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This month issue of TUX magazine they went with a distro smackdown which review many linux distros and came up with Mandriva as the top dawg of the desktop distros. I have used Mandriva almost exclusively, I really never felt the need to go distro hopping. I really never saw the point since most users use apps not distros. Still I became very confortable using it as opposed to SuSE or Fedora which seem either too comboluted sometimes or to raw.

Interesting enough Mandriva is also heavily used in Latin America and Spain not sure about the reason but it always seem to have a very easy way to run. At the same time many linux gurus really critizise mandriva speed as being just slow compared to Debian and Slackware.

In all honesty I did experience a slow mandriva from time to time and even a buggy mandriva with X giving me issues. However apps run as they should, they are very well put out of the box, with some exceptions like Kolab server. But in the end Mandriva really make me productive on linux.

TUX went on reviewing Mepis as another really nice distro as well as Linspire, Debian, Ubuntu The ease of use, the freedom factor and the installation process were key to the decision and I think even if mandriva is not the best, it is the better balanced.

The article does reaise some questions that we talked before as if Ubuntu is really ready for the desktop being a distro that doesnt include some of the key software for good browsing experience on the net (Flash, Java etc).

And also how far can hardware support go on the next hardware revolution (once Vista raise the bar on hardware requirement and new chipsets are out in the market). I think on one side Linux is great supporting hardware, but most of this is old and will quickly be obsolete once Vista ships out and most manufacturers start selling their new generation of hardware.

Will Linux be ready to run on the latest and greatest?
What about laptop? DRM, and all that crap?

How long will it take before you are locked out of ur favorite porn site because they encode to Win10codecs? or used even more ActiveX to get into your bank account.

The article does reaise some questions that we talked before as if Ubuntu is really ready for the desktop being a distro that doesnt include some of the key software for good browsing experience on the net (Flash, Java etc).

These are always available for Ubuntu.

Not out of the box. Which is to the point not good for the end user.

Jza wrote:Not out of the box. Which is to the point not good for the end user.

Well, Ubuntu can't include non-free applications, and codecs in their main repository due to licensing, but any new user can easily enable the Multiverse, or Restricted repositories in Synaptic with a few clicks.

Jza wrote:Interesting enough Mandriva is also heavily used in Latin America and Spain not sure about the reason but it always seem to have a very easy way to run.

That's because Connectiva (the iva in Mandriva) is a South American company, and spent a lot of time, money and effort focusing on that market.

The issue over Flash, Java, MP3, codecs is not something that is Ubuntu-specific by any means, although it is often used as a stick to beat them. None of the freely available distributions have this, because of the license fees involved.

mrben wrote:None of the freely available distributions have this, because of the license fees involved.

That's not true actually, if you go download the so called "evaluation edition" of SUSE Linux 10.0, or buy the retail box, you get a distro which include Flash and Java set up by default and RealPlayer included for MP3 playback, here you may start to bash RealPlayer, but what guys like the amaroK folks can do is that they can use the Real engine to playback stuff, and by doing by, have support for everything that Real supports, including MP3. I think SUSE 10.1 is gonn have this a little more tweaked/polished out of the box.

Tsuroerusu wrote:

mrben wrote:None of the freely available distributions have this, because of the license fees involved.

That's not true actually, if you go download the so called "evaluation edition" of SUSE Linux 10.0, or buy the retail box, you get a distro which include Flash and Java set up by default and RealPlayer included for MP3 playback, here you may start to bash RealPlayer, but what guys like the amaroK folks can do is that they can use the Real engine to playback stuff, and by doing by, have support for everything that Real supports, including MP3. I think SUSE 10.1 is gonn have this a little more tweaked/polished out of the box.

You're forgetting MEPIS, Vector, and Slackware. There's actually alot of distros that include MP3, Java, and Flash out of the box, but you can't hold anything against Ubuntu for adhering to the Free Software Foundation.

Wally Balljacker wrote:

Tsuroerusu wrote:

mrben wrote:None of the freely available distributions have this, because of the license fees involved.

That's not true actually, if you go download the so called "evaluation edition" of SUSE Linux 10.0, or buy the retail box, you get a distro which include Flash and Java set up by default and RealPlayer included for MP3 playback, here you may start to bash RealPlayer, but what guys like the amaroK folks can do is that they can use the Real engine to playback stuff, and by doing by, have support for everything that Real supports, including MP3. I think SUSE 10.1 is gonn have this a little more tweaked/polished out of the box.

You're forgetting MEPIS, Vector, and Slackware. There's actually alot of distros that include MP3, Java, and Flash out of the box, but you can't hold anything against Ubuntu for adhering to the Free Software Foundation.

Well, Slackware and Vector certainly aren't distros I'd recommend to brand new Linux users, let alone be my mom, I know they include some of this stuff. I think it's cool that Ubuntu likes to keep their distro free of proprietary stuff and certainly for servers I don't want that blob crud in there, but for a desktop, and especially for a new user's desktop, which is what Ubuntu is targeting after all, at the present day, a completely Free distro, just don't work for new users, because they won't have all the stuff they're used to from Windows, and that will mark Linux as a bad system in their mind and they'll never try it again and go back to Windows, a completely proprietary operating system. I think it's better to have a Free OS, with some proprietary plugins included for the sake of beginners and/or the average Joe who may not even know how to install crap on freaking Windows.

I saw the demos of Fedora 5 at the LWE and it looked pretty nice. I installed it over the weekend on a spare drive and it works pretty well. Yum is still sometimes very slow but it has gotten a lot better. Also Gnome 2.14 is very responsive in Fedora. Nice job. Unfortunately there a bunch of tweaks and setups you have to do to get flash, dvd playback, mp3, java, etc.. working. This is pretty much true of most of the community distros. Automatix is a fantastic tool to get this stuff installed on Ubuntu. It lets you get all non-Free stuff installed very quickly. Fedora could definitely use something similiar to Automatix. I'm really looking to forward to the next release of Suse. After talking to the Novell/OpenSuse people I definitely want to give it a run on my system as soon as the new version is officially released.

Patrick wrote:I saw the demos of Fedora 5 at the LWE and it looked pretty nice. I installed it over the weekend on a spare drive and it works pretty well. Yum is still sometimes very slow but it has gotten a lot better. Also Gnome 2.14 is very responsive in Fedora. Nice job. Unfortunately there a bunch of tweaks and setups you have to do to get flash, dvd playback, mp3, java, etc.. working. This is pretty much true of most of the community distros. Automatix is a fantastic tool to get this stuff installed on Ubuntu. It lets you get all non-Free stuff installed very quickly. Fedora could definitely use something similiar to Automatix. I'm really looking to forward to the next release of Suse. After talking to the Novell/OpenSuse people I definitely want to give it a run on my system as soon as the new version is officially released.

Yeah - at this point I give anyone who I give an ubuntu cd a link to automatix too. It's great for people who either can't or don't want to figure out how to comb the net for essential non-free stuff.

Sorry - I probably should have made a little subclause:

Free downloadable distributions that are tied to commercial entities tend not to include the stuff because they run the risk of lawsuits. Small distros run the same risk, but being non-commercial are less likely to get sued.

The point still stands - it's not as simple as saying "x distro sucks because they don't include x proprietary software". (Which is why proprietary software sucks the big one).

I'm not saying Ubuntu is perfect (it's not), but I hate it when reviewers place high value on things that are a) identifiably not the fault of the distro, and b) not specific to one particular distro.

Meh. Rant over.

Patrick wrote:I saw the demos of Fedora 5 at the LWE and it looked pretty nice. I installed it over the weekend on a spare drive and it works pretty well. Yum is still sometimes very slow but it has gotten a lot better. Also Gnome 2.14 is very responsive in Fedora. Nice job. Unfortunately there a bunch of tweaks and setups you have to do to get flash, dvd playback, mp3, java, etc.. working. This is pretty much true of most of the community distros.

I'm running Fedora Core 5 on my Mac mini, and it freaking rocks, really awesome job from the Fedora guys, smooth and 0wnz OS X in terms of performance and speed.

Patrick wrote:Unfortunately there a bunch of tweaks and setups you have to do to get flash, dvd playback, mp3, java, etc.. working. This is pretty much true of most of the community distros.

Well, I found it to be very easy on Fedora, you just add in the Livna repository and go install MPlayer and so forth with all it's codec dependencies, took me about 30 mins.

Patrick wrote:I'm really looking to forward to the next release of Suse. After talking to the Novell/OpenSuse people I definitely want to give it a run on my system as soon as the new version is officially released.

Music to my ears Pat, it "should" be out by April 25th, unless of course that it's delayed again because of that damn package manager they had to put in there at a late beta stage

mrben wrote:Sorry - I probably should have made a little subclause:

Free downloadable distributions that are tied to commercial entities tend not to include the stuff because they run the risk of lawsuits. Small distros run the same risk, but being non-commercial are less likely to get sued.

The point still stands - it's not as simple as saying "x distro sucks because they don't include x proprietary software". (Which is why proprietary software sucks the big one).

I'm not saying Ubuntu is perfect (it's not), but I hate it when reviewers place high value on things that are a) identifiably not the fault of the distro, and b) not specific to one particular distro.

Meh. Rant over.

For once I completely agree with you man

Something I think Ubuntu could do though would be to include some installer programs so they just tell the users where to go download Flash and dump it into a directory and run a program that will checksum it and do all the hastle. Kaffeine does this I think.

Mandriva??