masinick
Linux Guru
Joined: 03 Apr 2024
Posts: 8595
Location: Concord, NH
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 Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2024 6:37 pm Post subject: The State of the Distributions: Popular Distro Comparison |
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Kernel News has a pretty comprehensive, general overview of the four most common base distributions: Mandriva, OpenSUSE, Fedora, and Ubuntu. The article begins at The State of Distributions, going through an introduction, then proceeds to the installation routines at Distribution Installation, Managing the distributions at Distribution Management, the available software and enabling the Multi Media support at Software Management, a brief look at the available desktop environments at Desktop Survey, and finally the conclusions, summarizing the Pros and Cons of each distribution along with some final thoughts at Pros and Cons Conclusion
I think that it is a worthwhile read. What do you think?
Last edited by masinick on Tue Mar 23, 2024 3:14 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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masinick
Linux Guru
Joined: 03 Apr 2024
Posts: 8595
Location: Concord, NH
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| Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2024 3:36 pm Post subject: I found it very interesting; here's why |
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| Germ wrote: | | Definitely interesting reading. |
Someone else does not find it interesting. I wonder what would interest them? I'm only interested in finding out if the topic of interest would be somehow related to discussing the interests and preferences of Linux distributions. Personally, I see value in the diversity of distributions, though there is a lot of overlap. What's useful to me is that certain distributions are well optimized for certain kinds of work. Something like a sidux is well optimized for experimenting and testing out the latest software, but it would be a waste of time for someone who just wants a really simple system. Something like SimplyMEPIS, Linux Mint, PCLinuxOS, and to many, Ubuntu would be of interest to someone who does not want to go too deep into analyzing the software - at least not yet. Ubuntu tends to be particularly popular, yet it tends to frustrate the intermediate to advanced users, who seem to want more and tend to move on, yet many of them still try it out repeatedly.
Something on the order of Mandriva does a good job of fitting in somewhere in between. It may not be ideal for everything, but it tends to be reasonably easy to handle, reasonably current, and it comes in a variety of variations that can be further tailored to suit particular needs. Other vendors, such as SUSE with OpenSUSE, SLES and SLED, offer multiple alternatives, as does Red Hat with RHEL Server, Enterprise Desktop, and Fedora. I could go on and on - and I have many times in other threads.
The point is that this diversity does seem to have value. While it may frustrate and confuse some people with too many choices, confound others who are looking for more refinement and better documentation or some particular feature, the fact that there are choices allows developers and integrators to experiment to find the right mix for various situations.
Sometimes it may appear that all of this is a waste of time. Just about when we start getting tired of all the practically identical variations, someone comes up with a twist that leads to an entire new category, and every so often, leads to a completely different computing style.
Larry Ellison at Oracle, for at least a decade, had been trying to establish lightweight client server computing with the core data residing on servers, presumably running large back end Oracle databases, but he got nowhere with that initiative for years.
Yet others kept fooling around with such things. Gael Duval left Mandriva to explore completely different ways to express a desktop computing model, using elements of virtualization, back end servers and networked computing.
Google really seems to be making headway by going the smartphone route first with Android, then pushing a very similar idea into netbooks and even desktop systems with the combination of Android for the smartphone, ChromeOS for the netbooks, Google Gadgets for a variety of networked devices, and Google Docs for distributed communication and documentation that can be carried anywhere remotely.
If we did not have much diversity, how many of these models could be explored - and even more so, what if we did not have shared, open, widely available source code software to add, remove, modify, and extend the software that we've known, experiment, and little by little, make incremental improvements, that over a few decades, represent huge advancements in the state of the art? |
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jester
Sr. Member
Joined: 19 Apr 2024
Posts: 1165
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| Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2024 3:55 pm Post subject: |
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I voted interesting earlier, but did not comment - dead tired
What I saw was confirmation of Fedora as relatively 'bleeding edge' (see the Software section and compare version numbers); but I also saw that Ubuntu's 'reduced complexity' approach was seen both positively but also as a limitation.
I thought SUSE might get a higher rating for it's polished UI (other similar reviews have done so); Mandriva's appraisal was also interesting in that the authors admitted to having 'neglected' the distro for a while (guilty here too) but came out quite positive
I'm surprised that Ubuntu's venture into 'the cloud' aka Ubuntu One didn't warrant a mention
It's interesting that no two reviewers or reviewing panels come up with the same conclusion; e.g. we reviewed Win xx, OSX 10.x.x and linux distro ABC and we liked, or we reviewed subsets of any of those and we liked, etc.
Everyone or every group seems to come at the review with a different set of priorities. In this case they went with some 'brand name distros' and a defined set of reviewing points, which is not a bad approach, but they still came up with different conclusions than other reviews of the same distros
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