Some of the best Linux distributions of 2011 | Hacker News Reader

Some of the best Linux distributions of 2011

dedoimedo.com

30 pointsTsiolkovsky25 comments

Well.. The article saved me a some time by putting the bias and 'hate' right into the first couple of paragraphs. That allowed me to drop from reading mode to skimming right away.

- I doubt these shootouts make any sense, whatsoever. Without a clearly defined target and some backed up metrics (see shin_lao's comment) this is a random 'I like x' page and could've compared Britney to Madonna for all I care

- Gnome 3 was excluded from the start, because of the author's impression of it killing the desktop or something. While this is a matter of personal opinion, this disqualifies the entry as relevant for me (again, _my_ personal opinion).

- Lots of remarks continued to reduce the quality. I remember a couple of stabs at Gnome again, arguable comments about Arch and a little snark against Fedora. Probably more.

OK, we get it, we get it, you don't like Gnome 3. Every handful of years things change enough in an OS that it makes people uncomfortable, and a certain percentage then believe it's their duty to beat their chests for a year about just how bad the new stuff is. After about 18 months it's started to quiet down significantly, and before long the same crowd mostly can't live without it.

It's a bit boring, though, right?

Don't get me wrong, Gnome Shell in 3.0 / F15 was rather rough, but that is how it goes in open source. You don't get nearly enough usage testing until you announce it's gone gold.

While I did switch to ubuntu/unity for the time being as Fedora had some other issues, I absolutely saw enough of a spark in Gnome Shell to know I'll be back checking out 3.2 as soon as I have some time. While Unity is much more stable and polished I think gnome shell shows signs of having a much better usability once the rough edges get sanded down.

CentOS is a blast. It is super-light, super-fast, super-stable, with a million years of support, and running a mature and pleasing Gnome 2 desktop.

Benchmarks? Facts? Test procedure? At least some basic explanation?

I'm not going to defend the article and their test procedure, but I'll give a bit of insight anyway:

CentOS, as you may or may not know, is RHEL[1] recompiled from the source RPMs.

For RHEL [and I work at Red Hat], we:

* Sell support for 7-10 years from release date. For RHEL 6, that's support/updates/security fixes until Dec 2017 or Dec 2020 depending on how much you pay.

* Spend about a year before release intensively QA-ing all the packages. We have a huge team of people just doing this.

* QA each 6-monthly point release to the same standards.

* Have lots of developers working on optimizing RHEL specifically (as well as working upstream).

* Have a separate team that works on performance and tuning.

* Work with hardware suppliers to ensure best performance on specific hardware, and make sure we have support for hardware before it is released. [Typing this on a pre-release Intel SVP ...]

* Get world-beating benchmark results on things such as SPECvirt by working with manufacturers and other large companies, and going back to the original developers to work out bottlenecks on very high end hardware. [Last week my colleague was logged into a PC with 4 TB of RAM].

The above costs a bunch of money. I think we spend in the region of $100 million on R&D each year.

Note of course we only test the binaries we release. We don't test CentOS's binaries ...

[1] https://www.redhat.com/rhel/

* Still make HUGE kernel updates every few days on RHEL 6.x

which, while you're reading made me wonder. we bump into kernel issues from time to time due to update, and I always wondered why the policy was what it is.

basically it seems like backports while retaining the same kernel major/minor version numbers... because a lot of it aren't just bug fixes

Note that as I have been maintaining a Debian spinoff for years I highly value RH's packages quality, and have generally been picking from RH packages for patches and stuff "that just works" (incorporating that in the debs)

Still the kernel case puzzles me ;-)

We backport new features, bug fixes, hardware "enablement" etc into the same kernel. We keep the kernel structures and kernel symbols compatible (actually there's a big whitelist of approved symbols that your kernel module is allowed to call and we guarantee those will stay the same).

The basic reason for this is so software vendors can write kernel modules for RHEL 6.0 which will be binary compatible with all future RHEL 6.x releases. (The kernel modules will need to be recompiled when RHEL 7 comes out).

This involves lots of careful review of backports to make sure (eg) that all kernel structures like task_struct stay compatible. I'm not involved with this directly, but all I can say is it's a pretty amazing achievement over a ~4-5 year development cycle and ~7-10 year update cycle.

I assume that we keep the kernel major.minor version the same to reflect this. 'Course the release number changes each time ...

The article has links to much fuller reviews of the distributions mentioned. This one is just an overview.

FTA:"...it is based on Arch Linux, which is probably the least friendly Linux around..."

With a remark like that, I was hoping that the author provide the raw scores. Even so, on what grounds is Arch Linux not friendly? Their wiki is very easy to follow and understand for a new user. Not to mention their forum.

I think this is because installation and most of configuration steps of Arch Linux requires work in console which is considered unfriendly for an average user nowadays. Personally, I have nothing against console, but many newbies are scared of it.

It is not friendly in the sense that you as the user are expected to extensively configure your system before you are able to use it. It does not work out of the box (unless you have very basic needs). What makes Arch Linux great in my opinion (I use it myself) is that if you are the type of person who is willing to spend some time customising your desktop to achieve a perfect, tailored work environment, Arch gives you all the flexibility you need without imposing unnecessary complexity.

I have to agree with splatterdash. IMHO I've only started using Arch recently and the greatest part about it so far is the amount of things I've learned to manually do while setting up and configure my system. There are many things that I had taken for granted with other distributions because they are "user friendly."

Also, risking my neck here, Archbang is a neat little distro that's pretty much arch + openbox with a few pieces of bloat. A dedicated arch user might ask "why?," but it is extremely easy to use and install (and it is arch). Just something to take a look at if you decided you're too lazy to look at the arch wiki and take 10 minutes to do the real install. Archbang is polished enough and more of a "complete" preassembled distro that I thought would have done a lot better.

Plus, who doesn't love to tinker.

I started using arch recently and it was certainly intimidating working through the installer, my first install attempt led to me not being able to boot into arch or my windows partition and it took a fair amount of googling to figure out how to get windows back. I think it took me like 3 days to really get it to the point of being productive.

That said I think the arch wiki is truly amazing. I never expected such great documentation from a linux distro. I learned a ton while installing it and I'm still learning constantly. It may be unfriendly in that you'll need to generally configure things yourself before you use them, but the documentation is incredibly friendly.

There are many less friendly Linux distributions around than Arch.

Maybe the article author meant "popular" or "well known"? But even then the Arch community is friendly and they've produced some nice documentation.

Arch occupies the sweet spot between Gentoo and Ubuntu, favoring the Gentoo side I think. (I'm a long-time Gentoo user though a few friends love Arch.) You skipped the rest of the quote: ". . . , save for Gentoo." (And there is a number of OSes less user-friendly than Gentoo.) The reason for Arch's "unfriendliness" here is that it has a wiki at all--people don't want to read. (Somewhat related, this has also seemed to result in a decline in toy quality since people don't want to put stuff together...)

When you do a distro comparison, I suggest that all screenshots use the same light blue or dark blue background with no image, so that the desktop and any possibly unique features are highlighted.

This review uses typically cool screenshots, and their only result is possible conclusions like "ooh, that distro has unicorns!"

I'm gently disappointed that TinyCore doesn't get a mention. I'd like to see more devs on that; DSL has been dead for several years and Puppy is "odd".

Other minimal distributions, like Slitaz, are also worth a look, especially if internationalization is important.

Perhaps I might be in the minority here, but I thought elementary OS deserved a mention at least.

Why Natty Kubuntu instead of Ocelot? It's not even LTS. And besides having a top 5 list of Linux distros and three items on it are basically Ubuntu seems silly. Revised list:

* Ubuntu

* RHEL

* Arch Linux

I don't know if RHEL should be included. Although the list is of Linux distros, I was thinking that it should be geared toward home users. RHEL is great, but I wouldn't pay for the license (which is actually pretty cheap) when there are many good, free distros out there.

I'm not knocking on RHEL, I'm just cheap

The list has CentOS and mentions Scientific Linux, I thought to generalize them both to RHEL. They are essentially the same anyways.

I was just clarifying. Some benchmarks would be nice for comparison purpose though...another time, another thread. Maybe I'll take the time to set up a dev machine and do some testing myself.

This post was created to generate controversy. Don't get sucked in.

Very rough comparison, no metrics, inaccurate :(

I would love to see what not and whats for at least. Very little of that.

Mac OS x is a pretty good Unix distro, way better than ones like Ubuntu

What does that have to do with anything? It's proprietary, and not even Linux.

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