>> I am not an engineer and can't afford to start a new career just now, but I am enthusiastic about Linux. <<

First, I read the first part of that sentence as a slight hyperbole. Nothing wrong with that, I do it all the time. But since this is the part of your post I'm concerned with, I have to set it straight. What you mean is something like "I don't know how computers work, and I don't have ANY time to learn."
Is that fair?

Now, given that, why your enthusiasm for Linux? I am guessing, for want of plausible alternatives, that it is the free software culture of which it's a part. But I have "bad" news for you: free software will never be as easy to use as proprietary PC software. It will always require SOME slight effort and understanding on the part of users. It just comes with the territory.

Consider the analogy with organically grown food. I don't think it will ever be available the way processed food is now, in beautiful packages in the supermarket next block. It's just impossible to deliver it that way without ruining it or at least compromising its quality. To get it one has to invest some effort, either finding a smaller, perhaps more remote vendor, or, increasignly, I think, growing your own.

Here's hoping you can find that bit of time,
Ian

For patent reasons, not many distros do include the codecs necessary for multimedia like MP3s, Quicktime and Windows media, but there are some. If you want an easy distro that already includes these codecs, try MEPIS or PC Linux OS.

http://www.mepis.org/
http://pclinuxos.com/

People who want to use Ubuntu often start with MEPIS because MEPIS has switched to using Ubuntu packages.

SUSE comes with the ability to play MP3s out-of-the-box but not the ability to rip them from CDs. Quickime and WM have to be added afterward but it's not as difficult as it might seem.

Don't forget "yum install firefox" in Fedora. You can't get any simpler than that. And if you are not comfortable with shell commands there's always yumex, which installs programs graphically.

The selection of distro's reviewed was probably decided by what everyone had. This set of reviews suffered from what many Linux reviews suffered from. No where were a set of criteria established. Also the reviews were by different people on different machines. No scientific basis for the rateings which were all opinion.

What is needed is a single mid to high end machine with a drive rack that allows each Distro being reviewed to be installed exclusively on it's own drive and reviewed by a single reviewer. Benchmarks may then be tested against and subjective features explained in greater detail. Perhaps use a standard like the latest Fedora to measure against.

Since playing with Linux has become my defacto hobby (and I'm still wondering why), I've decided to build a unit specifically for that task. I'm thinking that an AMD 64 Dual Core, 2 gig Ram, NVIDIA and one of the better MSI mainboards should do the job. I've installed a drive rack in the case so I can stick each distro on it's own drive and install the drive before boot. Until now I've been putting the latest and greatest on whatever low end unit that I'm currently not useing and if I liked what I was evaluating on it, got promoted to better machinery.

Like all tools, each Linux distro is best at what it was designed for. That should be considered in a review. I have Red Hat, SUSE, Fedora, Xandro's, Ubuntu and Linspire at home. I have no doubt that SUSE and Red Hat don't make superior server distro's, yet that isn't what I run at home. Nice distro's however. The one on my "production" machine is Linspire, a decision driven by my 5 year old grandson. CNR is an absolutely awesome and terribly usefull feature that allows me to provide for a boatload of great kid's stuff for Alex, the ultimate linux user.

The focus of the distro has to be stated up front and the criteria must reflect it's actual purpose. To simply state that Distro Yellow Hat is better than Winspire is meaningless otherwise.

Thats the review that I want to see!

I think it was a real comparison, otherwise all these reviewers would not have agreed on the rating given to the other distribution.
And it was a much better comparison that those you usually see, with only 1 or 2 reviewers, this one involved many, so it should be superior.

Mandriva is not perfect and is no receiving much attention because it is not a big company (relatively to Red Hat or Suse) and because their management made quite some irritating mistakes. But indeed, all in all, in remains clearly the best version for the home user who does not want to fiddle too much, have a lot of software, stability the largest hardware support (still a crucial problem for linux users who want things to work simply).

It can't be a joke... Jokes are supposed to be funny. That wasn't.

It might be palatable if the magazine wasn't so KDE centric. The fact of the matter is that this magazine ignores gnome users.

Read "her" answer once more. Personally I prefer to consider myself too smart for KDE rather than too dumb for it ;-)

There's been loads of discussion on the GNOME teams attitude of less-is-more when it comes to configurability. My experience is that what they've done is remove configurability from the UI, thereby simplifying it considerably for newbies. All the configurability I want is still in there, it's just under the hood in many cases (gconf-editor is your friend).

Getting rid of Nicholas Petreley improved the quality of Tux a little bit, but until they get rid of Mango as well, I've decided to stick with publications that include content written by people that are mature and informed. Why read a magazine with abrasive language that antagonizes readers when there are plenty of other places to get good information about Linux?

Both desktop environments have their merits, but as a software developer that values productivity, GNOME is definitely a better choice for me. Lack of usable C# bindings for QT/KDE provides more than enough reason for me to stick with GNOME. By using GNOME and it's associated software development technologies, I can build new applications and utilities in less time than it would take me to do so with KDE, and the resulting code is far easier to maintain. The GNOME desktop environment leverages standards-based emerging technologies like Cairo that are also starting to be used in ubiquitous Linux applications like OpenOffice and Firefox. GNOME development skills are more broadly applicable, and GNOME technologies are supported by a wider variety of programming languages. By comparison, most KDE development technologies trap the developer in C++ and are only used in KDE applications.

I realize that KDE may be a better choice for many new users that don't have a need for C# or Cairo, but for me, it would be stupid to use KDE. Tux is a magazine for new Linux users, so a KDE emphasis may be appropriate, but that doesn't mean that KDE is universally better for everybody. Mango needs to grow up and acknowledge that not everybody has the same requirements that she does.

"I really like the idea of doing a comparison and ranking the distributions on common criteria with common ratings, but I think we ended up with a compilation of independent reviews, without any true comparitive analysis."

There were common criteria, like ease of installation and multimedia. Jes Hal explained it. But the range Tux used to grade a particular distro is sketchy.

As much as I enjoyed reading this issue, and the "reviews" for the selected distributions (how were they chosen by the way?), I would have to partly agree with the quotation above.

Still, Tux people, nicely conceptualized issue; I like the way you people worked around the fact that what you have really are independent reviews, with a lot of subjectivity unrestrained. They read nicely, though.

Still, the comparison is wanting. Also, how come Vector Linux and Xandros were not included? Is Xandros too "easy" that you forgot about it? Do we discriminate against old pcs that those who run on them well, like Vector and Puppy Linux, are excluded?

Just a few thoughts I wanted to share.

I've just reread the Linspire review and I find it interesting that some of the very things the reviewer had trouble with are the very things that worked best on every Linspire install that I've done. I grant you, that being a Windows Network Administrator probably pushes me into the geek catagory, but I'm a lightweight Linux guy.

Specifically, getting to all of my printers and joining my home workgroup were trivial. Indeed, I had more problem with a Windows install that I did a month ago. Linspire just seemed to reach out and touch everything on my network. Because my big drive is in the Linspire unit setting up a Samba share did cause me about 15 minutes of exploration and discovery time while I figured out what I was doing. The hardest thing was setting permissions correctly to allow for guest access. This is not trivial and is how Linux/Unix works, so it will be similar for all Linux distro's.

Multimedia was the other great feature that the reviewer couldn't get to work. In my world, sound is everything! On each of my 4 installs (a laptop, and my desktops) in every case the sound card installed AND WORKED perfectly. K-Player didn't do everything, but M-Player which I got from CNR does much better. Also the CNR warehouse provided solutions to just about every need, including ripping CD's and DVD's. It cost me $10 to get the commercial DVD player, which could have been worse. The fact that a real REAL Player was included was very helpful. Multimedia for me is an absolute requirement, and if a distro doesn't do it - it goes on the shelf and thats the end of it. Linspire did not disappoint me.

Except for my DELL laptop, all of my other machines are Mike's. They have a mix of mainboards and processors rangeing from Semprons, PIII's, my sons AMD 64 Dual Core, and my wifes Celeron. Over the years I've been careful to look for a mention of Linux on the box of any hardware that I buy. 256 was the minimum memory that I ever tried to use (and 2 gig is the new family standard). Memory is good.

So, with the correct hardware - and hardware is cheap these days - Linspire does networking, multimedia, and installation better and easier than any of the other distro's that I've used. I'm surprised that the reviewer had problems.

As an special note, the last install I did was my son's mega machine. He's a college student in an Information Systems Security program, so this unit was built with power in mind (he's also a power gamer). I stuck the Linspire CD in and went throught the short sequence of configuration questions, watched it reboot for the install and expected to spend the next hour formatting and installing on the 250 gig HD. What seemed to be no more than 5 minutes later I was at a log-in prompt. I was stunned and angry because I knew that it could not have partitioned, formatted and installed that quickly. I was wrong. When I hit enter it started the tutorial. A bit of inspection revealed that it had indeed fully and properly installed. All I could do was sit in stunned amazement, a tear in my eye. It found everything! No part did not work.

Chapter 2 of that same story. Several weeks later we get Windows Media Center Edition. As this was to be a game machine the plan was to provide a replacement drive (we include a drive rack for that purpose on all newer family units) with Windows. After a few misstarts and the CD Drive having some problems reading the MS CD it takes me about 2 hours to get an OS on the unit. Then we spend another 3 hours getting the special drivers and updates on the machine. This includes getting the computer on the internet to register the system. 5 hours to get to where I was in 5 minutes with Linspire. I admit that there was some time lost to yelling, frustration and downloading drivers off the internet on Daves second machine to complete the install (a Linspire machine actually). I'm an experienced MCSE, what would a real person have done?

The only note is that I've since added a second video card and SLI mode that Linspire doesn't seem to handle, so I can't go back. I hope that they rectify this in the next release of the software. SLI mode and SATA are the necessary additions to 5.0.

i thought the latest suse was horrible and they were quite kind. i hadn't tried it since 7.3, and that was a multimedia orgy. the latest didn't have anything that i wanted, things like audacity, etc. and it runs so damn slowly with so much unnecessary bulk.