Suggest Ubuntu Alternative

[Hamish Wilson]

What I find interesting about DistroWatch is how quickly many Ubuntu fans disowned it, even though back in the day they were trumpeting it as proving their dominance in the Linux space. Granted, the DistroWatch methodology is questionable, but I do think turning around and dumping on it simply because it is now painting a slightly different picture is kind of immature.

[daniloseo]

I'd suggest OpenSUSE

[brosis]

So, I have tried Magea 2 for few days, I don't think I can recommend it.

The +:
very smooth installation experience,
quite fast boot and good systemd integration,
very smooth work experience,
magea control panel, aka drakconf(?) - hardly had to use keyboard
proprietary drivers are ready in form of kernel, many kernels available (rt, 686, vanilla, server etc)
package management, when choices of two or more required dependencies are present, you are offered a nice choice.

-/+
package management, configuration, when translating from one package to next version and configuration changed upstream:
magea is way less flexible at distinguishing between changed by upstream/current version unchanged upstream. Instead if silently upgrading it presents a diff, gentoo style config update.
but other way around, found no ugly text-dialogs that break the experience.

The -
testing packages (backports etc) generally manage to be a older than on Debian Testing (think LMDE too),
package management, searching and downloading lists is painfully slow, like 12x slower than apt/dpkg,
package management, own graphical package tool is way worse than synaptic(why not port it?) feature wise,
package management, own tool can quit to desktop when installing/updating without any warnings. For example I accidentally closed magea center, but this chain-closed package mgmnt tool, which was in middle of installing stuff.
packages are much less flexible built,ie pull more stuff than Debian would pull for same functionality. Probably has something to do with RPM/DEB saga.
magea control panel, scanner install, failed to properly install and connect to network all-in-one scanner. Found out, it did not enable "epson2" backend, which is funny...
magea control panel often overcrosses functions with say GNOME control panel.
many translation issues (stuff not translated) although I had all "locale" stuff installed. Probably forgot to pull it.
the software is generally same... totem and firefox are equally sluggish and inefficient and video output for example.

Overall I like the automation amount very much, but the distro needs polish of packaging system.
Still, I think ubuntu scores more here.
So,.. my personal option would be for the guys to dump magea and instead improve debian, as a much more advanced base system but lacking polish.

Time to try opensuse..

[brosis]

Time to wake this OLD thread up.

After several weeks of doing nothing, I was forced to switch from Ubuntu 13.04, because its freaking EATING resources doing nothing on SIMPLE DESKTOP.
I am not against Unity, but such deficiency is simply killing. One gigabyte of RAM, plus absolute requirement to run GPU at profile HIGH. On a notebook, this is unacceptable.

So, I tried opensuse 12.3 and its out of the box, simply BEST Linux for the end user, I ever seen. Period. Absolutely loving it. The only yells I have is RPM, although zypper syntax is quite easy, and that the package manager is STILL not that functional compared to synaptic. Its completely GUI guided/tweaked, fetches everything by itself as needed, has nice design, works out of the box, allows a lot of tuning that you don?t miss CLI, has near-bleeding edge packages, and and and.

So in the end, the winner is: OpenSUSE

But, I still want Ubuntu or Mageia to succeed, or become on pair. Because, as we all know, Novell was corrupted by microsoft and is held in prison by its daughter-division Attachmate.

[bwat47]

Time to wake this OLD thread up.

After several weeks of doing nothing, I was forced to switch from Ubuntu 13.04, because its freaking EATING resources doing nothing on SIMPLE DESKTOP.
I am not against Unity, but such deficiency is simply killing. One gigabyte of RAM, plus absolute requirement to run GPU at profile HIGH. On a notebook, this is unacceptable.

So, I tried opensuse 12.3 and its out of the box, simply BEST Linux for the end user, I ever seen. Period. Absolutely loving it. The only yells I have is RPM, although zypper syntax is quite easy, and that the package manager is STILL not that functional compared to synaptic. Its completely GUI guided/tweaked, fetches everything by itself as needed, has nice design, works out of the box, allows a lot of tuning that you don?t miss CLI, has near-bleeding edge packages, and and and.

So in the end, the winner is: OpenSUSE

But, I still want Ubuntu or Mageia to succeed, or become on pair. Because, as we all know, Novell was corrupted by microsoft and is held in prison by its daughter-division Attachmate.

Sorry if I am being nitpicky, but it always gets me going when people say silly things like "I don't like RPM" and then go and compare RPM to some random GUI application like synaptic . rpm != synaptic, its comparing apples to oranges.

RPM is only equiavalent to deb/dpkg, rpm vs deb REALLY doesn't matter much; what's really important is the tools used to manage them: the under the hood command line package management tools, which is zypper and apt-get/aptitude. IMO zypper is superior to apt, zypper's SATsolver dependency resolution and handling of multiple repos/vendor changes are better than any other package manager I've seen (zypper can handle stuff like upgrading to another major distrobution version much better than apt because of its superior dependency resolution and ability to do vendor changes, its also much better at dealing with dependencies from third party repos and such). I <3 zypper. Next we have the GUI tools, the yast software manager and synaptic. I agree there, I do like synaptic better than yast, but I usually use zypper anyway.

Opensuse has a great page here regarding myths and misconceptions about RPM: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:RPM_sucks

[brosis]

Sorry if I am being nitpicky, but it always gets me going when people say silly things like "I don't like RPM" and then go and compare RPM to some random GUI application like synaptic . rpm != synaptic

RPM is only equiavalent to deb, rpm vs deb REALLY doesn't matter much, they are both pretty much just glorified tarballs; what's really important is the tools used to manage them: the under the hood command line package management tools, which is zypper and apt-get/aptitude. IMO zypper is superior to apt, zypper's SATsolver dependency resolution and handling of multiple repos/vendor changes are better than any other package manager I've seen (zypper can handle stuff like upgrading to another major distrobution version much better than apt because of its superior dependency resolution and ability to do vendor changes). I <3 zypper. Next we have the GUI tools, the yast software manager and synaptic. I agree there, I do like synaptic better than yast, but I usually use zypper anyway.

Opensuse has a great page here regarding myths and misconceptions about RPM: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:RPM_sucks

No, no, you misunderstood, but later sorted everything exactly the way I was trying to present...

Rpm vs Deb: I see two technologies that are actually of same high quality. This is why I say, that I dislike RPM. I started with DEB and I know them very good, and RPM is basically mirror side of DEB, so... I don? t understand why we keep two houses, when we occupy just one... a tiny line of trolling here. Only this, nothing more.

I also didn?t see any advantage of zypper, compared to apt. You can take this as a compliment, because both are very fast and efficient.

Regarding Yast2, what amazed me is its ability to correctly detect changes in manually modified files and -- automatically take decision if that configuration actually makes sense.

[bwat47]

No, no, you misunderstood, but later sorted everything exactly the way I was trying to present...

Rpm vs Deb: I see two technologies that are actually of same high quality. This is why I say, that I dislike RPM. I started with DEB and I know them very good, and RPM is basically mirror side of DEB, so... I don? t understand why we keep two houses, when we occupy just one... a tiny line of trolling here. Only this, nothing more.

I also didn?t see any advantage of zypper, compared to apt. You can take this as a compliment, because both are very fast and efficient.

Regarding Yast2, what amazed me is its ability to correctly detect changes in manually modified files and -- automatically take decision if that configuration actually makes sense.

Well, RPM is actually the LSB standard and came before DEB, debian is the one that decided to do their own thing I think what it comes down to is RPM used to actually suck back in the day, and thats why deb and its tools become popular, but these days both are quite good, so neither side will ever want to "give in" and use the other lol.

Regarding zypper vs apt, its not so much in the command syntax as the dependency resolution and vendor lock features. Zypper has an advanced SATsolver which is far better at managing dependencies than apt. If there are dependency issues zypper will always present you with multiple intelligent choices and one of them is always a good one apt just cries and tells you things are broken.

And the vendor lock feature is great. lets compare how a third party repo behaves (or adding any additional repo, really) with apt vs zypper. with apt if you add a third party repos with some of the same packages installed on your system, no matter what it will always try to use the third party packages if they are newer. This is fine if thats what you wan't but thats not always the case. With zypper each package has a "vendor", so by default the packages vendor is one of the default official repos. So if you add a third party repo that has a bunch of updated packages available but really just wanted to install a single application from it you can do that! The third party repo will NOT update your system packages unless you explicitly do a vendor change on all those packages. Managing multiple third party repos in zypper is so much better than with apt, these are the two reason I love zypper. Zypper + opensuse's build service is a very awesome combination.

I also do think zypper has nicer looking commandline output too, but thats a more minor thing.

[Alex Sarmiento]

Title.

The distribution should be "consumer" friendly, in installation and in service; and have some sort of "market place" (ie GUI frontend to big local package repo, or application manager etc).

I have recently tried Unity and polished unity looks pretty good.

But with current Ubuntu policy of
1) "we want to control everything", ie "Mir" case
2) "we require CLA everywhere", ie can turn all into closed source
sure people will search for alternative.

Please suggest and explain why(strong points, weak points).

Why do you care about those points? Just politics?

[blackiwid]

Regarding zypper vs apt, its not so much in the command syntax as the dependency resolution and vendor lock features. Zypper has an advanced SATsolver which is far better at managing dependencies than apt. If there are dependency issues zypper will always present you with multiple intelligent choices and one of them is always a good one apt just cries and tells you things are broken.

yes its the half truth, for apt that is maybe right, but not for aptitude. it gives you different solutions too.
in theory you could also pin packages in apt, to not use the newest packages from oem or so, but I never got that working when I tried it ^^

Why do you care about those points? Just politics?

Ubuntus list of evilness is just to long now.

the worst thing they did was:

1. spyware in default installation/config
then
2. replacing the music store in that music app and steal basicly money from them (yes its legal what they done their but not moralic)
3. dont send patches to upstream
4. inhouse developments that get released last day so the other distros can only integrate it later
5. they used nonfree lisenses on several stuff like their launchpad,
6. and still ubuntu-one server part is proprietary
7. their communications were horrific, letting other people work on stuff and 2 months for release they say, we desided to not use that stuff you exclusivly developed for ubuntu, of that poor qt-guy.
8. they flamed against wayland with lies or at least not the truth
9. they do their MIR thing.
10. even if you think that moralicly thats all ok, but having 20 own solutions that only use ubuntu will become a disaster for them, if no other distributions use that, its less likely that security holes get fixed or found.
11. unity, this move in that timeframe even fragmented the gnome-project even more, and that even with a unready solution, unity was 1-2 years buggier and slower than gnome-shell, they could have switched when they at least would have been at the same level, now they jump around between gtk, qt, compiz and back and forth they cant desite what they want.
12. exclusiv ubuntu amd or nvidia drivers, thats more of their we fight other distro thing, not thinking of a community
13. firefox thing, they could have switched to iceweasal they desided to go the more unfree route here
14. "we require CLA everywhere", ie can turn all into closed source sure people will search for alternative.


its just to much, they seperate themselves. I switch to arch linux and my relatives will switch to fedora, because they deliver maybe what made ubuntu a great distribution - the suckiness even from the beginning, a gnome-distribution.

now they have something qt-gnomeish bastard thing with android drivers. half qt, half gnome half android.

[Gps4l]

So in the end, the winner is: OpenSUSE

But, I still want Ubuntu or Mageia to succeed, or become on pair. Because, as we all know, Novell was corrupted by microsoft and is held in prison by its daughter-division Attachmate.

I would like add somethings.

Do you know that the deal between novell and ms, forced ms to sell Linux ?

SUSE comes from openSUSE, not the other way round.

So I could argue that openSUSE, has nothing to do with that deal.