[Cumbria] A comparison of Linux Distros -- Summary

[Ken Hough]

Have just completed a modest comparision of a few Linux distros / 
installations. You might have seen some
of my comments as I've been doing this.

Distros included were:  Mandrake v9.0, Red Hat v8.0, SuSE v8.0. 
 Slackware v8.0 was attempted, but because
of a real screw up of my HD and a dreadfull (IMHO) installer, was not 
and will not be used again.

A summary of observations are as follows:

On a desktop PC (500 MHz AMD K6II / ca 400Mb RAM), both Red Hat and SuSE 
installed correctly (dual
booting Linux / Win98) and setup all hardware correctly. ie CD drive, 
sound card, ethernet card.

On a laptop PC (Toshiba Satalite Pro 480 CDT -- 233MHz Pentium / 64MB 
RAM), Mandrake, Red Hat and
SuSE all installed and ran OK, again dual booting.

Only Mandrake was able to set up the PCMCIA ethernet card correctly.

Both Red Hat and SuSE appeared to set up the network card correctly 
during installation, but in neither case,
was the network available.

On this laptop PC, neither KDE nor Gnome are viable -- not enough RAM so 
lots of swapping and a long.......
time to run up. icewm is a viable alternative for most purposes.

Experience so far on the desktop PC with Red Hat hasn't yet persuaded me 
to move over from SuSE. To me,
they seem on balance rather similar.

WRT KDE v Gnome, I still prefer KDE. It seems that Gnome still has quite 
a few wobblies, whereas KDE
seems more polished and  has few wobblies. Since ani-aliased fonts have 
been possible under KDE the
KDE desktop looks good. I even managed to get that working under KDE2!.

By default, Gnome gives a rather minimalistic setup. Too much so, for my 
liking, but others obviously think
otherwise.

These notes are not intended to ignite any flames, just to provide some 
honest comparisons that might be
helpful.

Ken