I have been away from here for a time while I took a voyage around some of the new Nix releases and this is what I found .
Fedora Core3
I have tried all fedora releases since core 1 and while this is a good distro it just does not jump and say me me me .There is no WOW factor at all.
There is still nagging annoyances that never seem to go away .
For me these are.
1. Fuzzy Fonts , Fedore does a really bad job on rendering fonts they improve with work but never really give a nice clean look.
2. Scanner support , bah what a pain ,I have tried two scanners a HP2200 and my current which is a PSC2310 , both have never worked
3.NTFS support , flacky and frustrating , I know of the possible copyright issues but heck if Mandrake and Suse can get around that surely Redhat and Fedora can.
4. With every new release of fedora there seems to be a new battle of the sound to done.
5. I dont know what others have found but Mozilla always looks yuk in fedora.
To me Fedora always seems to be one constant Beta version , but I think that is intentional.
Mandrake10.1
Very much a point release. I think Mandrake should have delayed it a month or so , I know they stick to 6 months releases but that should be so set in stone . A months delay and they could have included , KDE3.3 , Gnome 2.8 , Firefox1.0 and Thunderbird 9.
As it is, whilst up to Mandrakes high standard, 10.1 really offers very little new and for anyone with say MDK 10 PowerPak it is simply not worth the effort and the dollars to change.
Suse 9.2
I think the same can be said of Suse 9.2 that I said of MDK 10.1 , but they did get KDE 3.3 and Firefox 1.0 into there.
But again it just a point release.
Ubuntu 4.10 Final
I have finally installed to final release of this , I have been to a PR version for so long , but I nuked my machine to look at the other distros so it gave me the opportunity to install.
Ubuntu is in its infancy , but it does so much so well. One thing that really impresses me is its font rendering , it is fantastic , no jaggies and beats Fedora cold.
Firefox seems to have been made for Ubuntu , it runs so well.
I hear a lot of grumble that Ubuntu does not include KDE, but it does such a good job with Gnome that it does not really matter. Gnome performes better on Ubuntu than it does on Fedora , MDK or Suse. Doing a post install of KDE is breeze though.
As for my HP PSC2310, I just add the additional packages from the contrib repositories and it works , as good as it does in Windows , if not better. Sane does a great job os scanning with it.
So its back on my main machine and it will be here for quite some time.
And just one final note , thankyou for the opportunity to moderate , its an honour to help with a great forum , and this is the best of the forums I visit .
Cheers
Bookmarks