[GRLUG] The battle of the distros

[Collin Kidder]

So... I had been using x86_64 Arch Linux on my laptop for quite some 
time. I decided I'd like a change so I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 
8.10, Debian 4.0r5, and Fedora 10 beta. I tried the 64 bit version of each.

I'm somewhat shocked but of all four distros I found only Ubuntu to 
really be to my liking.

Arch was great for tweaking and is always on the bleeding edge but has a 
fairly small community and seems better for people who really want to 
tweak linux a lot. I'm over that, I just want to develop apps in linux 
and use it for my desktop.

Debian was total garbage. Absolutely nothing worked right at all. The nv 
and nvidia drivers were totally borked in Debian and could not find the 
LCD on my laptop at all. The other three distros had no such trouble. 
Debian also did not like my 3945 wireless card. Maybe Debian is a great 
distro if it works on your hardware but they screwed the pooch bad for 
my hardware.

Fedora was actually pretty good and I liked that SELinux was actually 
all setup and enabled. I would have probably stuck with it had I not 
been an idiot and downloaded the prerelease version 10. That caused 
problems. But, I didn't see an appreciable difference between Ubuntu and 
Fedora except that Ubuntu has a lot more packages available.

So, in the end I just could find no really good reason NOT to use Ubuntu 
and it works just fine. Seems to me that maybe the arguments against it 
are either old and expired or just based on Elitism. Correct me if I'm 
wrong.