

Some of the best Linux distributions of 2011 - Tsiolkovsky
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/best-distro-2011.html

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darklajid
Well.. The article saved me a some time by putting the bias and 'hate' right
into the first couple of paragraphs. That allowed me to drop from reading mode
to skimming right away.

\- I doubt these shootouts make any sense, whatsoever. Without a clearly
defined target and some backed up metrics (see shin_lao's comment) this is a
random 'I like x' page and could've compared Britney to Madonna for all I care

\- Gnome 3 was excluded from the start, because of the author's impression of
it killing the desktop or something. While this is a matter of personal
opinion, this disqualifies the entry as relevant for me (again, _my_ personal
opinion).

\- Lots of remarks continued to reduce the quality. I remember a couple of
stabs at Gnome again, arguable comments about Arch and a little snark against
Fedora. Probably more.

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trotsky
OK, we get it, we get it, you don't like Gnome 3. Every handful of years
things change enough in an OS that it makes people uncomfortable, and a
certain percentage then believe it's their duty to beat their chests for a
year about just how bad the new stuff is. After about 18 months it's started
to quiet down significantly, and before long the same crowd mostly can't live
without it.

It's a bit boring, though, right?

Don't get me wrong, Gnome Shell in 3.0 / F15 was rather rough, but that is how
it goes in open source. You don't get nearly enough usage testing until you
announce it's gone gold.

While I did switch to ubuntu/unity for the time being as Fedora had some other
issues, I absolutely saw enough of a spark in Gnome Shell to know I'll be back
checking out 3.2 as soon as I have some time. While Unity is much more stable
and polished I think gnome shell shows signs of having a much better usability
once the rough edges get sanded down.

------
shin_lao
_CentOS is a blast. It is super-light, super-fast, super-stable, with a
million years of support, and running a mature and pleasing Gnome 2 desktop._

Benchmarks? Facts? Test procedure? At least some basic explanation?

~~~
rwmj
I'm not going to defend the article and their test procedure, but I'll give a
bit of insight anyway:

CentOS, as you may or may not know, is RHEL[1] recompiled from the source
RPMs.

For RHEL [and I work at Red Hat], we:

* Sell support for 7-10 years from release date. For RHEL 6, that's support/updates/security fixes until Dec 2017 or Dec 2020 depending on how much you pay.

* Spend about a year before release intensively QA-ing all the packages. We have a huge team of people just doing this.

* QA each 6-monthly point release to the same standards.

* Have lots of developers working on optimizing RHEL specifically (as well as working upstream).

* Have a separate team that works on performance and tuning.

* Work with hardware suppliers to ensure best performance on specific hardware, and make sure we have support for hardware before it is released. [Typing this on a pre-release Intel SVP ...]

* Get world-beating benchmark results on things such as SPECvirt by working with manufacturers and other large companies, and going back to the original developers to work out bottlenecks on very high end hardware. [Last week my colleague was logged into a PC with 4 TB of RAM].

The above costs a bunch of money. I think we spend in the region of $100
million on R&D each year.

Note of course we only test the binaries we release. We don't test CentOS's
binaries ...

[1] <https://www.redhat.com/rhel/>

~~~
zobzu
* Still make HUGE kernel updates every few days on RHEL 6.x

which, while you're reading made me wonder. we bump into kernel issues from
time to time due to update, and I always wondered why the policy was what it
is.

basically it seems like backports while retaining the same kernel major/minor
version numbers... because a lot of it aren't just bug fixes

Note that as I have been maintaining a Debian spinoff for years I highly value
RH's packages quality, and have generally been picking from RH packages for
patches and stuff "that just works" (incorporating that in the debs)

Still the kernel case puzzles me ;-)

~~~
rwmj
We backport new features, bug fixes, hardware "enablement" etc into the same
kernel. We keep the kernel structures and kernel symbols compatible (actually
there's a big whitelist of approved symbols that your kernel module is allowed
to call and we guarantee those will stay the same).

The basic reason for this is so software vendors can write kernel modules for
RHEL 6.0 which will be binary compatible with all future RHEL 6.x releases.
(The kernel modules will need to be recompiled when RHEL 7 comes out).

This involves lots of careful review of backports to make sure (eg) that all
kernel structures like task_struct stay compatible. I'm not involved with this
directly, but all I can say is it's a pretty amazing achievement over a ~4-5
year development cycle and ~7-10 year update cycle.

I assume that we keep the kernel major.minor version the same to reflect this.
'Course the release number changes each time ...

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splatterdash
FTA:"...it is based on Arch Linux, which is probably the least friendly Linux
around..."

With a remark like that, I was hoping that the author provide the raw scores.
Even so, on what grounds is Arch Linux not friendly? Their wiki is very easy
to follow and understand for a new user. Not to mention their forum.

~~~
hni
It is not friendly in the sense that you as the user are expected to
extensively configure your system before you are able to use it. It does not
work out of the box (unless you have very basic needs). What makes Arch Linux
great in my opinion (I use it myself) is that if you are the type of person
who is willing to spend some time customising your desktop to achieve a
perfect, tailored work environment, Arch gives you all the flexibility you
need without imposing unnecessary complexity.

------
a_a_r_o_n
When you do a distro comparison, I suggest that all screenshots use the same
light blue or dark blue background with no image, so that the desktop and any
possibly unique features are highlighted.

This review uses typically cool screenshots, and their only result is possible
conclusions like "ooh, that distro has unicorns!"

------
DanBC
I'm gently disappointed that TinyCore doesn't get a mention. I'd like to see
more devs on that; DSL has been dead for several years and Puppy is "odd".

Other minimal distributions, like Slitaz, are also worth a look, especially if
internationalization is important.

------
zalthor
Perhaps I might be in the minority here, but I thought elementary OS deserved
a mention at least.

------
zokier
Why Natty Kubuntu instead of Ocelot? It's not even LTS. And besides having a
top 5 list of Linux distros and three items on it are basically Ubuntu seems
silly. Revised list:

* Ubuntu

* RHEL

* Arch Linux

~~~
lnteveryday
I don't know if RHEL should be included. Although the list is of Linux
distros, I was thinking that it should be geared toward home users. RHEL is
great, but I wouldn't pay for the license (which is actually pretty cheap)
when there are many good, free distros out there.

I'm not knocking on RHEL, I'm just cheap

~~~
zokier
The list has CentOS and mentions Scientific Linux, I thought to generalize
them both to RHEL. They are essentially the same anyways.

~~~
lnteveryday
I was just clarifying. Some benchmarks would be nice for comparison purpose
though...another time, another thread. Maybe I'll take the time to set up a
dev machine and do some testing myself.

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p0wn3d
This post was created to generate controversy. Don't get sucked in.

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ittan
Very rough comparison, no metrics, inaccurate :(

I would love to see what not and whats for at least. Very little of that.

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ultimatewarrior
Mac OS x is a pretty good Unix distro, way better than ones like Ubuntu

~~~
oinksoft
What does that have to do with anything? It's proprietary, and not even Linux.

