| Seven Linux distros fight over one old ThinkPad -- Conclusions |
(Oct. 5, 2006)
Conclusions
Summary scorecard
The following table compares how all seven Linux distributions stacked up in my tests on the old ThinkPad. Click each distro's name in the table to read its mini-review:
All in all, in my brief test of each of these distro's, I was quite impressed with their overall quality, performance, and ease of installation and configuration. The main exception was Mandriva One, which unfortunately ran into a display compatibility problem.
One point I should make is that after about five years of using Linux on my daily desktop, I had never experienced a debian-based distro until now. Yet, that didn't keep me from rating debian-derived SimplyMEPIS, Xandros, and Kubuntu very highly. I've certainly begun to see the advantages of the apt-get approach to avoiding "dependency hell," while remaining independent of any particular vendor's subscription-based updates, and not being held hostage to a specific vendor's selected set of apps.
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Finally, I have to say that I was truly surprised to find that my two favorites of all the seven distros I tested were from second-tier projects MEPIS and PCLinuxOS. My hat's off to both of these projects for what they've been able to accomplish!
Oh, and a word of advice to the OpenSUSE and the Fedora Core projects: how about coming up with some lightweight 1-CD live/install distros, folks!
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