ubuntu vs fedora vs mandriva...

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2008-05-22 at 14:05 -0700, Josh Coffman wrote:
> On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 2008-05-22 at 12:37 -0700, Josh Coffman wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > >   It's been a while since I took a few distro's recent releases for a
> > > test drive. I've stuck with Ubuntu not because I love it but because
> > > it was a lot easier to get a working desktop with than my favored
> > > Fedora. With recent releases and how fast things improve in nix world,
> > > I'm wondering if other major distros have gotten better at the
> > > desktop. Can anyone say whether the recent releases from Fedora,
> > > Mandriva, or even OpenSuse make setting up your desktop easier?
> > >
> > >   I should mention that at one time I had written down every step and
> > > command I used to get a working desktop with Fedora 6. This, for me,
> > > means including nvidia drivers, ndiswrapper with broadcom driver (at
> > > the time bcm43xx drivers didn't support faster than 802.11b speeds),
> > > compiz, multimedia playback, and my personal favorite apps/games.
> > >
> > >   Ubuntu enables easier installation of nvidia, ndiswrapper, and
> > > multimedia. Has Fedora gotten better or are they still in a death grip
> > > with purist theology? I thought Mandriva felt a little lite as a
> > > desktop, and YAST2 makes me crazy. How are these doing?
> > >
> > >   Yeah, I read some reviews, but those only say so much. Besides, I've
> > > always gotten good feedback from PLUG members.
> > ----
> > Fedora 9 (the latest release) uses xorg that is not presently supported
> > by nvidia and thus, there would be no way to make compiz work with an
> > nvidia card today. That could change tomorrow but I think it will take a
> > month or so.
> >
> > Fedora 9 also took a major jump in KDE (KDE-4) which does have some
> > feature regression at this stage if you are a KDE user.
> >
> > As for multimedia...it is doubtful that they will ever change their
> > position, they don't provide binaries/codecs but they do offer to link
> > you in with fluendo where you can 'purchase' licensed copies and of
> > course, you always have the option of installing livna repository which
> > will get the various codecs for multimedia. Livna also publishes the ati
> > & nvidia binary packages (when available) and it makes sense to add
> > Livna to your repository list. I suppose that if you felt that they were
> > ever in a 'death grip with purist theology', then you won't feel that
> > they've changed.
> >
> > In all, it was a very aggressive release.
> >
> > Craig
> >
> 
> I've had strange package conflicts before from livna versus other
> repos. Its been a while but i think it was because I was getting the
> nvidia driver from them and some other package from another place and
> they both had the same dependency but different version numbers.
> 
> I understand where they are coming from; I just wish there was an
> easier/faster way to get a desktop setup with Fedora.
----
Livna and rpmforge/dag/freshrpms/atrpms seem to conflict and for the
casual user, livna should be enough and easy enough to manage. Enabling
Livna and any of these 'others' is a challenge, not for the faint
hearted.

Presently, I am using just livna and adobe repositories (and obviously
the fedora repositories)...things work well. I actually upgrade from
Fedora 7 to Fedora 8, removed the freshrpms packages and then used the
new 'preupgrade' package to upgrade to Fedora 9 and it worked great.

Craig