Calvetti

1. The grating, annoying culture. Examples: Ubuntu is human (just because of the ugly brown interface), the official site designer has a coffee obsession, Ubuntu developers have a wacko fetish for alliteration, and strange, imaginary animals (Jaunty Jackalope – lol!).

2. The site is now so overloaded that if you post a question there, and you come back to it more than an hour later, you had better know how to find it again, because it will already have been pushed to the back pages. Come back the next day, and it could be buried under enough posts to make a book or two!

3. Possibly due to the above, the techs there are less helpful than those at other distros, and should you have suggestions for how they could improve that distro, or bugs to report, their opinions tend to be rigid. Ask them why they insist on making you use sudo to work on your system files instead of open an administrator session (an Ubuntu exclusive, as if the rest of Linux-world was full of idiots), you will see just how quickly they turn into war penguins!

I’ve been using Ubuntu since March, and am at last fed up enough to go give Fedora a try. I’m tired of the game of wack-a-mole I keep getting dragged into with bugs in the configurable interface (Ubuntu-style). I’ve had enough of the lame excuses I see posted whenever there’s a sloppy display issue, on anything from video to their gnome panels. Finally, I’ve seen enough bragging of the biggest software repo ever to unload programs which are useless because all they do is crash! The Jaunty Jackalopes want to snivel and snap at their users, so maybe I’ll see better attitude with the distro which wants to Reign!

Finally! A sincere distro comparison – and there’s no irony here.

It’s all (or most of it) down to habit, folks, down to what we’re used to, what we believe in and what we, personally, prefer. Think for a bit – if you take apart version differences due to release dates and look at a given x distros over a year, the package repertoire (apart from some outliers) is mostly the same, major components (GNOME/KDE/XFCE, Firefox, OpenOffice.Org, …) are the same, what’s really different is: relatively low-level tweaks (just how many of you compile your own kernel to get UXA and KMS?), some configuration variables and default settings. And it has always been my deep belief that it’s the default that determine the “average user’s” experience.

As an example, just take a look at Phoronix – I often do – and you’ll see that speed-wise, there are no clear winners (although, admittedly, Ubuntu seems to have a lead quite often. Whether this can be matched by running updates on other distros is another question). Similarly, any distro can be made to look/behave more or less like any other one. So, what wins, and dictates the final verdict, in any distro comparison? Habit!

Fair enough. I have in the past noticed fluctuations in the stability of suspend/resume, especially when I was still working on a Thinkpad x40. I didn’t spend much time looking into the issue. At the time, I just assumed it was a minor difference in driver/kernel versions. It seemed odd that the boring Intel chipset in my netbook would be having issues, but I did hear that there were some radical/destabilizing changes in the Intel drivers recently.