PC Magazine offers a six-way shootout between Red Hat, SuSE, Debian (Potato), Caldera, Mandrake, and Turbo Linux. Red Hat takes top honors in the final reckoning (which can be viewed by downloading a PDF on the last page of the report.) From the article: “Widespread industry acceptance and ease of use make Red Hat’s distro a solid choice for general use, but don’t rule out other distributions until you’ve studied them and know which excel at specific tasks.”
PC Magazine: “Choosing Linux”
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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For some sort of reason they managed to mix up almost every logo of the different distributions. Very professional!
The logos for Caldera, Debian and Mandrake are wrong! Pretty lame article overall…
Caldera e-desktop is much simpler, user friendlier than RH 7.x. But RH -had to- win. Bah!
Course redhat wins, it’s 50% of the linux distro chemercial market. not saying i’m for that, personally i like mandrake. but i really couldn’t even read their article if they couldn’t even get the damn logo right. what’s wrong with these people?
i’m guessing they just copyied articles out of other sites and then for a rating picted either 3 or 4.
These were the lamest reviews and comparisons of Linux I have ever read!
I’m not knocking RedHat, but I’m sick of it winning dumb comparisons based on the fact that it is well known. I mean, in this review, the only things the editor mentions really is that RedHat is well known (“For many outside the open-source community, Red Hat Linux is the only Linux”) and that the installer is pretty.
This should have been titled “Choosing Linux Install Programs and support packages” since that is all they focused on. I guess how stable the system is and how well the installed software interacts AFTER you install Linux is entirely unimportant.
In my opinion, once installed, Debian is a far better system than RedHat is. It got only two stars though because the install is not pretty and there isn’t any corporation to offer support. The fact that Debian is probably the most well supported distribution on the internet must have escaped the editor.
Caldera only got three stars in spite of the fact that they offer the most comprehensive support options and were the first distribution to offer a graphical installer. Duh! Also, Caldera ships with Webmin, which is a much better tool than linuxconf, mainly because it actually works (I abandoned RedHat with their 7.0 release, so maybe linuxconf works better now).
Caldera tests their distribution more thoroughly than any other distribution (with the exception of Debian maybe). If you want a solid system that it easy to install, configure and maintain, then Caldera is it.
Anyway, enough of my ramblings. This was a dumb review and comparison.
I always think there should be a ‘none of the above’ option.
i’m not saying i don’t like redhat either but i’ve tried the 7.1 version… i didn’t like it. so what if it has a graphical installer? there’s lots of distros that do. and people point out how simple their installer is. to me the simpilist installer was corel’s linux, which is a three to four step installation; which also is too simple for me, even too simple for a windows user (mostly cause it has a problem of showing errors.)
also: does anyone know of any linux distros with the 2.4.x kernel other than redhat, mandrake, and suse?