ubuntu vs fedora vs mandriva...

[Josh Coffman]

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.

So is OpenSuse or Mandrake any easier as a multimedia desktop?

-j