Review

I really like Fedora

I wont say that I love it, like I do Debian Lenny, but there are some parts about it that i like more than Debian.

1) It is more bleeding edge(sort of) by that i mean that it has many more update packages than debian lenny, those packages are available in Sid though.

2) My rt2860 802.11N Wireless Card installed easily

I just added the rpmfusion repo and typed

yum install kmod-2860

This driver is supported on the 2.6.27 kernel that fedora has, Lenny has the 2.6.26 driver and I needed to create a patch so it would work on Lenny, and it still lowered the strength from 300 mb/s to 54 mb/s.

3) Fedora 10 has KDE4, and this version, although still not the greatest, is still very usable for me. The odd program will crash every couple of days or so but nothing i can’t do without, and it seems very snappy to me.

However, there is one thing that is very very bad about Fedora 10

There is not ATI driver support for Fedora 10, this means that the propietary driver will not work correctly so you cannot enable 3D effects and xgl doesn’t work.

I spent a few days looking for a way to install the ATI driver, and i thought i found one

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=155503&page=1&pp=10

I tried this and i thought i had it, the ATI catalyst control center installed and the video card was detected, but xgl did not work. Howver this way has a good reputation for x86 systems and i have a x86_64. Maybe if you try it on a x86 it will work *shrugs shoulders*.

I can see that fedora 10 is a really good system, but ever since Fedora 8, the ATI driver has been unsupported. I would happily move to this system and still use KDE4, as it worked well here and KDE4.2 comes out in a few days.

I (and I believe most people out there agree with me) like having the newest stable technology, and at least at the moment because of the lenny freeze, Fedora has more up to date software than Debian(even SID). It surprised me that things that hadn’t even yet been able to make it to SID, were included in Fedora stable, and worked great!.

But, until they decide to support ATI drivers, i dont think i will be ready to move to it. After i finish typing this i am going to boot into Lenny and install the 2.6.28 kernel. Hopefully when lenny is released Debian will  catch up to and pass Fedora again, which i think is very likely to happen.

Ubuntu was one of the first distributions I ever tried, and it is the one that encouraged me the most to stay with Linux. Ubuntu is one of the most beginner friendly distros out there. It comes with a lot of packages pre-installed to make your life easier and help you out as you transition your life to Linux.
Ubuntu is IMO the best option for a new Linuxer, it comes with several drivers already pre-installed as well as being the most bug free distribution I have ever seen. My first wi-fi usb card, a wusb54gc, worked right out of the box with Ubuntu 8.04; however, it did not work with 7.10, the reason being that it was only added to the kernel in the 8.04 version. It is a very strong OS and contrary to the hype, not just a distro for noobs.

Ubuntu has a very easy to use installer, including a easy to user graphical partitioner walks you through the setup process and makes it easy for you to configure your installation. If you are not quite ready to commit and want to try it out before partitioning your hard drive you can either run it from a Live CD or from the Wubi.

As I already said, ubuntu now has better hardware detection than before but it’s not yet perfect, it configured my network perfectly and was able to detect a good propietary driver for my video card. Installng propietary drivers under Ubuntu is easy but not perfect. For example, when I told it to automatically install my ATI radeon 2400 HD PRO’s driver, it downloaded a usable driver all right, the driver it downloaded allowed me to use 3D graphics with Compiz, but the mipmaps was broken. I had to go to the ATI website and download the Linux installer for the exact driver for this video card, which was easy enough to do and corrected all problems I had with my video card.
Ubuntu 8.04 introduced Wubi, which allows Windows and Ubuntu to be installed in the same partition, (sacrificing some performace, of course). You also get a boot menu when your computer starts, to choose into which session to log into. Wubi is uninstallable with the Add/Remove program.