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

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

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

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!