Has anyone seen this?
10 best Linux distros for 2010 | News | TechRadar UK
Of course it’s a matter of personal preference who uses which distro, but I personally like Fedora and Opensuse. I came back to Opensuse 11.3 from Fedora as(at least I feel) the former has been integrated well with KDE. But I observed most of the programmers tend to use fedora…I dont know in depth if opensuse offers same support to programmers as fedora does.
I confess “best” is subjective. I believe the article defines best as “Hardware compatibility, ease of use, the size of a software repository”. To me buried inside each of those, is “community support”, where I would consider community support a subjective assessement, that is specific and of varying importance to each individual.
For some comunity support is not so important. For me by far it is the defining criteria that outweighs, and drives every other critiera.
As a home desktop user with multimedia being a strong hobby of mine, I’ve always held the view that the best Linux distribution for me is the one where I have the most familiarity with the distribution, coupled with the best support with the distribution. In my rather specific case, my support (and this is likely specific to me) comes from the people I know, and not from how a distribution is generically packaged for hardware nor for the size of the repository.
Those hardware packaging, and application packaging considerations are very much a distant second place as they do not offer significantly more than what I can get with openSUSE. For me, because of the similarities in distributions, they are very much a distant critieria. Instead, community support has always been the prime consideration for me.
Now I’ve been with openSUSE since 2001, and since then I have struck up friendships with a host of openSUSE volunteers, from openSUSE forum moderators/admins, to openSUSE enthusiasts (on both IRC chat and on the forums), to openSUSE packagers, to colleagues/friends who run openSUSE. My rapport with them is the main criteria for me to be on openSUSE, and I believe that because I have not distro hopped, but rather stuck with openSUSE, the time investment for me in openSUSE is enormous, and no other distribution can come anywhere close to that for me.
Thus while I find those articles of interest, in all due honesty, unless there is a fundamental shift in my support base (ie the people I know stop using openSUSE) I can not in all due honesty ever see my self change distributions. For me its not worth the lost time and effort.
If I have a problem specific to openSUSE, in most cases one of my acquaintences can provide me an answer specific to openSUSE. If not then I write a bug report on openSUSE, and if the problem is openSUSE specific in most cases it is addressed (if it is specific to openSUSE). If a package is missing for openSUSE that I ‘must’ have, in most cases I know someone who can package it for me for openSUSE (if my own efforts fail). If I can not configure a package to work for openSUSE, in most cases I know someone who can help me configure it for openSUSE.
I simply can not get that level of detailed and specific support from another distribution without spending years building up the same friendships/support/respect base.
In my view, that sort of support base is a criteria and benefit that most distribution hoppers will never get as long as they continue hopping. They don’t stick with a distribution long enough to develope such a support base, and they often turn off people by untactful posts raving positively or ranting negatively about a distribution on a distributions forum, chat channel, or mailing list.
Still, it IS interesting to read what is noted by others wrt other distributions, but again, I would need a massive shift in my support base for me to ever consider moving (ie Packman packagers stop packaging, openSUSE to change direction fundamentally pushing away my support base, … etc …).
Its interesting thou, to read the importance others place on criteria that is less important to me (relative to a community support base).
Seriously, whenever I see something like this;
I bleed from various orifices. Debian is a lot of things but it is NOT an excellent professional user distribution because it does a lot of things WRONG (not least of having (still) dismal bi-arch support).
soldier101 wrote:
>
> Has anyone seen this?
> ‘10 best Linux distros for 2010 | News | TechRadar UK’
> (http://tinyurl.com/3xb6v68)
Ah good… an opinion piece that masquerades as some kind of survey or
something with statistical backing.
RHEL for servers? I’m sorry, but ANYONE with any real sys admin experience
must disagree with that. Even dyed in the wool Red Hat users usually will
switch to SLES once shown the differences. RHEL is a marginal server
product with RHEL 5… with was worthless before that. SLES has been able
to support high end usage for many versions… sigh… brain washed
people…
These subjective “Best of” lists are usually of no importance but can provide a few laughs. The best distro’ for experts is apparently Fedora ? No mention of Arch or Chakra, and openSUSE’s main plus point is its “strong links with Microsoft”…Hmm…maybe I should be using something else. :\
I tried out Fedora on my laptop because of this article. It only spent about half an hour on my laptop because the fglrx driver from their rpmfusion wasn’t compatible with the kernel version that was provided in their updates. I think it has to do with that new security fix in the kernel and now you have to patch fglrx in order to compile it. That was a major downside for me. But I did enjoy a few good things about it (Good GNOME implementation IMHO). I might dual boot with Fedora 14 when it comes out. Hopefully they fix fglrx by then.
So there are 3 Ubuntu Solutions that are ‘best’.
Where Ubuntu mostly gets a
Unlike most other distributions, Ubuntu developers know how to make a desktop look good. The aurora-like swathes of purple, orange and black may have taken their inspiration from Cupertino, but they easily beat the tedious dull-brown of previous versions.
I do have to agree with that. They do indeed make a very nice desktop. I think that what most people are drawn to it. Plus the big community. With that i mean the fast amount of users that are present and active.
What’s not so great, for seasoned users, is that the window control buttons, such as close, minimise and maximise, are now on the top-left border. But new users, especially those used to OS X, won’t find this a problem, and neither did we after a couple of days to acclimatise.
Funny to read that. I remember that they actually had really rants about that. Must be a big thing.
What about Debian?
But there’s another, more important, reason. Major version Debian releases are generally years apart, and the software that makes the final cut has been tested to the point of destruction. The current version, Debian 5, is due for replacement later this summer, when version 6.0 should arrive
Their releases are really long, but i failed to install the codec’s and did not want to learn Debian. I know a lot of cities use Debian, but modified.
But here we are with OpenSuse and the shots via politics.
OpenSUSE 11.3 bundles the latest version of KDE, as well as Mono. This is the Microsoft .Net compatibility library that has recently been removed from both Fedora and Ubuntu, and its inclusion might be important if you’re working in a cross-platform environment, and you need greater compatibility with Microsoft’s products. Which is exactly what Novell wants you to think.
I never seen a problem with Mono. I did not have any use for it, but i think it makes sense if you want to communicate with the MS world and to attract potential customers.
But i did not follow very well the discussion about it.
For me, even its only Linux, i wonder why BSD was not included. If OpenSuse were not available for some reason, i would use BSD and it does look good and has also a fairly nice userbase. From what i have seen.
In the end its the user who makes the decision to which distro he is drawn.
But i can not agree with the statement that Ubuntu is so easy to install and everything works.
The same can be said about OpenSuse or most other distro’s.
Also, i remember in ealier version of Suse you were able to install certain categories like Office or Development. Not sure if you still can do, but this was a really nice way to install a system to your needs.
But i tend to agree that some distros giving the perfect choice in that they offer a certain package for a purpose.
One thing i actually mostly miss, is how websites, blogs etc… rate their choices. As an example i would state in this case distro installed on desktop x, laptop x etc… information like this are missing and so one can not conclude if the statements are actually reproducible or not.
Some one else might completely disagree with the statements made or are of questionable nature altogether.
So my second thought is more reserved after all.
I don’t know why people conflate openSUSE with Mono. It’s not a default install on openSUSE even and is a separate entity.
Totally agree
Mono is in the default Gnome installation. It’s also driven by Novell, hence the association.
So does mean its not in the KDE install by default?
Perhaps that explains how good the rating is.
Mono is not installed on 11.3 KDE 4.4
“Default install” depends on which DE (if any) you choose. If you choose Gnome, Mono will be included.
Thanks for info FlameBait 
On Tuesday 28 Sep 2010 19:36, Raffles10 scribbled:
> These subjective “Best of” lists are usually of no importance but can
> provide a few laughs.
A few years ago in the UK, “Which” consumer magazine published a reader-
survey of PC suppliers and how they rated for after-sales support. I noticed
that about 2/3 of the way down the list was a company who made my first PC.
I was a bit surprised to see them there for two reasons. First of all, they
used to be consistently highly-rated for service. Secondly, they’d gone out
of business at least half-a-dozen years before the survey was made. Those
companies that appeared below them in the list must have been really bad!
–
Graham Davis, Bracknell, Berks. E-mail: “newsman”, not “newsboy”.
“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” - Carl
Sagan
I never get this idea that Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS are easier to use for Windows users than openSUSE. I came from a Windows only world and I tried puppy linux, ubuntu, fedora, BSD, Xandros and finally openSUSE (originally 10.3). openSUSE was far and away the smoothest transition for one reason: YAST!
No Linux OS does app install and management better than YAST (and the updater applet). Phenomenal. I still use Fedora on a netbook (only because wifi never worked in openSUSE - don’t try to fix this for me here, there’s a looong thread on this) and every time I use it and have to check for or install new apps/packages, or check for updates I am astounded at how easy openSUSE makes it all.
I think perhaps the reason is these reviews are usually based on a few hours of install and use. Use the linux distros for a few months and you’ll quickly find YAST (with updater applet) is better than ANY OTHER tool including Windows update.
ya i don’t quite get it right now i pretty much only use openSuSE and SLE.
i have found nothing that is more reliable than SLE for servers and for the desktop i love opensuse easy install everything has always just worked for me if i want to manually configure things everything works how expected and i can find it where im expecting and if not there us YAST which saved my ass back in the 9.x days when i first started working with linux and suse.
but i do agree with 6tr6tr these are prolly with just a few hours experience with the distros on a VM to really to get to know a OS you need to work with it for months on real hardware.
oh and there mention of ubuntu studio as the perfect OS for music is BS there is no such thing as a suitable distro for working with pro audio and it is going to take a lot more than a OK daw and some driver support to change that.
OpenSuSE is my personal favorite, although I have limited experience with the various distros. I have used Redhat a little, and Ubuntu some, and I prefer OpenSuSE out of the three.
We use OpenSuSE in an office (we are programmers), and it has done everything we need to do quite well.
Redhat has the reputation for being more secure (others would have to tell me if that is true), but it seems to lag behind other distros as far as up-to-date software (although I suppose that is why Fedora is around).
Ubuntu was nice, but it was a pain from the administrative side. For admin tasks OpenSuSE was much easier. By default, YaST has GUI tools for setting up NFS servers and clients and changing the boot menu, and it mounts the Windows partition by default. Ubuntu has the capabilities, but the GUI tools are not there by default and you have to know the right program to install.