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Lindows, Xandros or Lycoris are now the big three desktop distributions?

What a ridiculous statement. Lycoris is a couple of guys up in Redmond that have produced a substandard distribution.

Lindows/Linspire, I still hold a bit of hope that they might be able to do something interesting, if anything because they are focused on the desktop and seem daring enough. However, they are yet to deliver something that matches Mandrake or Suse in stability, completeness or quality. Their biggest innovation is Click-n-Run and the desktop tutorials. The latter are nice, but I would wager that most users are allergic to recurrent monthly fees/subscriptions for software.

And Xandros is not a bad product at all, but they haven't delivered anything that differentiates them significantly from Mandrake and Suse. A new file manager becomes a liability as you become the sole maintainer. And K3b is a better and more complete solution to CD-burning than what is provided by the in-house Xandros app. Additionally, both of these offer a complete line of products, have been around longer and contribute more code to the open source projects on which they base their work. The fact that Mandrake releases alll of its configuration and installation tools under the GPL matters a great deal to us. Mandrake 10 and 10.1 are, in my opinion, the fastest distributions around and I have tried them all (Slackware, Fedora, Suse, Xandros, Debian).

For some reason and at some point in time, it became fashionable to bash Mandrake for the bugs found in release candidates, not on their final products. The much touted issues with 9.2 were primarily caused by a hardware company (LG) with defective engineering processes. Fortunately,LG eventually owned up to the problem.

I am also very hopeful that Suse will pull of something interesting in the next few releases. Suse 9.1 is already very good if a bit too resource-intensive. Suse's patching system is better than what any other distribution is providing right now because rather than re-download whole applications for a patch, you only download the necessary pathces, although urpmi is still much more flexible.

So in summary:

Linspire hold some promise. We'll see whether they deliver. Many people including me will not support a company with proprietary bits because if they happen to vanish or be acquired by a less than ethical company, nobody can continue where they left off. Licensing issues aside, Linspire have been a better open-source citizen than I had expected, but I would still like to see the installer and click-n-run under a suitable open source license.

Suse can deliver a very complete solution if they can stop the Ximian guys from warring with the KDE guys. I am a bit tired of the non-stop self-promotion by Miguel and their crew. But they do have a fantastic set of technologies that if put together coherently could deliver the best desktop around yet.

Mandrake is true to the Free Software spirit. Each release keeps getting faster and more consistent. It has the best multimedia support out of the box and the largest usenet and web communities. It is the oly company that has been contracted to deliver an EAL-5 product by next year, a security level attained by no other operating system other than IBM, with the technology that lets its z900 and z990 mainframes be divided into independent, isolated partitions.

Today, Microsoft's Windows, Sun Microsystems' Solaris, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX and IBM's AIX all have EAL4 certification. Mandrake EAL5 will be a significant selling point in government and business with security concerns. Their clustering support and their expansion into services are also very promising.

Finally, and most importantly, their whole development process and tree are completely open to everyone.