Minds Eye

Firstly it has been far too long in between posts. I blame nothing but me :-(, although work has been busy and many late nights as well as weekends away on family holidays.

Couple of things I want to mention. I have installed (tri-booting now) OpenSUSE 11.0, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu Hardy 8.04. All 64bit versions on my primary work/production laptop and have been flicking between them for about 3 weeks on random almost daily basis. I have been using a combination of shared home drives and soft links between separate distros depending on which distro I set up the various components I use. By this I mean that Ubuntu was the first to have all my music copied onto it and therefore became the default location to point all music players, whereas Fedora was the place I copied a lot of home movies for editing to, so that became the default Kino and editing partition. Get the idea?

This has been an awesome time for comparisons and learning about the pros and cons of each. I am not writing a review and will not be going into depth on anything here, but to mention a couple of new apps which I have been using and think are improving to the point of being well above and "leaner" than other non-mentioned competing distros.

Banshee-1 is absolutley awesome. It is faster to read in new library locations, has great podacst and videocast support and also includes iPod support which makes the entire music, podcast, video experience seamless and brainless. Well done the Banshee developers on this one.

OO 2.4.1 across all three loads faster and has not crashed across any distro.

Firefox v3 is now standard in all 3 distros and that just makes browsing a pleasure.

I have been monitoring other features like suspend and hibernate. Hibernate works flawlessly across all 3 distros, but suspend works on OpenSUSE11 and Ubuntu but has a weird quirk on Fedora where it works the first time and then hangs on resume during the second attempt??? I have no idea there and have not had the time to look into it.

That being said the laptop support of wireless and suspend/hibernate has progressed a long way in the last 2 years.

I have had another play with Xen which has had its ups and downs across the three distros and the most success on Fedora.

As far as package management goes Ubuntu comes out well in front followed by Fedora and finally OpenSUSE. Not to be down on OpenSUSE's YaST, I just found it slower and more cumbersome than the other two. It was also the only package manager to crash when selecting packages to install which was rather off putting.

All in all I am not sure which I would recommend? For me as someone who can get the source of the problems pretty quickly and sort them out just as quickly I still lean towards Fedora, although for the new convert and no brainer install and usage I may lean towards Ubuntu. I will continue to use the three as regularly as is practical and just see what else crops up as worth mentioning.

How long until these distros (or their enterprise big brothers) are ready for the enterprise? Not long for the average user, the only thing holding them back will be integration into corporate and enterprise proprietary systems. Both of which will be changing over time as providers move to web based and more standards compliant solutions.