The Ultimate Distro Showdown: Ubuntu 9.10 vs openSUSE 11.2 vs Mandriva 2010

We laid our hands on all the three biggies—Ubuntu 9.10, Mandriva 2010 and openSUSE 11.2—and pitted them against each other. What followed was the battle of the century, as each distro pulled off one unique trick after another to stay on top of the game.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold, as we bring out the next generation of Linux-based operating systems, and try to find out which one has that little extra to make the cut as the best of the best!

The hardware

  • Processor: AMD Phenom X3 8650 @ 2.3GHz
  • Chipset: Nvidia MCP67 (nForce 630a)
  • Graphics Processor: Nvidia GeForce 9400GT with 1GB of GDDR2 RAM
  • RAM: 2GB of DDR2 800MHz Transcend JetRAM
  • Hard Disk: Seagate Barracuda 320GB/Western Digital Caviar 160GB (hosts the OS)
  • Screen: 15” TFT with a resolution of 1024×768

That’s a pretty respectable multimedia PC, except for the rather small screen size. However, it shouldn’t matter, because if the UI looks cluttered on my monitor, then the UI design is bad. Anyway, with the hardware specs behind us, it’s time to move on to the first distro of this review—Ubuntu 9.10.

Ubuntu 9.10—The Koala screams for attention

The Koala may have been the most publicised and talked about release of this month, something like the Linux 2.0 (a la the Web 2.0) for home users, aiming for a level of polish in its user interface hitherto unseen in the world of GNU/Linux. Apart from features like KMS and GRUB2, Mark Shuttleworth had considered ditching the yellow-brown colour palette for something new. Changes like ditching Pidgin for Empathy, which were rather radical at the time of the announcement, dismayed many Ubuntu fans.

Yet, Ubuntu has made it big. The user interface, though a bit loud in its shade of lemon yellow, is laudable (see Figure 1). It’s the same old GNOME though, and at version 2.28, a bit cleaner than the previous releases. In fact, I don’t know if it’s just me or it’s the Ubuntu customisations, but I did stumble a bit after the first boot into GNOME 2.28.

Figure 1: Ubuntu 9.10 desktop after installation

Figure 1: Ubuntu 9.10 desktop after installation

Continuing about the downside of Ubuntu 9.10, KMS and GRUB2 also came as big disappointments to me. Since I have an Nvidia GeForce card, KMS didn’t work at all (and sample this, an interview on Phronix says that Nvidia has no immediate plans to introduce KMS support into their drivers) and that, along with GRUB2, made for a very unpleasant boot indeed. It seems that the developers put so much effort into developing the KMS experience that they neglected the non-KMS sector. And considering that KMS is fully supported only on Intel chipsets, and a lion’s share of users use Nvidia and ATI cards, that’s a very bad decision indeed. Even Fedora was better than this.

Now for the good things… Empathy. Pidgin, heralded as the irreplaceable chat client in the world of both Linux and Windows, has finally met its match, and it seems our little bird flew away to the Empathetic competition. Empathy has come a long way since its introduction and is now a pleasure to use—and it’s certainly better than Pidgin, considering its support for rich chat features like voice and video.

The next unique offering is the Ubuntu Software Centre (Figure 2). Rather than use Synaptic by default for package management, it’s hidden away for the advanced users. For the layman, the Ubuntu Software Centre acts rather like an app store (except that there’s only free software here). Once you open it up, there’s a screen with lots of sections. Let’s say you want to install Amarok, which you know is an audio player. So you click on Sound And Video. From the listing, select Amarok. An arrow will appear in the selection, on the right side. Click on it. A mini-review of the software will appear, briefly describing it, along with a screenshot. Below it, there’s a button. Click on it to install. Simple, isn’t it?

Figure 2: Ubuntu Software Centre—a one-stop app store

Figure 2: Ubuntu Software Centre—a one-stop app store

Ubuntu also holds the distinction of being the first distribution to pay attention to those finer details that differentiate the polish of, say, Mac OS X and Windows to the crudeness of Linux. Packing in more smooth transition effects, extra wallpapers, visual styles and fonts than ever, users are now spoilt for choice (but weren’t we before?) over how to make their system look. Coming to looks, Ubuntu has now adopted the Dust colour scheme in the Human theme, with Dark Chocolate Brown window borders and selections, and off-white panels and bars with a slight chocolate hue. Nice colour palette, but I’d rather stick with the Dust theme. There’s a new icon scheme as well, called Humanity, but I don’t know if it’s just with me but many icons don’t appear in the Places menu and none in the Systems menu. Apart from this, Humanity is another revolutionary icon theme with mind-blowing icons. Overall, it’s a pleasure to actually work in this distro.

Now it’s time for Kubuntu. At first glance, it’s the same boot from Jaunty, and the stock KDE 4.3.2 without any customisations (see Figure 3). But look again and it’s a whole new story. It’s KMS here too, but this time KMS is a lot more subtle and at least the boot on non-KMS machines looks as good, if not better, than in Jaunty. With KMS on VirtualBox, those transition effects and the flicker-free boot experience did wonders. Boot into KDE4, and the KDM theme just blows you away. Enter your login details and you’ll be looking at the prettiest stock KDE4 you have ever seen. And mind you, KDE looks best in its stock theme. Change the looks even a tiny bit and you’ll cause a major wardrobe malfunction (or fashion disaster, however you want to put it)!

Figure 2: Live Kubuntu desktop with the Kickoff menu and µBlog widget

Figure 2: Live Kubuntu desktop with the Kickoff menu and µBlog widget

Kubuntu’s installer is another brilliant feature. A full screen image background modelled on the Air theme, with an installer wizard in the centre, guides you through the system installation.

I had a few complaints about Ubuntu, but have none for Kubuntu! None, except for font-rendering issues with OpenOffice.org, but I’m pretty sure that’s because of the fact that OOo is running under Qt. OOo never did like Qt!

About Boudhayan Gupta

The author is a 15-year-old student who suffers from an acute psychological disorder called Distromania. He owes his life to Larry Page and Sergei Brin. Apart from that, he enjoys both reading and writing, and when he's not playing with his Python, during most of his spare time he can be found listening to Fort Minor or cooking.

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  • Ok, now we know the good the best and the ugly :)
    It seems that the Best is called fedora
  • I have been using OpenSuSe for more than 5 years now. What I found the best in "OpenSuSe" is its look.........its user-friendly activities.

    I will not like to get indulge in any comparison between OpenSuSe with other Distros because I know that (inside stuff is same everywhere) its just the outer look that people are carried out with.

    To all new comers in Linux, I strongly recommend OpenSuSe.

    Believe me..........it rocks..

    DBS.
  • wobo
    > To all new comers in Linux, I strongly recommend OpenSuSe.

    To all new comers in Linux I strongly recommend $DISTROLIST_DW and then chose what suits your individual needs/taste/likings.
  • Kelvin
    I want to add a correction regarding "Criteria 7: Config centres" of page 4: Ubuntu actually has a "Config centre." The Ubuntu menu -- the bar that contains the logo -- can be edited from a right-click menu to make the default "Preferences / Administration" into "Control Center."

    right-click > "Edit Menus" > goto: sidebar ("Menus:") >select: "System" > goto: center ("Items:") > uncheck: "Preferences" & "Administration" > check: "Control Center"
  • Aastra
    You're Very Funny (re: About Boudhayan Gupta). I don't know if your weblogs show the exact profile of users that access your blog (i.e. the browser identifier data), so if it doesn't: I'm running opensuse 11.2. I've definitely had the same experience as you wrt to Ubuntu's installation being unstable (and I have very generic hardware, i.e. intel centrino, intel GMA, dual core 64bit with Phoenix BIOS; i.e. a totally standard motherboard) and I cannot for the life of me understand the popularity of that distro nor the attraction to the horrible ugly brown color scheme they use (although come to think of it, opensuse's 11.2 default green-gooseshit login screen and desktop background color is pretty awful too). The thing that really blows me away is how can people live with Ubuntu's disgusting Gnome interface with it's cartoonish icon set. Anyway, that's not why I'm here to comment; Keep in mind that while opensuse might be very easy to install, with a superior install application than other major distros, the release itself tends to be less stable than the other distros (during the 1st 3-4 months after release). The opensuse release folks tend to less testing and burning in and tend to push the envelope too aggressively (especially when it comes to KDE4) than other mainstream newbie distros and that leads to serious instabilities in the running releases, whereas Ubuntu's devel's seems to value stability more and therefore do fewer and more conservative releases.
  • tinhed
    Those who are criticizing ubuntu for a lack of "out of the box" support, i suggest trying out linux mint. Its not " ubuntu done right" as some people will like to point out.but it gives you lots of things peinstalled so you dont have to go searching. If you can keep up with its release schedule( which is 3 months behind ubuntu), its really worth a try. particularly for GNOME fanboys like me.
  • wobo
    I admit that you took your time and efforts to compile this review. But as some of the others I also find some weird differences between your single reviews and your conclusion.
    1. in the "Software" department you put Mandriva on top because of the rich supply of software - in the shootout conclusion you use this as a negative point by saying "it's bloated software base".
    2. In the installer section tell us about the old-fashioned look, while in the management area you praise the "slick gui" of the Mandriva control center, which has the same look as the installer!

    In the end I also agree with others that your main focus is on something which the user can change with a couple of clicks: the looks. You prefer deb before rpm, this is like Vi vs. Emacs, an almost religious war with no winner. Cut those 2 points and count again.
  • bhaskarsharman
    Ubuntu 9.10 has too many bugs. i think they didn't test it on different hardwares. My configuration is amd athlon 3000+ with gigabyte motherboard+nVidia Geforce 6100 graphics card. but the newer version couldn't install as the installer not detecting my HDD. also for many years,they treat my computer as a poor one as i couldn't increase the resolution to normal(1024*768) from 640*480 or 800*600!
    also they should find a way so that everyone who don't have internet connection could fetch essential packages such as media player codecs, plugins for the disk writer,other utilities etc easily. i found almost 90% refuses it due to lack of these plugins.Also,for more than one year,I'm trying to get a DIAL-UP MODEM DRIVER!
  • Barnabyh
    Re. your closing line: Real men use Arch or Slackware.
  • TeaAge
    Hmm nice Showdown but the conclusion ...?

    I'm wondering about the ranking, because it seems only based on your taste of the look.
    Mandriva for example was best in Software, Configuration Center, Multimedia and Custimasation. Means 4 of 8 or 4 of 7 because Criteria 1 has no winner and than you put it on rank 3 with a "far behind"? Doesn't make much sense to me.

    On the other side is the look and feel very subjective and shouldn't have such a big meaning.
    But I have to say, I don't think it's ugly. May you prefer the One more than the Free (Free is somewhat "conservative"), so take a look at http://wiki.mandriva.com/de/Datei:2010_onetheme...

    Also the ranking with the software installer is a bit strange: You prefer deb over rpm (why?) both a great. You prefer zypper over urpm: why? You mentioned the function to download everything before the installation, which does urpmi support as well. And did you know, that you can remove orphaned packages with urpme?

    Nevertheless, reviews are always subjective. It's ok that you find Mandriva ugly or that you prefer deb over rpm (and zypper over urpm) but after your ratings on that 8 criterias, you should raise Mandriva to the second rank. Sum the ranks and you get openSUSE 13, Mandriva 13 and Ubuntu 16.

    Regards,
    TeaAge
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