As always, I’ve been having a little scout round at whats going on in the Linux world at the moment. I’m pretty happy with CentOS 4, but it doesn’t do any harm to have a play. Here are some thoughts after a quick play with Ubuntu and Fedora Core 5 (Test 2).
Ubuntu
The recent hype about Goobuntu, a possible Google variant of Ubuntu, made me sit up and take notice. I’m not sure it really exists, and if it does, I’m not sure it’s designed to be a Windows-Killer, but all the press increased my interest in Ubuntu.
You can read all about Ubuntu on the website, but suffice to say, people are claiming it’s very user friendly and a possibly the best Desktop Linux available at the moment. There seems to be some groundswell behind it, and the latest stories have made it seem even more attractive.
It came on one CD, which makes a change from the 4-5 CDs for other distributions. The installation was straight forward, but didn’t appear easier than any of the Red Hat variants. In some ways, the lack of a GUI installer made it seem even more geeky than some other distributions.
Once it was installed it seemed very much like any other distro I’ve used. It uses the Gnome window manager, so it feels very much like Red Hat with a different theme. The menu structure looked a little simpler and the “Add/Remove Applications” screen was neat, but it didn’t change my life.
I might have a go at installing Oracle on it, but then again, I’m not sure I can be bothered 🙂
My verdict, nice enough, but what makes it better than any other distro?
Fedora Core 5 (Test 2)
I was a devout FC fan before I switched to CentOS. I started to download all 5 FC5 CDs, but then switched to the 2.8G DVD. As the dumb-ass user I am, the only thing I noticed was change in graphics. I guess the new look and feel is an attempt to differentiate Fedora from Red Hat’s enterprise distro. Apart from that, it all looked like more of the same to me. So far I’ve not been able to install 10g R2 on it, but it’s still a beta, so who cares.
My verdict, nice enough, but what makes it better than any other distro?
I can’t really tell the difference between all the distributions these days. CentOS works well for me because it’s a clone of a distro that Oracle support, but apart from that, my daily life is unaffected by it.
The only thing that might make me eager to switch is if some heavyweight company puts their name to a free Linux distro. Like Google with Goobuntu? 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
“It came on one CD, which makes a change from the 4-5 CDs for other distributions.”
Which isn’t down to some new miracle compression software, just the fact that they left out a lot of packages which are not really relevant for a home user (but which would be of interest to someone wanting to play around with programming, databases…)
Yes of course.