back to article Which desktop Linux distribution?

One of the most common objections to desktop Linux is fragmentation. With so many distributions, which one do you choose for serious deployment in a business environment? Given the amount of work involved in any desktop OS switch in terms requirements analysis, application selection, compatibility testing, integration with …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Desktop Linux?

    Is this the real april fools?

  2. Jolyon Ralph
    Thumb Up

    My view

    I use Debian for servers and Ubuntu for desktops. The core is the same, they both use the (excellent) debian apt packaging system, so it's not too confusing to mix.

    Tried RedHat and many other grizzly varieties, but decided the Debian branch is the one for me.

  3. Pete

    I have been

    Running mandrake then mandriva Linux exclusively as my desktop OS for around 5-6 years

    Not really had any problems at all, couple of driver issues, and sound can cause problems occasionally if the application is badly written.

    I now run my own business doing web site design and development and still find all the tools I need to do my work are available. I only resort to wine for running the marvelous ies4linux so I can do those IE specific tweaks and check them.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Desktop linux commercially ....

    ... will never replace windows in my lifetime.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    you know, that one with the pretty colours

    i think it's called "Windows"

  6. Jim Carter
    Boffin

    Ah... Ubuntu

    I tried it for a while, and 8.04 is in my experience a nice piece of software. If all you want to do is surf the net and email, maybe with a little word processing. But all the programs I am familiar with are in Windows and Wine just isn't stable enough to handle Photoshop, WoW, or a host of other Windows-only programs that I use. Which is a crying shame. If Wine were more stable, I'd consider making the jump permanently but at the moment it just isn't viable.

  7. REMF

    opensuse

    is the way forward

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Which distro ...

    Ahh, let the flames begin.

    As for me, Gentoo for servers, Fedora for development/personal machines.

    I also use OSX and OpenSolaris.

    Desktop Linux? Meh ... mind you, it says something that one of our consultants had Ubuntu installed on her laptop by her son and it took her a while to realise that she wasn't running Windows. Sadly, the changeover was not permanent as a piece of software she uses wasn't able to run under WINE. So it goes.

  9. Colin Wilson
    Linux

    Ubuntu

    ...on 3 of my 4 machines

  10. Peter Ford
    Linux

    It works for me

    I use Ubuntu 8.10 and 8.04 at home, and OpenSuSE 10.3 and 11.1 at work.

    As far as I can tell, there's not much to choose between the leading distros once you have your apps in place, at least on the desktop. OpenSuSE don't give you video codecs and some proprietary things without a fight, but for a work desktop that's usually fine.

    Most of the servers at work are running OpenSuSE 10.3 too, although there is a Gentoo, a couple of old Redhats, a Slackware and something else I experimented with (but I can't recall what) lurking in the racks too.

    An awful lot of modern hardware works perfectly out of the box at least with Ubuntu and OpenSuSE, and the more enlightened printer etc. makers produce Linux drivers where necessary.

    The only software I've paid for in the last twelve months is World of Goo (on Linux), and the only downtime on any of the linux machines has been due to hard-disk failures.

  11. alain williams Silver badge

    Who is the fool

    You will be a fool if you don't take this seriously. Linux as a desktop will grow slowly, starting in specialised environments.

  12. Duncan Carter
    Paris Hilton

    Doh!

    It's meant to be a 'Fools', not a '(F)Lame War'.

    Or have I just fallen into the trap...

    Paris, on the desktop...

  13. Graham Dresch
    Thumb Up

    Desktop Linux ? - no Desktop Unix

    I have used Solaris as a desktop o/s long before Linux became popular.

    ( and MacOS and OS/2 / eCS )

  14. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Happy

    RE: Desktop Linux?

    Lol, you owe me a coffee and a screen-cleaner!

    RedHat/Fedora (if you have a well-trained admin team that can cut your own build, train your users and support 95% of issues without going back to the vendor), but that's mainly down to familiarity. Novell SLED a close second.

    Probably DarkStar Linux for dyed-in-the-wool Windoze home users.

    Where's Jake on this?

  15. ScientologyIsACult
    Linux

    Mandriva FTW

    I started on mandriva 8.1 in 2001/2002 time and then moved around like some sort of distro slut.

    i tried fedora, ubuntu, opensuse, dsl, puppy and gentoo (not necessarily in that order) currently i'm using mandriva 2009 and it's the best distro yet

    no issues at all.

  16. alan

    why is anyone making an issue about the number of linux distros...

    .... when windows comes in just as many flavours?

    and to Jaowon, your right it probably wont, because the majority of the planet (and by extension windows users) are ignorant of its existence. 10/10 for spelling, minus several million for relevance. and one other thing.... windows sucks.

  17. Bob Gateaux
    Stop

    We must use Windows for most satisfaction

    "Given the amount of work involved in any desktop OS switch in terms requirements analysis, application selection, compatibility testing, integration with systems management processes, etc., you want to make sure that the horse you back represents a safe long-term bet."

    Please to simply install Windows then no analysis or testing needed and we can all be sure to have backed the winning post horse.

    Why to make work for himself with the Linux where my software will fail me?

  18. Lan ser

    Opensuse

    OpenSuse at home and until I recently changed jobs to an unenlightened company at work as well.

  19. Francis
    Linux

    (X)ubuntu

    I use Xubuntu but that is more for historical reasons than any abiding love of XFCE. Any flavour of ubuntu seems good for many applications. Gaming perhaps not but for office use gaming probably isn't high on the agenda. I have a Win XP VM for those irritating apps that require me to use windows but I've managed to avoid firing it up for a couple of weeks now ...

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Ubuntu

    For most people Ubuntu does the job admirably. I've not had any hardware issues on anything I've installed it on recently. Well, apart from when I couldn't get wireless working on one ancient laptop -- but then Windows wouldn't even install and it turned out the main reason wireless wasn't working was because there wasn't any wireless hardware in the beast.

    Red Hat Enterprise is OK, but it has issues with working on newer hardware. Fedora is fine for the likes of me (happiest when fixing problems).

    For everyone else, though, definitely Ubuntu on the desktop. It just works. It's a shame that there are _still_ windows-only apps that people depend upon that stop them moving.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Linux for old machines

    I have an ooooolllldddd pc in my attic - I think it is branded Vax?? - will Linux run on that??

  22. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    Fragmentation is only an issue in Microsoft FUD

    Quick answer for newbies: use the same distribution as a friend who offers to help you get started.

    Long answer for people prepared to take time to solve problems themselves: http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20070528093134661/Linux_Distribution_Guide.html (That will give you a small list of testing the water choices, and a wider selection of links that are useful when you decide to wade in a bit deeper).

    Microsoft have half a dozen different operating systems, and the current ones are sold in half a dozen different versions. As I have not used Microsoft software this millennium, I cannot comment on how much of an issue fragmentation is to a Microsoft user. From a distance I gather that some commercial software companies make a greater effort to deal with OS fragmentation than others, but almost all of them are poor at supporting multiple architectures (even x86/AMD64).

    Things are very different in the free/open source world. Almost everything is available pre-compiled for almost all distributions. You can expect excellent support for x86 and AMD64, good support for ARM and MIPS, and some support for rarer architectures (ie if you want more than a basic system, you will have to compile some software and occasionally fix it yourself).

    If you are planning to use commercial software on Linux, that will limit your choice of distribution - unless you are big enough to get a company to support what you choose.

    If you make the effort, any distribution can be configured to do what you want. If you pick one of the larger distributions, the chances are that someone has already done so, and put up web web page telling you how they did it. If you pick one of the commercial distro's, you can hire someone to hold your hand as they talk you through the steps.

    The distro's mostly use the same software. The differences normally relate to how you install software and configure the machine to do exactly what you want. Experience in one distro will be of some help with any, and lots of help with a related distro.

  23. Steve

    Tripleboot

    My home desktop triple boots Solaris/DebianEtch/XP, probable use of each in percent would be 50/35/15 % of the time. Office box is Solaris only. Laptop is XP. Home servers are SlugOS 4 (and Ultrix, if a PDP-11 counts :) )

    Horses for courses, they all have their good, their bad, and their fscking annoying points.

  24. Peter Simpson
    Happy

    @AC - Not yet, but they're working on it

    "I have an ooooolllldddd pc in my attic - I think it is branded Vax?? - will Linux run on that??"

    http://linux-vax.sourceforge.net/

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Archlinux

    for anyone interested in learning about linux and optimising their PC.

    Ubuntu for everyone else.

  26. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    Linux on old Vaxen

    A quick web search says near enough: http://lwn.net/2001/0621/a/linux-vax.php3

    From the boot log I can tell you that a modern cheap laptop in low power mode is about 1000x faster than the one reported here. Also, Mr Airlie compiled his own mini-distribution using cut down versions of software intended to run on embedded systems. A large amount of effort to achieve what most people would consider a pitiful return, but if you really love your Vax then go for it.

  27. Psymon
    Linux

    I'm certainly interested...

    ...to hear some balanced critiques on the matter of enterprise suitability within differing Linux distros.

    Unfortunately I suspect this will be prime grade A troll fodder for the fanbois (most of which have never run an enterprise level network) to come crawling out from under their collective Hive Mind(tm) rocks.

    One of the biggest issues of course is user familiarity. Those veteran admins out there all know that re-training is actually the least viable solution when things start to get scaled up and often simply impossible when things become international.

    Since 99% of users are familiar with windows...

    Lets imagine (just drawing from my own experiences) you have a very IT illiterate accountant in Sweden only a year or so away from retirement, who becomes almost incapable of using his system if the start menu is changed from classic view to XP, let alone if the entire desktop is changed, along with all his office apps. It's made very clear to you re-training is not an option, and you are under severe pressure from his MD that his workflow can NOT be interrupted.

    Any intelligent comments/experiences?

    The other side I'd be very interested to hear about is what the centralised management and deployment facilities are like in comparison to MS post 2003.

    Active Directory is an incredibly powerful and flexible implementation of LDAP, and from what I’ve read, has in recent years become significantly more advanced than its’ Linux alternatives.

    Before I get shouted out, let me explain. Security groups within Active Directory aren’t just limited to the file system. They play an integral role throughout. My reason for suspecting the advantage is in the MS court is down to their implementation of Kerberos.

    Kerberos is an extensible protocol, yet only MS have extended the tickets to include security group information. This allows security groups to define permissions universally throughout all the server/client features. I’m not going to go into further details just yet, as I’d like to hear about the Linux equivalents first before drawing comparisons.

    Finally, compatibility.

    I’m sure we’ve all issues with this within our infrastructures, but I can’t help come to the conclusion that these issues are greatly amplified on non-windows environments.

    Again, no flames please. As admins we know that we don’t always get a choice in the software that gets used on the client desktops, and the larger the infrastructure, the less likely our choice will count.

    An example would be the massive success of the .net development environment. This caused a massive problem for an admin colleague of mine running a schools system. He’d actually implemented a successful network consisting entirely of Macs. Right up until the dictum on high came that he had to install the Student Information Management System (written primarily in .net). At the time, it was incompatible with the Mac OS, and so a massively expensive replacement operation had to be implemented.

    Any success/horror stories?

  28. Dave Coventry
    Happy

    Slax

    I have Gentoo, Ubuntu 8.10, and Vector on various boxes, but slax is the lightest, quickest disrto I've found. Wireless is a bit of a pain but not insurmountable, installing to hard drive likewise.

  29. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fedora Fedora Fedora!

    It has loads of lovely stuffs.

    Debian for servers though.

  30. Benedict

    @alan

    windows might suck but you are clearly wrong and you know it.

    I don't see this many version of windows: http://www.livecdlist.com/

    Maybe it's just me but everytime I use a GUI based linux there are always some glaringly stupid bugs or completely unreliable functions. Granted it is usually the GUI, but it is still annoying enough to stop me wanting to use it for a desktop.

  31. Andrew Oakley
    Happy

    Best. April. Fools. Ever.

    Best. April. Fools. Ever.

    (Of course, the real answer is Ubuntu. Everyone knows that my Commodore 64 is better than your ZX Spec... er... I mean, my Ubuntu is better than your Red Hat)

  32. Len Goddard

    Linux for years

    I moved my desktop system to Ubuntu (Dapper/6.06) almost 3 years ago as a response to the frustration of trying to run a windows desktop when developing code for linux servers. It has been a delight to work with an OS that doesn't fight you when you want to do something. The bonus is that none of the corporate snoopware and asset control stuff run on it either!

    At home I still have windows mainly for games. Most everything else I do from a linux VM (to avoid dual-booting). It is amusing that the linux software runs as well within the VM as the windows equivalent do natively under windows, which says something about the overhead windows applies to the system.

    If the latest efforts to get DX10 running under Wine mature I'll be able to dump windows forever.

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    @AC with Vax

    Why would you run Linux on a Vax, when you can run a far better OS - openVMS :-)

    (Also you can run SysV Unix on Vax hardware - and its freeware).

  34. Dazed and Confused

    Ubuntu, fedora, centos

    Ubuntu on the laptops

    I've got Fedoro on the desktop Linux box and one server (over 3 years uptime and counting)

    CentOS on the other servers.

    PS. I'm sure someone must have Linux running on a VAX, but Ken Olsen wasn't keen on the idea of "Personal Computers"

  35. vegister
    Linux

    widely used in academia

    many university departments run linux on the desktop almost exclusively.

  36. JonP
    Thumb Up

    Debian

    Just (coincidentally) installed Debian 5.0.0 Lenny (really only because there was that Reg article about it recently and it stuck in my mind) on an old-ish (P4) laptop - never used Linux before (a bit of Unix way-back), so i thought i'd give it a try.

    and bugger me sideways if it wasn't disgustingly easy. On top of that it managed to install a dual-boot (using GRUB - iircc) with windows XP (that was already installed) and it all seems to work fine with minimal effort (OK I skim read the install manual one lunchtime) Not really had much of a play yet, but am quite impressed so far...

  37. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Vax running Linux

    "I have an ooooolllldddd pc in my attic - I think it is branded Vax?? - will Linux run on that??"

    "http://linux-vax.sourceforge.net/"

    I have a Vax in the attic as well. Mine is bright orange, has the number 6131 on the side and comes with multiple carpet cleaning attachments. I didn't know you could run Linux on it as well.... What a star buy!

  38. Dave Bell

    Another Windows version due

    What I've glimpsed running at our local hospital often looks to be using DOS-style box-drawing methods. Well, that doesn't mean the software depends on MS-DOS. The default Xandros on the Eee includes a copy of Midnight Commander. which has that look.

    I hope my health doesn't depend on Microsoft continuing to support really old software.

    I'm having good reports of what Linux/WINE can do with the Windows software I run. If it wasn't for the security issues, and eventual end of support, I'd be happy to use XP for a long time. As it is, Linux/Wine could be a viable upgrade. Better than the apparent current upgrade path for XP.

  39. Cameron Colley

    So many comments to comment on.

    OK, I may sound a little patronising here -- but what the heck?

    RE: "X/Y/Z is the best distro because I installed it and everything works"

    While that may make it the best to install -- it doesn't necessarily make it he best to use day to day. I currently use Ubuntu, but I am aware that were I to use Gentoo, for example, I'd probably find my machine booted quicker -- but is just so happens I'm too lazy to play with it at the moment.

    RE: Just use Windows.

    You're either trolls or you haven't spoken to a CIO recently. I think most IT departments will be looking at Linux -- if only as a long term "plan B".

    RE: People suggesting Ubuntu, Mandriva...

    Yes, for home use they're great -- but have you tried to deploy them in an enterprise?

    Do the network bootp installs work?

    Do they include any proprietary software that may be introduced by mistake, or any potentially illegal software such as PGP in CIS or the UAE, or libdvdcss in much of the "civilised world"?

    Do they integrate well with Active Directory, Exchange, IIS, etc.?

    ...

  40. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Ubuntu and Debian

    Ubuntu for desktops and Debian for servers. I used an RPM based distro for a while (Mandriva) which was good but not as manageable/upgradeable as APT based systems for me.

    As to when Windows will be usable on the desktop for computing education It would be easier to teach car mechanics how to do their job on cars with welded down bonnets.

  41. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    @Psymon

    I can give you some food for fight. Clearly, you know how big company/org network works, so we can cut the crap.

    1. As you pointed out, when majority of our lusers don't know what is "task bar" or have great difficulty to do a "right click", there is little or dare I say no difference if their so call workstation PC runs something other than windows. As you also know that most of their software environment would be tightly controlled anyway (eg. restricted access to local hard drive/ cannot change most settings, not even screen saver). Therefore, if there is no windows only software required, at least there is a limited degree that we can safely replace many windows PC to something better (be it Linux, OSX or else).

    2. For so called business critical core software, user friendly is never an issue in the real world. You know it, they must learn how to use it, no matter how stupid the software might be. Operating system does not matter, all OS does is to support business software, nothing more. A primary example is bank, many banks use OS/2 for their desktop PC, no windows what so ever. It is not a problem if those PCs cannot play games or look pr0n on the internet. Only badly managed network allow their lusers to use work PC as a home PC.

  42. Toastan Buttar

    Ubuntu

    Ubuntu offers a pretty painless introduction to Linux to see if it's something you want to 'get into'. You can run it as a Live CD (if you've got enough RAM) and it'll show you if it'll support your hardware out-of-the-box. If not, expect some finite amount of pain before it'll do what you want.

    I believe Mint Linux is a better bet if you expect multimedia stuff (MP3's, DVD's) to play straight away. Having said that, Synaptic is a joy to use for pulling in extra apps/drivers which don't come as standard.

    Puppy Linux is stunningly fast, even on low-spec machines. It actively encourages use as a Live CD and you can load a boot file directly onto a Windows partition without messing around with new filesystems / repartitioning or whatever.

    However, if Windows does what you want you've got to ask yourself some pretty deep and searching questions about whether it's worth making the jump to Linux-only or a dual-OS setup. What do you want to achieve that you can't with Windows ? If you just want a free-as-in-beer OS, you've got to ask yourself if the learning curve truly 'costs' less than the MS Tax.

  43. foo_bar_baz
    Linux

    Whatever

    @Jaowon: Linux is not a religion, there is no need to convert the whole world. Horses for courses etc. That's not to say it's not worth telling people if you feel you've found something worth trying. I'm just fucking happy to have an OS like Linux. If it didn't exist I'd surely be using a BSD.

    - RHEL on my work desktop

    - Ubuntu/EasyPeasy on my EeePC

    - Xubuntu on my son's PC

    - CentOS on my home file server

    - Ubuntu on my home mail / web server (will revert to Debian soonish since it has native linux-vserver support)

    - XP on my gaming PC

    Before hobbyists comment on it, I use RHEL/CentOS for various reasons. It does everything I need (media playback is not among those) and it's extremely stable with excellent SELinux support.

    There are probably plenty of enterprise users like myself gagging to answer the questionnaire but cannot. The Register should just look at their web server logs and draw their own conclusions.

  44. Will Kemp

    SME

    I'd recommend SME Server as a file server / internet gateway for small business environments. It's very stable, Centos based (therefore RHEL based) and it's viable for people with minimal Linux experience to administer it.

    On my laptop, i've been using Fedora since it was Red Hat, but i've just switched to Ubunut 9.04 beta to give that a try.

  45. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Psymon

    > Lets imagine (just drawing from my own experiences) you have a very IT illiterate accountant

    > in Sweden only a year or so away from retirement, who becomes almost incapable of using his

    > system if the start menu is changed from classic view to XP, let alone if the entire desktop is

    > changed, along with all his office apps. It's made very clear to you re-training is not an option,

    > and you are under severe pressure from his MD that his workflow can NOT be interrupted.

    You can theme any desktop to look just like what he's used to.

    You probably won't find that work already completed, because most users don't want it. But it's possible - and you are given all the tools and rights to do it if you think it's worht the effort.

    > Active Directory is an incredibly powerful and flexible implementation of LDAP, and from what

    > I’ve read, has in recent years become significantly more advanced than its’ Linux alternatives.

    No, I wouldn't agree with that. What AD does best is to lock out competitors; from a directory perspective, there are several equally good alternatives.

    > Before I get shouted out, let me explain. Security groups within Active Directory aren’t just

    > limited to the file system. They play an integral role throughout. My reason for suspecting the

    > advantage is in the MS court is down to their implementation of Kerberos.

    Kerberos exists in many situations - MS didn't invent it. Their implementation is somewhat difficult to use outside Windows because of their PAC getup - but Samba now uses that happily.

    What you don't really get yet is the ability to use Linux as an AD controller - that requires Samba 4, which is only in technology preview so far. But it's looking stable, and it's very nearly feature-complete (actually, it's some weeks since I last downloaded it; I'll have to see what's been added lately).

    > Kerberos is an extensible protocol, yet only MS have extended the tickets to include security

    > group information.

    If you can do it in Windows, you can do it in Linux - with the temporary exception of being the DC I mentioned above.

    > This allows security groups to define permissions universally throughout all the server/client

    > features.

    Yes. Linux has been doing that for years.

    > I’m not going to go into further details just yet, as I’d like to hear about the Linux equivalents

    > first before drawing comparisons.

    If you're doing a greenfield rollout, you've got choices like RHDS. If you're already in an AD environment, you'll probably want AD.

    > I’m sure we’ve all issues with this within our infrastructures, but I can’t help come to the

    > conclusion that these issues are greatly amplified on non-windows environments.

    I rarely see real problems with that - I see people who *demand* Outlook, and insist on doing the "I told you nothing else would do" thing when they finally get it (after I've given them Evolution)/ I see people who *demand* Photoshop, as nothing else will do - until they see the bill, and then realise that Gimp does actually do everything they need and more.

    I hear *thousands* of stories about how Linux doesn't have sufficient driver support, yet Windows "just works" - this from people who need their Windows boxes sorting out because it doesn't "just work" unless you get a professional to hide all the work first. And hardware support - I've had better support on Linux than on Windows for quite some time now.

    > As admins we know that we don’t always get a choice in the software that gets used on the

    > client desktops, and the larger the infrastructure, the less likely our choice will count.

    If you really are forced to use a particular piece of software, and that piece of software really does force a particular platform, then the choice is moot. But in practice, I find people ask for the software they've been conditioned to ask for - not the one they need.

    > Any success/horror stories?

    Plenty of success stories. The only real problem I had was with a Freecom USB DVB-T stick, where they changed the chipset without changing the part number. One quick email to the chipset manufacturer, and I had a GPLed driver sent to me.

  46. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Jaowon

    I'd like to think that long before the end of your lifetime the Windows v Linux desktop OS debate will be about as relevant as VHS v Betamax.

  47. SynnerCal
    Unhappy

    Another Ubuntu

    In my case 64bit Ubuntu 8.04LTS - tried 8.10 on another box and it was just way too flaky for me - saying that I've had problems with lockups every 7-8 weeks on the 8.04 box too - never lost any data as a result, and I'm thinking this is a graphics related-issue, (because you can login and close down the box remotely in most cases).

    Systems used for general office type things, web stuff and development, along with hosting a good few VMware Server instances running Centos, Solaris, Windows, etc.

    It's on a Dell D620 and it just 'does the job' day in day out with minimal fuss.

    That said, if Centos was better at supporting the laptop then I'd probably move to it. Ubuntu forums are pretty good though as support.

    Interestingly enough - my kids also use Linux - the older ones dual booting Ubuntu8.10 and WindowsXP, and the younger uses Suse 11.1 on a laptop. Both seem pretty happy to use the systems - which kinds of sets the lie to the oft-quoted opinion that 'Linux on the desktop is too difficult to use' in my mind at least.

  48. Tom

    Just one icon

    I dont want desktop anything. Just give me a browser and the tools on it to do anything from anywhere.

  49. Simon Langley
    Unhappy

    Users are the problem not the OS

    At home I use Debian on my servers and Ubuntu/Leopard on my clients. At work I have two machines, one runs our corporate XP build the other runs Ubuntu.

    Ubuntu is great and it does do almost all of what almost everyone needs but, the problem is the users. Users vary from annoyingly knowledgeable to annoyingly stupid but most of them would need a fair bit of training to cope adequately with Ubuntu.

    I am sorry to say that the enormous installed base of idiots means we shall be stuck sullying ourselves with Windows for the foreseeable future. The only likely alternative to Windows is Mac OS X, which I have seen more and more among senior staff at my clients. Ubuntu (and indeed all the many - too many - versions of Linux) are not on the cards for a loooooooong time.

  50. Toastan Buttar

    @AC: Hardware Support

    "And hardware support - I've had better support on Linux than on Windows for quite some time now."

    I can't ever take this claim seriously. Yes, Linux supports more straight out the box but Windows will always support more hardware overall, due to the widespread availability of drivers, either bundled on a disk or downloaded from the manufacturer's website.

    In my experience, if something doesn't work right away with Linux, you're pretty much guaranteed 'an interesting time' trying to get it talking, with no guarantee that you'll ever get there.

    Musical hardware ? Forget it from the word go - just bite the bullet and stick with Windows or OSX.

  51. Michael Davis
    Stop

    User Familiarity

    To those who are concerned about the users being lost if you stick linux in front of them, what are you going to do when those users need new machines? You're going to put the newest Win OS and the newest MSOffice in front of them, which "look and feel" absolutely nothing like "traditional" windows.

    The users have to be retrained anyway. Do you want to be in this position again 5 years from now?

  52. Stan

    @Toastan Buttar

    Are you sure windows has better driver support than linux? Across all versions of windows perhaps, if your willing to hunt down out of business and merged companies for drivers that will only work with 3.1 and 95 but if your swallowing MS's load and running vista then that statement is so far from the truth it cant be seen from the top of a big hill on a clear day. Meanwhile I can link up some 1/2 inch reel to reel storage and a suction cup modem to anything modern with a serial port, stick the latest version of any of the major distros in the drive and have it all working as all the drivers are already in there.

    Just to hammer my point home, recently picked up a vodafone 3g modem (Huawei e220). Plugged it into a p3 laptop running ubuntu, fired up kppp and connected to the net. Plugged it into a more recent desktop running sabayon (a derivative of gentoo), same thing. Had a few live cd's around so stuck them in the same box and all worked with all hardware without exception. Then plugged it into a relatives beige box running vista so he could give it a try....and, after much hunting through the net, was told it needed a firmware update. An 87MB firmware update. Over dialup. For a, what is it now, 2 year old OS? Form a company the size of vodafone? What was it you said about driver support again?

  53. Nyght
    Jobs Horns

    Hmm

    I currently run 64bit Sabayon (A gentoo port) and I love it.

  54. jake Silver badge

    Slackware & BSD (&@Matt)

    "Where's Jake on this?"

    Just rolling out of bed ... Was up all night with a colicing horse. (The foreman & I let the hands sleep and walk them ourselves ... tired hands make mistakes. Tired jakes make mistakes, too ... but mine don't usually include tractors & fencing).

    Anyway, mostly I use Slackware on desktops, and various flavo(u)rs of BSD on servers. Both are extensively cut down and modified from stock to fit the current situation. No two offices are alike. In smaller offices, I'll put Slackware on the servers, too ... minimizes the learning curve. I'll include other UN*X based systems and/or Windows and/or Apple based gear, according to the company's software needs. I'm not religious about it.

    Why Slack? Because it works, and I've been using it for about 15 years. It's the closest thing to what I consider UNIX[tm] in the Linux world. It is also one of the easiest to customize.

    Why BSD? ... Well, because it's BSD :-) I was lucky enough to be in the right place & time to attend ken's lectures at Berkeley ... I grew up with BSD, and it grew up with me.

  55. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    @Users are the problem not the OS

    Nope. The problem is that right out of the box, you don't have a decent environment.

    Example?

    Ubuntu is supposed to be the most user friendly distro right?

    The default Ubuntu install has a background that looks like someone smeared faeces up an old plaster wall.

    Fail. Go back to square one.

  56. jake Silver badge

    @AC 11:31

    "I have an ooooolllldddd pc in my attic - I think it is branded Vax?? - will Linux run on that??"

    My aging cluster of vaxen runs BSD. I rarely fire them up anymore ... although one of my nephews thinks the ASCII art Snoopy printed out on fanfold paper is the coolest thing EVER :-)

  57. Kwac

    On my Toshiba 230CX

    P1, 133MHz, 6 GB harddrive, a massive 144 MB RAM - I run Puppy Linux

    When I upgraded it to Windows 98 it didn't have drivers for the USB port so it hung around in a cupboard for a few years.

    Its fine for email, browsing. I used it as a music server (Damn Small Linux) for a while. Next incarnation might be FREESCO.

    I also run Ubuntu (x86 laptop), Xubuntu (x86 Desktop), and Debian (AMD64 Desktop).

    Moved from SuSE to Mandrake, ditched that when the Company fired the guy that started it.

  58. Andy Bright
    Happy

    Hobbyist versus serious deployment

    hahahahaha.. good one.. had me in tears..

  59. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @AA

    "The default Ubuntu install has a background that looks like someone smeared faeces up an old plaster wall."

    Then change it. One click on the desktop will fix that.

  60. Glen Turner

    Ubuntu *and* Red Hat

    Interestingly serious deployment of Linux on desktops means that you may end up running two distros. If you take a best-of-breed strategy then you want Ubuntu at the desktop, a no-brainer since Fedora isn't supported. At the back end you could run Ubuntu Server if you wanted, but the depth of the Red Hat support organisation is just so much greater than that of Canonical.

    SuSE are an option, although not the leader in either field at least they have supported product offerings in both. Normally a single vendor would be better -- less buck-passing and so on. But when that vendor is Novell...

    I've seen some pretty successful replacements of "green screen" systems by Linux. The trick seems to be concentration on getting the sysadmin costs per unit right down by automating system administration (using puppet and package managers) and using single sign on (Kerberos) backed by a diretcory (LDAP). Those old green screens had a few VTAM geeks running the show, and it's important not to lose the savings of cheaper hardware and networking by increasing head count.

  61. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A title is required.

    Depends on the user. I jumped from OpenSUSE to Mint via Mandriva, Ubuntu and Fedora. In the end went back to Vista. The best compliment I could pay any distro was that it didn't make me want to throw my laptop up against a wall _quite_ as much as the previous one. Some of us don't really want to spend hours getting hardware to work, searching for the best "compromise" apps to replace the familiar Windows ones, and trying to convince Fedora that there aren't really 999 updates it needs to download.

    I'm sure there are loads of very happy Linux users who wouldn't have it any other way, and I'm happy for them. I'm just not one of them.

    Oh and for a brief return to the actual topic, I found Mint to be the best. Although this is based on only a week's worth of experience. All the apt packaging loveliness, boots up pretty quickly, useful bundled apps and drivers, and I quite liked the Mint menu (seeing as it's very similar to the Vista Start Menu - no surprises there then.)

  62. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Coming of age..

    I've been using Linux on the desktop since about 1996 (and it /was/ painful back then).

    Tried many of the distros since then

    but currently favour Debian as it works equally well on the

    servers at work and home and my work and home desktops and netbook.

    Using KDE3.5.10 for the desktop and love it. Finally convinced my wife to

    give it a try after years of Windows this week and a couple of days in she's

    loving it too.

    On the other hand this comment was posted from lynx, sometimes a desktop is just overkill :-)

  63. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SuSE

    I've always found SuSE user-friendly and reasonably tolerant of my ignorance. Currently I'm spending a month or two living with 64-bit Vista - for my sins. Asap I plan to cut over to SuSE and run XP in a VM for those apps (Office, Quicken, etc.) that don't work on Linux.

  64. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Mint sauce.

    Over the years I've tried most flavours of Linux in an attempt to find something that I can live comfortably with as a personal desktop. Finally I have alighted on Linux Mint which is a saucy little offspring of Ubuntu and just about the tastiest flavour in the kitchen. Obviously this is a subjective judgement but still worth sampling by any other seekers after simple cooking.

  65. Jay
    Linux

    What colour is that hat/why is Ubuntu always brown?

    Can't be bothered (just yet) to read all the other comments above, so here's my dabblings.

    Things at work are moving slowly from Solaris to things more RedHat-based. For reasons I won't go into this was first Fedora and now more CentOS. Though for a new project I've managed to secure some paid for RedHat licences. Though that's all server-based stuff.

    On my Mac at home I've got Parallels running XP, Win7, Ubuntu 8.10, OpenSolaris, Fedora (8 or 9, I forget) and Puppy Linux. Whilst I'm more au fait with Fedora, I find Ubuntu easier to do the simple things.

    On my EEE 701 I'm running EasyPeasy/Ubuntu.

    Given my day job is sys admin and I don't feel I have the time to spend hours messing about with things any more then Linux doesn't get too much of a look in. Whilst I think Ubuntu is good enough to do the usual stuff (web, mail, Skype for example) I don't think it's quite ready for desktop primetime yet.

  66. alan
    Linux

    @Benedict

    You do have a point, but I don't know that I am wrong, I was fairly sure that I was right, to a degree.

    The site you linked to had things like Local Area Security Linux, Damn Small Linux, various rescue cds et all which are hardly what one would consider to be desktop linux distros, they are more specialised niche distros. The list was too comprehensive.

    IMHO when someone asks "which desktop linux distro" the answer (atm) is either Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE or Mint. Those are the top 5 (in no particular order).

    Windows 3.1 (not sure what was before that apart from dos :) )

    Windows 95

    Windows 98

    Windows 98SE

    Windows 2000 } think these are the same by different names but meh.

    Windows ME }

    Windows XP Pro

    WIndows XP Home

    Windows XP Media Center Edition

    Windows Vista Home Basic

    WIndows Vista Home Premium

    Windows Vista Business

    Windows Vista Ultimate

    Have I missed any? Thats more than 5. Granted not many will be using 3.1 or 95 etc but even if you disount anything before xp, its still more.

    The reason so many linux distros exist is because its free to modify, and people who need it to do very specific things can mod the distro and create their own relatively easily, and they make those changes available back to the community. If you could do that with windows I'm sure there would be more (and better) versions of it around.

    The point here is that if you get a list of all linux *desktop* distros, I'm sure there would be more but there are plenty MS distros too. I don't see it as an issue, the reason its an issue for wintards is because they are force fed a single current OS when they buy a new pc and thats the end of it, they dont realise there is a choice.

    no trolling intended, honest.......

  67. Owen Williams
    Coat

    @Jaowon

    Fedora desktops, CentOS on the servers. Linux on the desktop since '94.

    > Desktop linux commercially will never replace windows in my lifetime.

    Smoke a lot? Drive fast? Take unnecessary risks?

    I'll get my funeral director's coat.

  68. Trix
    Boffin

    No-one's asked the question

    How about updates for Linux distros that you can deploy to the environment without each and every machine connecting and downloading them willy-nilly.

    As for the comment that Windows has "multiple distros", c'mon, at least the basic OS and commands are the same. So what if XP Professional has more widgets than XP Home. No different to installing Red Hat and configuring the web services components. But try running your RH package upgrade commands on an Ubuntu system... or configure services... or setup the display.

    I tend to agree that crap about OMG change to the desktop is often a bit of a red herring. Sure, that 1% of users will never be able to feel their way around something if the background colour changes, but just because a few are noisy doesn't mean that the vast majority of users have those problems.

  69. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    rik

    I Had ubuntu 7.04 and the users needed some usb mass storage devices, print service & web flash etc. , but it didn't work & I had a laptop with suse 10.3 working elsewhere so i switched.

    Currently I have (leasing is awesome) Dell Ubuntu 8 for a dvd player, tux racer, eduware-gcompris & email user box, Dell ubunutu 8 server-lamp, (old HP) debian lamp & imap, (old compaq) suse 10.3 user web & media, an (Dell) xp for power desktop user. Most disappointing, I have an xp mini notebook (Staples) to get proprietary institutional access (not sure why only IE encryption plugin works).

    Prior to this I ran cutom pcs w/ 98, freebsd, debian 3&4 & ubuntu 6 LTS mixed in.

    cheers

  70. lee stone
    Thumb Up

    debian and derivatives work for me...

    debian on servers

    #! Crunchbang on my business machines

    Edubuntu for my kids

    Ubuntu for my wife

    Windows for my phone.

  71. Wortel

    Which? One you know and/or like.

    Why not all of them? the power is freedom, freedom to choose whatever you like.

    Personally the choice is Mandriva, but I also regularly use Knoppix (nice toolkit), Trinity (last-ditch virus scans before data rescue), and DD-WRT/Tomato for embedded routers or Untangle for PC based firewall/router, and whatever happens to be running on an embedded device I get my hands on such as the Buffalo LinkStation.

    In the past I have also used and/or tried Red Hat (before and after the fork to Fedora, handful of releases), Fedora, Yellow Dog, Freesco, Coyote, Vector, Mint, Puppy, DSL, SME Server, SuSe (before, and after Novell got involved). Yes, I tried several Ubuntu releases too to see what the fuss was about, and it's quite nice.

    Really, it's just subject to user preference. Much respect for those that create these things for us to use, thank you!

    Written from a Mandriva 2009 + KDE 3.5.x + Compiz Fusion 'desktop' oriented HP Compaq nc6120 notebook, at the office :P

  72. Wortel

    @Trix

    ===

    No-one's asked the question

    By Trix Posted Friday 3rd April 2009 05:57 GMT

    Boffin

    How about updates for Linux distros that you can deploy to the environment without each and every machine connecting and downloading them willy-nilly.

    ===

    Nobody is stopping you from rsync'ing the repositories to a local server overnight, and then allow the client PC's package managers access to that new local server when you're good and ready. :)

    Squid as a caching proxy will help a lot too for your bandwidth woes.

  73. Andus McCoatover
    Dead Vulture

    As I'm now a Consultant*

    I use Ubuntu 8.10. Browse web, get e-mails - Tux Droid lets me know - fill in endless and pointless job application forms, write CV's, introductory letters, it's all I want. PC Compaq 700mhz, 512 meg, 20G HDD, and on the dole. Can't afford owt else. (OK, the eeepc is useful from the pub^H^H^H town but...)

    <Eeyore_mode>

    *DEFINITION: Unemployed bloke with leather patches on his Tweed jacket, trying to find some crumbs of work from his aged old laptop on his kitchen table in the second half-century of his sad bastard existence. Sigh. Pathetic, that's what it is. Pathetic. Some do, and some don't.

    Senior Consultant? As above, but owns a Zimmer frame and a stair-lift. And dribbles.

    </Eeyore_mode>

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