very good description of ubuntu. I’ve installed Ubuntu 6.06 dapper drake and it works quite well, booting much faster than windows. But there is one problem: If you install on the second HD (hdb) using the novice mode, the grub loader installs itself in the mbr of the first hd (hda). In my case, it shot the mbr (and the pbr?) partly. The effect: ubuntu loaded well from hdb, but the win2k on hda showed a blue screen.

I would like to point out some things on Gentoo:

1. Availible Packages:
Should be rated 9. Don’t be fooled by the number of availible sofware, it differs from other Distributions. For example, there are no -dev packages in Gentoo because all headers are included (you need them to compile the system) also there are less packages for a specific programm, take amarok: while other distributions have up to 8 packages for amarok(because of output plugins), in portage you only have one (which can be compiled with different backends).
There are much more programs in the portage tree than any other distro has to offer eg. UT2003-4 + Demo and expansion + mods/quake 4 …
http://www.gentoo-portage.com/ (over 11000) packages as in August 2006

2. Support for restricted formats:
should be high 7-9.
Because things as decss apperently are legal, when distributed in source form, the official Portage tree contains such programms.also the gentoo packages (ebuilds) do not contain the actual programm, but only instructions for downloading and compiling the programm. So the gentoo-project doesnt have to host borderline-legal things.

The “Supported architectures” list for Gentoo is missing alpha arm ia64 m68k mips s390 sh.

The “Package number” for Gentoo should be “Over 11000″ not “Over 8000″. We currently have 11252 packages.

The “Predefined package groups” for Gentoo should not be “Not available”. A user can create a meta-package (i.e. an ebuild containing just dependencies) with the packages he or she wishes to have in the package group. Then the user can put that package into an overlay.

The “International installer” item for Gentoo should not reference gentoo-wiki.com. It is not official Gentoo documentation. Additionally, gentoo-wiki has many translations available. See http://gentoo-wiki.com/Gentoo_Linux_Wiki:Translated_Editions

“Support for restricted formats” in Gentoo should be “yes” instead of “?”. Gentoo supports wmv / wma / rm / ra / mp3 and many other formats. See the win32codecs package as well as the packages for all of the media players.

Hello Thomas Cort. Thank You for this reports. Some corrections has been made, however there will be new, better Gentoo description in the near future. Regards.

First Things First

Your description of PLD is strongly biased, which renders it less credible. PLD itself is probably quite good, and might play in the same league as CentOS — however, the opinionated introduction condescends its qualities.

Second Opinion

The benchmarking of SUSE is outdated by several years. Today’s penguinistas (n00bs and geeks alike) aren’t that much interested in what has been relevant years ago, or any other fairy tales. Let’s leave them to SCO

Please update your description of SUSE, possibly with the name as well — you’d know by now that we have openSUSE and SLED, which are not at all identical. Please make very clear which SUSE Linux do you attempt to describe and benchmark.

Third Helping

I like your website a lot. Keep up the good work!

Yours

YBK

.

@admin

Dear Paweł Czerski,

Kudos for designig a smooth website. Did I say I liked it?

“Nickname (wymagana)” should read “Nickname (requested)” — at first, I was quite baffled by the mish-mash of English and Polish, but then I had a second thought.

You could probably put the country’s name to good work, augmenting the fact that PLD is a very _polished_ Polish distribution.

Yours,

YBK

.

Correction!

Ohmigawd, I looked up the word in a wrong place.
wymagana = required (not “requested” which would be “żądana”)

I have to polish my Polish a bit

Yours,

YBK

.

YBK: which parts of PLD description is biased for you? I’d like to correct it if we said something that isn’t true. We mentioned the turn-offs like lack of English documentation and not being an easy distro for newcomers…
Just be more specific and we’ll fix it.

About Suse - yes I realize it’s outdated. Perhaps you’d like to help updating it? We’re very open to invite new people to work on the website.

I fixed the Polish words in comments box. Sorry for that. The vortal has been translated from Polish and occasionally you may encounter oops like that one

PS: Please do not use bold font unless you’re emphasizing something.

CFG for NetBSD is not a driver,
please read the article you link to.
It’s just a name I gave to using a combination of the cgd(4) and vnd(4) drivers.

Thank You Hubert Feyrer, I have corrected CGF description.

Why don’t you wikify the comparation system?
You’ll expand your database informations make the users enjoy

Claudio M.

Why don’t you wikify the comparation system?

Claudio, we believe in a tight and integrated crew which takes care of the quality of the website. A wiki is not a good solution in my opinion. It encourages vandalism and biased descriptions and we do not have enough time for continuous supervision and moderation (yet?).

Instead, we strongly encourage you or anyone who would like to help, to join the PolishLinux.org team in order to make the site better and more professional. The site editing is quite easy (thanks to the Wordpress engine). The only thing you need is the good will to help.

Edited on 25.10.2006: Well, all in all we ended setting up a Wiki for distro comparisons Check out the http://wiki.polishlinux.org site. The information is not transmitted automatically to the main site (we are doing manual verifications) but it usually takes up to 24 hours to get the edited information on this site thanks to the automatic scripts I managed to write. Everyone is welcome to join the wiki-writers team now (anonymous editing is possible for now) so feel free to edit the descriptions and enjoy the freedom!

Under distros to choose there is “Wyślij zapytanie”.

Under distros to choose there is “Wyślij zapytanie”.

Fixed.

ubuntu was also one of the first VM distros for VMware player - a fact that might have contributed to it’s popularity in the last year.

I might be worth-while to include a section about virtualization in your comparisons. It’s a growing area that does not seem to be reflected in your stories.

[…] En el mundo de la informática son habituales las guerras religiosas: Windows o Linux, Gnome o KDE, Ubuntu o Debian, … Vía meneáme.net leo que existe una herramienta que genera informes de comparación entre distribuciones. El sistema, por el momento en fase beta, se basa en generar puntuaciones (entre 0 y 9) a los distintos aspectos de una distribución, como pueden ser la instalación, arquitecturas disponibles, o cantidad de software disponible. Una herramienta interesante que ofrece una valiosa información si te estás planteando cambiar de distro. PDF […]

Cool, in debian you should mention alien, it’s an important tool.

“Package selection
Mandriva
(9) Present. It’s one of the advanced options during the installation.
Ubuntu
(0) Not available”

The above summary is a common misconception. Although it is true that you are not able to install packages using the main installer, you are still able to install packages via apt-get before running the installer. Any and every package you install before running the main installer will appear in your final installation.

@WildWinlinWars

And how does it differ from manually installing programs after the installation? We are talking about the installer here. There is no option to choose from a list of packages while installing Ubuntu. I have mentioned your remark in the description anyway, just so that it’s clear

Just skimmed the OpenBSD bit and found it funny that OpenBSD got a 0 for wireless support, considering it has the single largest wireless driver support list of any of the open source operating systems.

Note that Gentoo does have in-tree Speedtouch drivers: net-dialup/speedtouch, net-dialup/speedtouch-usb. I’m not sure how is this even relevant to a general distro comparison, however.

[…] http://polishlinux.org/choose/comparison/?distro1=Mandriva&distro2=Ubuntu […]

Hi very good job helping poeple to use Linux.
I like the open source becuase I feel free and it is good to be free.
I gree with you that FreeBSD is the best even though you did not say it.
Ubuntu is very good for new comers to Linux and I think it is great using it as desktop and some server as well. I did not like FreeBSD 6.0 some bugs in the installation installer.
Thank
A Tamer
Tripoli Libya

Good info in general, but I have to disagree on one point.

Having just gone through wifi hell trying to get Ubuntu to work with WPA, I have to say that NO Linux distro presently rates higher than 5 for wifi, unless you want to run an open access point. WEP has been cracked wide open and is now non-secure; might as well not bother to use it, since it only keeps out the honest folks anyway. And for WPA you need a guru to get it working (maybe… depending on which chipset your wifi card has… or maybe it might work with ndiswrapper… or it might not…).

Point is: it’s bad security to run an open access point, and WPA under Linux is half-baked.

I’m an advanced WinXP user who has made the transition to Ubuntu on one of my boxes at home. I’m tired of Microsoft, and I love the idea of doing it on my other systems too. But the ones that require wifi will have to wait until WPA support is a whole bunch easier than it is now.

Eagle-USB is in the Gentoo repository as “net-dialup/eagle-usb”
As stated by intgr above: Alcatel modems have their drivers in Gentoo’s main repository: “net-dialup/speedtouch” and “net-dialup/speedtouch-usb” as

@ViceVirtue

Thanks. The DSL-modems data has been corrected for Gentoo.

I give up… tried several distros and got lots of stupid errors and configuration problems. Just try to make synaptic work over a authenticated firewall and you know what i mean. If the desktop Linux distros do not get better there’s still a lot to learn from windows.
btw putting name/password combos in a text file ( by design in Linux it seems) is not a good idea!
Back to windows it is…will try in a few years from now..

Zenwalk is really awesome. My learning curve has grown. I can never see myself back-peddaling to windows again. Vista seems cool though, but I love speed of my PC and security while being able to watch movies, surf the web and not have folks, isp, etc all over my PC available ports.

It seems in your comparison DesktopBSD is lacking. I used Ubuntu and Kubuntu for a while, it is nice, I have no real criticism on it. But it remains: it is Linux, and therefor a kernel with packages gathered “from here and there” (no offense to anybody). BSD is an OS, where kernel and necesaary packages to arrive at an OS are integrated, and designed coherently. FreeBSD is not for the novice, no: whether you like it or not, after install FreeBSD, you will need to dive into pages and pages of (good) manuals before you can install a GUI. The guys over desktopBSD tackled exactly this problem: they took FreeBSD, developed a pack of utilities so you can have a system with a GUI and your average desktop apps (like Open Office, Multimedia, web browsing/chatting and alike) right after the install. So DesktopBSD brings FreeBSD to the desktop of the average user! This is a superb initiative, because it helps people experience FreeBSD while remaining as close as possible to FreeBSD (you can install any of the 16000 apps that come for FreeBSD to DesktopBSD; after all, DesktopBSD *is* FreeBSD plus a “pack for the beginners”.

I’m in love with it allready; it’s much more responsive than a Linux version

@Guest:

We have the utility to work on the descriptions of thr remaining systems (including DesktopBSD). Visit our wiki at http://wiki.polishlinux.org and feel free to contribute. All the changes are copied to the main webpage after verification.

I tried freebsd, gentoo, ubuntu, redhat, mandrake, and debian. I must say that I loved messing with gentoo, it was the dist that made me learn about NIX.. but not too practical if you are just looking for things to work. freebsd is rock solid and fast but it seems mostly for server and u’ll find that lotts software you can easily use on linux won’t be available. redhat.. no comment…
mandrake and ubuntu are super easy.. but they tend to get corrupt after a while..

finally… debian. I love it.. not AS fast like freebsd but also very stable. You aren’t gonna compile everything and tweak it to hell but yet it’s still very customizable. once you get a hang of it.. you’ll find that it just works. It’s got lotta ground so lots of software are available via APT. It’s just such a well balanced distro for getting things done, no wasting time, but yet still fun to play with. hohoho yay!

Read through the reviews everyone has given and would liek to add my 2 cents.

First off if you can’t get Wifi working it is not Linux’s fault. 90% of the time its because whoever made your wireless card only made drivers/firmware for M$ Winblows. If you can’t get Encryption working try different software search around, don’t just post and say its broke. You will probably find that your wireless hardware is proprietary and hence will have trouble no matter what you do. Why you need to research out when you buy a box, not just walk into the retail store and say gimmee. Know what you are buying.

As far as WPA encryption being unbreakable, BS…I own and operate a Wireless Internet Company and I can break WEP in less then an hour and have even broken basic (store bought implementations of WPA) WPA in a few minutes.

Case in point is: if linux sucks so bad on Wireless then why is every wireless AP built on linux/unix or vxware?

Finally, I have used literally dozens of distros. The popular ones such as Suse, Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu are IMHO all that way because they are easy setup distributions. Throw disk in, click, click, click I am running linux, yeah….I’m uber now.

Onwards, I find the most suited distros are Gentoo for Desktop and Debian for Desktop and Server. For web/file server exclusive FreeBSD is a charm.

Gentoo helps you learn a lot about how linux runs and allows severe, almost to much optimizations. I have literally seen people take Kia’s and try to make them run with Lamborghini performance. Often more then not from the point, click, click I’m uber crowd. For this same reason so many people leave Gentoo. Reason I say Gentoo is not a good server distro is, no server admin will want to take this much time to install a distro.

FreeBSD, well its a Unix, rock hard, and very fast running web/file server performance. Secure by default and it installs fairly quickly. Downside as mentioned is it is really not designed for desktop use, but can be used as such. It also needs a better volume management system and better file system selection, although I have heard rumors circulating that FreeBSD wants to use Sun’s ZFS.

The advent of Debian Etch, is very cool, I find the system almost as responsive as Gentoo, and the new GUI installer makes it a point, click, click distro , even for those of us who like to use software RAID5 acrossed 6 300GB HDs and then use EVMS. Its a very fun Distro and I find that it is useful on both Server and Desktop platforms. I even have it running on a Sony Vaio with the Intel 3945ABG card, and yes I am using WPA. All fn buttons work and the only thing I have trouble with is my wireless mouse and touchpad mouse playing fair, but guess what Winblows puked on that too.

Please before you bitch, research it before you buy it, and research it when you try to install it. Otherwise play with winblows and when the Intel/M$ forced system upgrades/purchase happen because of Vista, you will know why so many have left that world and deal with things in Linux.

I’m currently running Gentoo, Unbuntu, Freebsd and PC-BSD to select a new os for my next notebook. I like gentoo, but you frequently run in having to install yet another program for simple tasks. Whereas Freebsd provides a complete unix environment, Gentoo is very bare bones, which is sometimes a pain. Good example, you install a mail server and want to use telnet to see if it is working properly. Bad luck, first find a telnet package to install, wait a long time (on my P3-450) and then do your test.

For being fast I liked Unbuntu and PC-BSD (a freebsd based dektop os running KDE with a very nice package management tool and full FreeBSD under the hood). Having to run linux together with Windows at my office I may end up with PC-BSD under vmware using a Windows host or a Linux host running windows in the vm.

I do a lot of development and thus far there are really two different environments I work with. .NET under windows and C under Gentoo; personally i refuse to use redhat for what they are doing to the kernel and SUSE it becomes too difficult to operate with “one-offs” when packaging system limits you to Novell certified components.

@mad@m$

“as far as WPA encryption being unbreakable, BS…I own and operate a Wireless Internet Company and I can break WEP in less then an hour and have even broken basic (store bought implementations of WPA) WPA in a few minutes.”

WEP != WPA…. i would not consider guessing “admin/admin” for username and password to qualify as “breaking the encryption”

@lariva

If I remember correctly I did not say I broke into the router…which is definitely a well documented method of wireless network security breaching. What I said is I broke WPA…
if you look around long enough there is a LiveCD which has some pretty powerful tools for Wireless Breaking. I use it for Pen-testing my own network. In the few minutes case the encryption was WPA-PSK and the password was “aa11bb22cc33dd”…as you can see its not to tough to break that sniffing the network and then running a standard dictionary/slot tool.

With more packets injected and more time sniffing I was able to break this “zusij09biJy&\/nBKZbB” WPA 160 bit key. Time to break…packet gathering 44 minutes. System running the decryption. 1 hr 3 minutes (use a single dual core laptop if you would like I could bring the data back(SSH) and run it on my HPC cluster? Which would yield by far faster results as it is a cluster of 10 64 bit AMD 4600s each with 2GB RAM). Which gave me 5 probabilities. Time to try 5 possible keys out ~5 minutes. Total time = ~1 hr 52 minutes.

This is why high end wireless WPA does forced key rotation. In a business application where you are signing up customers this is impractical. If you are someone who uses wireless and has HIPPA on their back then it is the way to go. Because by the time the key is broke a new key is in use.

Onwards may your quest continue…I still firmly back my original post. I would like to add that Solaris 10 is a great server environment as well and the New ZFS allows great leaps in the world of file serving. Peace, good luck, good will and happy Open Sourcing.

Solaris 10 is a great server environment, and even looks very attractive on the desktop (JDS is by far the most beautiful default desktop I’ve used recently). It has a clever architecture that does not break old software - it’s forward compatible. However, it’s use on x86 is sketchy IMO because in many cases it doesn’t work. In fact, it failed to install on my *NIX machine.

If it wouldn’t be monumentally worse than Linux as far as hardware support and installation went, it would actually be able to quickly trump Linux, IMO. It has advatages over Linux that cannot be inhereted into the Linux codebase due to CDDL/GPL incompatibilities - but Solaris is quickly inheriting Linux’s vast pool of F/OSS applications.

Finally a simple , elegant comprehensive chart comparison.

On, my quest to find the perfect OS, I tried slackware, ubuntu, debian, fedora core, red hat, suse(openSUSE), gentoo, openbsd, freebsd. And the most joy I have ever gotten from an OS is from openBSD. Out of the linuxes I have tried, I loved Gentoo and Slackware. Slackware was more of an educational OS and Gentoo, I used as a regular everyday OS. All the other linux distros seemed and still seem bloated to me. I love openBSD’s policy. out of the 4 computer I have 3 have OpenBSD and one has windows (only becuase, nvidia drivers aren’t released open source, and I really dont want to install a linux). The only complaint I have heard about obsd, is that not much hardware support. However, I have a brand new intel core 2 duo with a intel 945 GM, Intel HD Audio, and all of that was supported right out of the box. Even my sd card reader was supported not to mention that my intel pro wireless 3945 card was supported without any effort. as soon as i was finished installing, i did an ifconfig -a and my wireless card came up and immediately worked. So, if youre paranoid like me about security and want a secure and easy to set up os then obsd is for you.

You’re obviously in love with SuSe.

I don’t think the perfect distro exists quite yet. Both Feisty Fawn and Debian 4.0 may be contenders.

My take: I started with Dapper (Ubuntu 6.06), went to Edgy (Ubuntu 6.10) too quickly (as in, the moment it shipped) and it blew up in my face. Didn’t lose data though. Reinstalled Edgy a week later because I wanted Firefox 2.0, did a clean install this time, it lived about a month before becoming unstable yet again. A few crashes before that, too. Decided Ubuntu had gone off the deep end with Edgy, jumped to OpenSuse 10.2 when it first shipped.

I found OpenSuse to be stable as hell and very usable, except for annoying glitches in the auto-update process and YaST being a bit of a mess. Ubuntu’s package management had spoiled me rotten :).

After a couple months of OpenSuse, I decided to try Fedora Core 6 for grins’n'giggles. Running it now. I found the learning curve a bit steeper, and more manual configuration needed, but by then I had learned how to install raw programs from RPMs such as OpenOffice 2.1, Firefox 2.x, etc. right from the original application sources. And for that, Fedora kicked OpenSuse’s butt…what was tricky in OpenSuse was relatively clean in Fedora.

So what would I do on a brand new system being set up for a newbie?

I think the real answer might be back where I started: Dapper. Start with that, deep-six the older OpenOffice and FireFox installs, put all new code in, roll with that for a while until either Debian, Ubuntu or possibly a newer Fedora get their butts fully in gear. OR possibly just start with the latest stable Debian 3.x series.

Here’s the good news: throughout all this messing around, I stayed with gnome and was able to keep my entire home directory intact, backing it up via external USB hard disk and reloading it on each install. Preserving bookmarks, mail, most application settings. In some cases even preserving old Gnome settings from previous, in others having to delete /home/user/.gconf/apps/gnome-settings/%gconf.xml in order to restore gnome defaults and re-do my preferred desktop settings, but that’s no biggie.

I don’t know how well KDE would have done at preserving settings across multiple distros. The fact that I *know* gnome can do it makes me want to stay with that.