applets. Ubuntu’s Software Center and default menu makes it dead easy to get the system where you need it. The experience is cohesive, integrated and friendly.
Yast has always been a great tool, but Debian has done some fabulous work with apt-get and aptitude and package management is no longer something that makes my feet itchy. It is not flawless – no OS is – but I think I prefer these flaws to the others.
And special attention needs to be called out to Ubuntu’s excellent community and wiki.
In the next few posts in this topic, I will cover some useful software and tips for living with Ubuntu.
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