Talk:Which Distribution
From Grokdoc
I hope you'll allow direct input from a newbie. As I explained to PJ, we're taking a look at Linux anyway, and I'm willing to serve as a "guinea pig", to give you my direct and unvarnished impressions of moving to Linux. I am deliberately *not* going to use any of the information becoming available here on GrokDoc.
Background: we are a software company using Windows. We all used Unix back in our student days, and liked it - but we were purely users, not administrators. For various reasons, we are interested in having a look at Linux within our company. In a nutshell: we are Linux newbies, but still a lot more technically competent that your average user.
One more comment, before I begin my tale: we have to earn our living, and cannot afford to spend weeks fiddling. If I can't get Linux installed, up and running using a few scattered hours over the next couple of weeks, or else it's not ready for prime-time. I say this in reply to another poster who says "believe me, the first couple of installations is going to take days". That is just not acceptable.
Ok. the very first step. I've heard of RedHat, Suse, Knoppix, Mandrake. I'm sure there are other distributions out there. But I've no idea which one is best suited to our needs. It ought to run on our hardware without a lot of hunting for drivers, etc. This is reputed to be a mess with most Linux distributions. Also, I don't have time to waste doing lots of detailed administration - and this is also reputed to be a problem with many distributions. At the same time, we wants a semi-normal version, in case we should decide to change later. I've heard, for example, that RedHat does everything their own way, and that moving between RedHat and other distributions is difficult.
Obvious answer: ask google. So I type in "linux distribution review comparison". This comes up with three promising links. However, it turns out that
- all of the articles are out-of-date.
- although they try to avoid technical talk, they fail. There are still references to things I've never heard of. And I'm technical. How is your average non-technical user supposed to know the important of GNOME, or apt-get, or any of the other myriad acronyms.
- none of the articles does a good job of comparing the distributions. It's useless to talk about how well/poorly the installation process on distribution A is, while discussing something completely different on distribution B. In the end, the same points have to be evaluated on all distributions.
What one needs is one of the comparative charts often seen in computer magazines, rating each distribution on the same points, and making a side-by-side comparison easy.
What definitely ought to be rated - comparatively across all installations:
hardware auto-detection (yes/no) range of hardware supported (rate on a scale) automated configuration - does it "run out of the box" (rate on a scale) ease of making necessary configuration changes, i.e., language, currency, firewall, etc, etc (rate on a scale) stability quality of documentation quality of user interface included office suite ease of obtaining a free download cost for a licensed version included software (this is done well on www.distrowatch.com - see below) ...and probably lots more...
- - - - -
After reading these articles, I'm left with the impression that - 2 or 3 years ago - I should have gone for Mandrake, and as a second choice SuSE. More usefully, one of the articles mentions the site http://www.distrowatch.com/.
So I visited http://www.distrowatch.com/. Clearly up-to-date, and a click on "Major Distributions" brings up a lot of good information. But detail is sadly lacking, and it is still the case that different attributes are mentioned for different distributions, making comparison difficult. I still want that table!
Still, based on this site, I choose the following candidates:
Xandros: sounds really good, but I wonder (and this is where a comparative table is important) - does "user-friendly" also include hardware auto-detection, and general configuration? Or does it only refer to how the OS works after it has been successfully installed?
MEPIS: A very appealing description. Sounds like this one is designed to eliminate most or all of the configuration work, which is exactly what a newbie needs. I can live with a less-than-pretty default look-and-feel.
Mandrake: while there are some negative comments about Mandrake, it is clearly a much more established distribution with a lot more documentation and support available.
Downloading distributions for comparison
My next step is to download the free versions of these distributions, so that I can try them out and compare them. According to DistroWatch, the all offer a free downloadable version. One I decide which one I like, I'll buy the full package. But first I want to have a look at them...
The MEPIS web-site makes a terrible impression. It's difficult to find any links to documentation, difficult to find download links. Very amateurish. While there are free download mirrors, the ones I try are incredibly slow - the estimated download time is measured in days!
The Mandrake web-site is better. But it's gone the way of many older sites, and gotten overloaded. Moreover, their "latest" documentation is for version 9.2, when the download links are for version 10 - I'll have to hope that up-to-date documentation is included in the distribution itself. The first download mirror is ridiculously slow. But the next one mostly works: I had hoped to schedule get all the downloads running, and let it complete overnight. But for some reason I'm only able to download one file at a time.
The Xandros web-site is the prettiest of the bunch, but I can't find any download link. The best bet was "Support:Downloads", but this brings up a knowledge-base search. I go back to www.distrowatch.org, where there is a direct link to the download page. But I find that I either must use BitTorrent (why do I want to install a back-door program on my system?), or pay for the download. Doesn't look like I'll be downloading this one...
Your average user would have given up hours ago. Free downloads are hidden, or do not work, or aren't free. One of the big arguments for open-source software is the ability to "try before you buy". But the distributors make this difficult or impossible.
I'm stubborn, I'll keep going. On the second day of downloading, I've given up finding a free download of Xandros. The MEPIS download has timed out yet again - when I resume it, I see that I'm 3% done - at this rate, it may finish next month. On the other hand, I have 2 of the 3 Mandrake CDs, and the 3rd one is in progress. So it looks like I'll be trying out Mandrake next week.
Frankly, the initial impression left by this really stinks.
