Edgy Penguins - CompuRants - Which Distro Is Best?

Which Distro Is Best?

To take the mystery out of this piece, let's get my opinion out of the way right off the bat. Fedora Core is the clear favorite in the non-continguous territories I call my home and office. That said, let me share my thoughts on why I have come to think this way and on my experience with other distros.

I should mention that I am not including distributions such as Xandros and Lindows, which, despite being quite user-friendly and more Windows compatible than most, are not available in any cost-free form and charge you for any additional software you choose to download and add. This is not a reflection of any disapproval of these practices on my part - just a narrowing down of the field for the purposes of this piece.

I am also not dealing with the live-CD distributions (such as Knoppix and SLAX) that run directly off a CD without requiring you to install anything on your hard disk. These are fine and interesting for those wishing to get a taste of what Linux is all about, but for real users, this way of doing things can end up being a bit annoying.

What Distros Are There?
So with all that said, let's get on to what I am going to cover. As you may have already surmised from the many distros I have excluded, there are a lot of Linux distros out there in the world today. A quick look at DistroWatch will show you a good number of them. Some of these distros are geared for home users, or business users, or for specific groups of users (students, for example), speakers of certain languages, or to users with particular purposes (servers and/or firewalls, for example). Many are designed to cover all of these groups, and such distributions tend to be the most popular. In general, Fedora Core (and its Red Hat Linux predecessors), Mandrake, and SuSE could be consisdered the big three. As such, these are the three I will focus on here, with a mention of one other potential contender that I have tried out. As is my nature, let me get a bit negative first (so as to get it out of the way and better build my case).

SuSE

SuSE is from Germany, and as such you would expect it to be a pretty well-oiled machine. Let me state it plain and clear right here: SuSE is no BMW. Or to put it in the common vernacular: SuSE sucks. Sure, it looks good and slick, has a nice logo and even a stuffed chameleon you can buy (Geeko is its name), but it just doesn't cut it where it counts. Now maybe the more experienced would have more luck, but I am focusing on newbies, and as such I give it three big three thumbs down. Buy the stuffed chameleon and you should do all right, but stay away from the product itself, unless you have an uncontrollable love of models who look like they were just pulled right out of a Mentos commerical (see their German website)... and headaches.

Why all the hostility, you may ask. Well, I am not really hostile towards SuSE, and, who knows, it might have improved by now, but I've had just too many problems with SuSE to satisfy my quest for a sure and simple distribution.

My first complaint is that the only way to get SuSE is to buy it or install it via FTP from the Internet. You cannot download ISOs and burn your own installation CDs. Now, I am not against any of these distro-folk making some money for their efforts, but it is kind of a pain to try things out when the only way you can do it is by forking out a good wad of dough. Now, granted, this amount of dough is far less than you would pay for a comparable collection of Gates soft, but really. The only thing you can download as an ISO is a live demo CD, which I did. Of course, it didn't work. I then went out and bought the real thing. It was very attractively packaged, came with some cute SuSE stickers, and two of the disks were duds. Great fix to be in, eh?

Then there was the much ballyhooed Yast2 installer, which is the software package installer application - a SuSE original. It is a pretty enough bit of work, but I had it die out on me at least three times during package installation.

Then there is the essential quirkiness of its base configurations. A good example is when I used the help files for Grip while in KDE. The help file opens and suddenly all my desktop icons are Gnome-ized! And then there were those great error or warning messages that popped out at four times the normal screen width. Reminded me of the old Frogger game. Oh, when I tried to install the green monster on a different computer, the mouse, which worked fine in the first stages of the install, suddenly went absolutely whacko. Back to scratch.

One of the reasons I originally decided to try SuSE was that it included NoteEdit (a music writing program). Well, under SuSE, it was as useless as a blast furnace in a wine cellar - it just sat there and responded to nothing. And when I tried to set up my Ximian Evolution e-mailer for a new IMAP account..... Oh, just so very great!

Finally, though I could go on and on, I had so many program hangs and crashes while SuSE-ing that I might has well have installed Windows ME on all my machines. XKill was the only program that seemed to work well, and thank goodness for that, because I was using it more than a southern Italian chef uses tomatoes.

To be just a tad fair to the Teutonic Knights who packaged the Chameleon Beastie, there were a few good things to be said for SuSE, but only a few.

SuSE did a good job at automatically mounting Windows partitions and my USB card reader.

Installation seemed to go smoothly (except for those nasty Yast2 failures) and succeeded, all things considered, on a wide variety of hardware configs. It even recognized my exceedingly generic flat panel display - quite an achievement!

It's RPM based.

It has a cute mascot.

Geeko: Just about the best thing about SuSE is its mascot

Again, just to be fair, there are a lot of SuSE users out there, so there must be a reason that they like it - or maybe they're just masochistic. However, for the beginner, there are just too many weird things going on with SuSE to deal with. If you want to try it out, I would recommend waiting until you have some experience with one of the other distros, or else you will just get frustrated and give up your noble Linux quest.

Mandrake

Mandrake is France's main Linux contender, and though the company went through a tough financial spell for a while there, it is now turning a profit once again and out from the dark and dreary world of bankruptcy. Mandrake was the first distro I actually could install and get up and working without pain, and, as such, I have a kind of nostalgic fondness for it. In the climate of these times, however, Mandrake's French heritage might put some people off, but there's no reason it should. After all, the French made my Peugeot and it is the best car I have ever had. They also make damn good cheese and tasty wines (especially those from the village of Rully)... and Johnny Depp lives in France. Admittedly, these points have little to do with Linux, but I thought I would throw them in just the same. Context provides meaning, after all.

All in all, Mandrake isn't a bad distribution. It is pretty straightforward to use and comes bundled with tons of software. It also brought the Linux world (and later the Windows world) the wonderful game Frozen-Bubble, for which they should be admired for all time. It also comes with more GUIs than any other distro I know, which can be interesting if you like to try new things out.

Mandrake also seems to work well on most hardware. I did not have the issues installing Mandrake that I did with SuSE, and in some cases (such as on my Sony VAIO laptop), it is an even more painless install than Fedora. In fact, ease of installation is one of the things that Mandrake is most often commended for. This, and the fact that it comes with disk partitioning software that will resize your Windows partition for you, is part of the reason that it is often described as the most newbie-friendly distro out there. While there is some truth to this, I don't feel it is totally correct.

While the installation is pretty much painless, it is not totally so. For example, the screen for adding additional language support, while easy to use, is pretty well hidden unless you know to click the Advanced button in the Set Default Language Screen. There are also a couple of questions it pops up at you that make a newbie quiver, as they most likely have no idea what they are being asked (I didn't anyway). Another oddity is that every Mandrake install seems to end up being different even when you make the same selections during installation. That isn't a big problem, but it is weird. And then there are the occasional quirks, such as the unwillingness of the GNOME theme manager to make the control selections you choose or Mozilla's exceedingly weird setup with Mozplugger that actually makes it hard to play media streams. And while there are a lot of RPM software packages available for Mandrake, I have found many not to work once installed.

So while Mandrake is pretty newbie friendly in some ways, it can be confusing and troublesome in others. It is a good distro, and tons better than SuSE, but it isn't perfect. . . not yet anyway.

Fedora Core

I suppose you could call Fedora Core America's entry into the Linux sweeps. Fedora Core is an official non-product (or unofficial product, if you prefer) from Red Hat, located in Raleigh, North Carolina, the backyard of Dawson's Creek. All right, so Raleigh is miles from Wilmington, where "the Creek" was filmed, but it's close enough! Anyway, Fedora Core is essentially the successor to the Red Hat Linux line, and despite its silly and slightly obtuse name, it is a very worthy successor at that.

Perhaps the best thing about Fedora Core is that installation is so clear and painless. A newbie could just press Next, Next, Next throughout the installation process, without making a single choice (other than to type in a root password), and end up with a perfectly satisfactory and totally useable system. The installer screens look good, and installation results also tend to be consistent. In my book, that adds up to user friendliness at its finest.

Once up and running, Fedora Core, with its default GNOME desktop environment, is clean and easy on the eyes with its Bluecurve theme (now available in multiple colors). The menus in the main panel menu are logically laid out and easy to use, and the selection of software is quite good. Configuration is essentially unnecessary, but can be done quite easily and, again, logically. It is also easy to add more software to the Fedora repertoire, as there are so many RPM software packages available for it. There are also a number of conveninet methods of installing such files and their dependencies, such as UpToDate, APT, and YUM. The number of repositories for Fedora Core RPM files is also greater than great, with Fedora Linux, FreshRPMs, and DAG standing out. FC also has a very stable and robust feeling to it, so the end user doesn't end up with the insecure feeling that his or her quirky system is going to fail next time its started up. Peace of mind counts, as any former Windows refugee can tell you.

Now, to be totally fair, there are some areas where configuration must be done via the command line (such as setting up the fstab file in order to mount new disks or USB storage devices), but with a good, thorough, and straightforward FC-specific guide (such as my book, "Linux for Non-Geeks"), this ends up being quite easy.

Perhaps the greatest hindrance to Fedora Core's acceptance as a newbie-friendly distro is the the power that it has under the hood. This power and versatility makes it a favorite of specific-tech-purposes types and true Linux geeks. The fact that FC is widely used in such circles gives it a sort of stigma in terms of its perceived acceptability for non-geeks. Unfair, to be sure, but that's just how perceptions go. Ignore them, and listen to me: FC is perfect for newbies too. After all, you don't have to be a race car driver to enjoy driving a Porsche.