There’s way to much Ubuntu everywhere!
November 30, 2007
Nowadays you can spot the brown african (no racism intended) just about everywhere. But why is Ubuntu all over the place when other distros are not?
You got an answer for this? Well I do. Buzz Buzz Buzz. It’s an apple-things really. Boasting about things that really aren’t that special. Now don’t get me wrong, I think Ubuntu is a very capable distro and I have used it from time to time.
But.. For newcomers to Linux, I would NOT recommend Ubuntu. OpenSUSE, with it’s YaST, is way better for those people in my opinion. And really, if the best distro, if you got someone to help you install it, is Debian Stable. Because things don’t go wrong very often with Stable.
The PCLinuxOS-posse are bragging about their distro, and yes, it has some nice tools. Ubuntu too, has some nice tools, but when it comes to basic administration it’s really not that good. It lacks a tool like Mandriva, PCLOS, SUSE, and more, has. This is something that I think is crucial to newcomers; To know where to find setup-tools.
Ubuntu really isn’t that stable either, comparing it to many other distros, which potentially makes people doubt us when saying Linux is stable. Then, if they would have tried something like Debian Stable or SLED or something, then they would have gotten the real deal about stability. Most people know that Ubuntu is quite bleeding edge, but the newcomer who want’s to check out all the cool stuff, might just say to him/herself “Whoa, Linux sucks!”.
We don’t want that, do we?
November 30, 2007 at 10:24 am
well i donno!, i have been a Mac OS X user at home and solaris at work. I needed to install something at my laptop, so i gave ubuntu a shot (i guess i wanted to be cool
), it has been fairly stable!, but i’m not a vetren in linux so i guess i would’nt know how it compairs to OpenSUSE and YaST!.
December 1, 2007 at 3:24 am
[...] Re: There’s way to much Ubuntu everywhere! [...]
December 1, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Ubuntu was the distribution that I started out on when I started using Linux. I just stopped using Windows one day, and started using Kubuntu. Sure, I’ve had some problems, but as a user I’ve learned so much about Linux because of the problems I’ve encountered. Ubuntu has excellent support online, as well. To Windows converts, I would suggest dual-booting, so they can get stuff done the way they know how on WIndows, and play around with Ubuntu until they feel comfortable enough to switch.
December 1, 2007 at 11:39 pm
As I just suggested to you, Mepis 7 is Debian Stable with more user friendly tools, like the installation tool. (It have more optimized configuration for newer machines, desktop and laptop then Debian). I recommend you to try it when the final will go out. Not so eye-candy like openSUSE of course!
December 28, 2007 at 4:47 am
I think that YaST is really good because it is comprehensive. It would indeed be the best administrative system if it wasn’t for the package management which is noticeably slow. Though it has improved in 10.3 its still not as responsive as Synaptic is. Also, I recommend new openSUSE users to use YaST to cut down on the number of running services that may seem unneccessary because this is one area where openSUSE isn’t too good at. Otherwise, I’d recommend openSUSE, MEPIS or PCLinuxOS for newcomers. There is also the question of choosing the ideal desktop environment for newcomers, in which case I’d recommend KDE.