Who are Ubuntu's Linux Competitors?

[askyourpc.com]

Who are Ubuntu's Linux Competitors? This may not be a valid question because Linux can be a broad description of a variety of OS. But are their any competitors?

[Bachstelze]

Most importantly Mandriva, Fedora and OpenSuse, I guess.

[Sorivenul]

Most importantly Mandriva, Fedora and OpenSuse, I guess.

+1. I couldn't agree more with this one. If were to rank them it would be:
1. Mandriva
2. openSUSE
3. Fedora

Of course, that's just my opinion.

Mandriva, draktools, and the whole Configuration Center are formidable competition for Ubuntu. Mandriva is my current #2 on my main machine. Forum support is good, but not on par with Ubuntu's, and I think that's what will keep Ubuntu ahead, at least for the time being.

openSUSE was my #2 disribution for a long time. YaST is a powerful and relatively simple piece of software. The forums are helpful and fast, but again not like Ubuntu's. Configuration is relatively painless, and the default themes for both GNOME and KDE(3/4) are some of the best default themes I've seen.

Fedora, with its focus on free software, provides a simple distribution with a sightly different philosophy from Ubuntu. While still fairly easy to use, setup may take a bit longer if you require non-free software, and this is a hang-up for some users. Also, the inclusion of Codeina in F10 has caused a bit of a ruckus.

Just my two cents.

[I-75]

Then again there are commercial competitors like Linspire (which Xandros recently bought out). Then you have Red Hat on the server side.

Going back to the free side of things, there is Slackware, Knoppix and BSD in addition to the ones listed in the above two posts. Then you have offshoots from Ubuntu like Linux Mint and Fluxbuntu.

DSL and Puppy Linux are considered by a few as special applications OS meant for minimal hardware requirements.

[lswest]

I can't think of any free OS having any other competitor. The whole point of Linux is to have choice. We're not fighting for marketshare, or for a monopoly, we're fighting to have our users be happy with their choice. Therefore if someone wants to use Mandriva, let them, it's their choice. Most patches on other distributions are shared via upstream, and therefore benefits us all.

Think of it like a huge aquaduct system, with each distribution being a tap to the same potential. The taps look different, and work different, but it's essentially the same thing.

[tidge87]

Windows Vista
Windows XP
Mac OSX

:popcorn:

[xebian]

Windows Vista
Windows XP
Mac OSX

:popcorn:

+1; You nailed it perfectly!!!:guitar:

[SunnyRabbiera]

In terms of distros I feel mandriva could take it up again real soon, the only bad thing about mandriva is that it has a sloooooooooooooooooooooooooow community unlike here.

[Xiong Chiamiov]

Going back to the free side of things, there is Slackware, Knoppix and BSD in addition to the ones listed in the above two posts.


Slackware and BSD appeal to a different audience (in general) than *buntu. The former are for people who like lots of control (doesn't Slack have manual dependency resolution?), while the latter is aimed towards those who just want things to work, and don't care if, say, CUPS is installed and they don't own a printer.

[cardinals_fan]

I can't think of any free OS having any other competitor. The whole point of Linux is to have choice. We're not fighting for marketshare, or for a monopoly, we're fighting to have our users be happy with their choice.
Canonical, Novell, Red Hat, and Mandriva all aim to earn a profit.
Just mentioning that...

[Sorivenul]

In terms of distros I feel mandriva could take it up again real soon, the only bad thing about mandriva is that it has a sloooooooooooooooooooooooooow community unlike here.

I agree. The 2009 release is a major step forward for Mandriva, IMO. Even the current RC is subtly yet noticably different from 2008.1, and in positive ways. While the Mandriva community may be slow, I would wager that any community is slow in comparison to Ubuntu's.

[L815]

I would have to say OpenSuse, and MacOSX.

[Hyside]

Either OpenSUSE ( which I have played around with ) or Mandriva as far as Linux competitors go.

[Twitch6000]

PClinuxOS
Mandriva
OpenSuse
Fedora
And last,but not least
DSL

[lswest]

Canonical, Novell, Red Hat, and Mandriva all aim to earn a profit.
Just mentioning that...

True, but they don't aim to do so by supplying a free OS (usually they make the most money with support plans). My main point was that they're not OS competitors, but more Support competitors. To me Linux is in competition with Windows and Mac OS X, but not in competition with other linux distributions, mainly because they all profit from fixes and patches applied to the upstream kernel. It's a community effort.

[fistfullofroses]

+1

Almost all distribution vendors aim to make a profit. Linux will always fight with itself over distro dominance. Indeed, most of Ubuntu's competitors are not Microsoft or Apple. Ubuntu's competitors are BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, zOS, Hurd, Minix, and most importantly other GNU/Linux distributions (Mandriva, SuSE, Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Slackware, Debian, Arch, Gentoo, etc...). Most Linux vendors do not care to overtake the two major players, they care to overtake all of the other under dogs. There is still a lot of money to be made there, and it's less costly.

[andras artois]

I wouldn't say competitors more like aimed at the same group.

But it would be Fedora, OpenSUSE and Mandriva.