Linux Distro Comparison (Early 2008)

I should begin by saying that while I'm not one of those people who have been using Linux since the beginning, I first dabbled with it in February 1998 but didn't make it my primary OS until March 2002. Initially I played with Caldera, SuSE and Red Hat, but Mandrake eventually became my favourite distribution. Since then I've been using Mandrake/Mandriva both at home and at work daily, but I check in on other distributions from time to time since I'm not completely satisfied with it.

If you have a home desktop operating largely as a standalone box, Mandriva 2008 barely gets my vote as the best distribution. Reasons I like Mandriva may not apply to everyone. The open source Broadcom wireless drivers are incredibly unstable for me, so I need NDISwrapper for now. I'll probably change my hardware to something Atheros-based since I've had good luck with those chipsets. Until then, Mandriva's NDISwrapper setup is first rate, as is its network setup in general. So thumbs up for that. Mandriva 2007.1 had the best network setup tools available, and Mandriva 2008's networking is a pretty close second. Unfortunately Mandriva removed the ability to delete network configuration profiles in the 2008 release, so I had to resort to vim to make it stop using the open source Broadcom drivers. Another minor quirk of the 2008 release is that gdesklets doesn't work, and it seems Mandriva has no intention of providing a bugfix for the 2008 release. Mandriva's network tray icon tool isn't bad, but could stand some improvement. As with any OS, it lists wired and wireless networks, and lets you choose among them prompting for WEP keys, etc. Sometimes it lists some wireless networks multiple times, and the tray icon has a tendency to crash after a few weeks of uptime. Menu options in the tray icon are also organized in a counter-intuitive fashion, but it's not a big deal once you're used to it. Mandriva's software installer, urpmi is a very flexible tool that works well, and in the 2008 release, they speed of the GUI frontend has been greatly improved. If you have multiple locations set for the same repository and one or more fails, the graphical installer loses the ability to count packages remaining to be installed properly. At first I thought it was a bug, but since that has been the behaviour since at least 2001, I assume that's the way the Mandriva guys like it. Overall, thumbs up for a good package management system. Mandriva's repositories are very complete, even offering packages for basic Blackberry support, which is a rarity. The Mandriva Control Center is among the best setup tools available for system configuration. The reason I only recommend it for home use is because Mandriva really doesn't have a plan for business users. Mandriva's position is that if you call them, they can probably work something out for you. I know from experience that if you call them with a business requirement, chances are they won't call you back.

OpenSUSE 10.3 is a much tougher distribution to judge. SUSE does so many things well. There are hardly any packaging glitches to be found, and those usually get fixed quickly. One of the great features of SUSE is the ability to add 3rd party repositories automatically. That means people new to the distribution can get up and running without having to research repositories like you have to with other systems. Because of this, OpenSUSE, which is free, essentially provides the same support for non-free drivers out of the box as the relatively expensive Mandriva Powerpack ($120/year for what used to be a club membership). Unfortunately, package management in SUSE is a thing of misery. Since none of its repositories provided Blackberry support, I downloaded SUSE packages from the barry project. In Mandriva I would just open a prompt, go to my download dir, and enter "urpmi *". All package dependencies are resolved and I have my software installed. This is not exactly new technology. Debian has been doing that since at least the Linux 2.0 days (yes, I know Linux 2.0 wasn't that long ago for Debian). SUSE's package manager is called zypper, which is somewhat of an ironic name since it's anything but "zippy." Maybe it gets its name from being as much fun as having your scrotum caught in a zipper. "zypper in *" did not install my packages, after taking forever to go through its repo updates because the files it found could not be found. I have no idea what that means. I couldn't find any options in zypper to install local packages. Basically, zypper can kiss my YAST. Speaking of which, apparently yast can be used to install local packages. I haven't tried this yet, but I'll assume it works. Even so, package installation is brutally slow no matter what you do. I disabled auto repo updates, and it still takes around five minutes to install a 500KB package on a Core 2 quad with 4GB and a fast internet connection from the time you first click "install software" in the menu. Even more annoying is that while YAST is setting up to install something, you get a billion modal windows opening and closing, each stealing window focus, so can't even work while installing something -- you basically have to plan your software installation around sandwich breaks. There are a few other minor quirks in OpenSUSE. SUSE has a crazy menu system for KDE called Kickoff that's designed to slow you down. Fortunately, switching back to the normal KDE menu is very simple. YAST for KDE is a very elegantly designed piece of software once you actually get to the software installer, but for some reason they made a very rough and unfinished version for Gnome. For example, in KDE if there is a problem with package package dependency resolution, YAST tells you which packages are in conflict. The Gnome version doesn't, it just tells you there's a problem. Also, if there is a software update available, you can click on the tray icon to see what's available in KDE. In Gnome this requires the root password. I still haven't figured out how to get Gnome to use the KDE version of YAST. If the SUSE team threw its software installation system in the garbage and just used Mandriva or Debian's system, it would easily be the best Linux desktop I've used.

I'm currently testing Fedora Core 8. More to come later.