ubuntu vs fedora vs mandriva...

[Craig White]

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