[Lvlug] Recommendations on a More Suitable Distro

[John Mc]

>>On 03/21/2010 03:42 PM, Patrick Bartek wrote:
>>Debian has the reputation for stable releases, but they have
changed to a 2 year release cycle with 3 years support. That's still okay, but I would have liked 4 or 5 years support. So, any other suggestions for me to look at.

>Tom Garland wrote:
>Ubuntu Studio could be a good place to start to checkout the
capabilities of a Debian based system.

     "--->Although one of the best metrics to compare user bases comes from Distrowatch, their ranking is based on hits per day and it generally shows how much popularity distributions get within the website, not in terms of users but in terms of hype. I find it more interesting to compare their traffic stats http://distrowatch.com/awstats/awstats.DistroWatch.com.osdetail.html and to see what percentage of Distrowatch visitors, use what distribution. Linux Mint is the second biggest Linux distribution in number of users... The metrics tell us that Mint's user base is... 3 times smaller than Ubuntu's."

I run both KDE versions of Mint on my two notebooks. From what I understand the GNOME versions work just fine, and considering you are accustomed to Fedora that is probably important. The next release of Ubuntu/Kubuntu will be at the end of April. That should be a Long Term Support (LTS) version which they do only every two years. The Mint "9" release [based on Ubuntu 10.4 (2010-April)] is about 30 days later and will also be 3 years of LTS. The current version, Mint 8, has an application base of only about 500. They have announced that the next release, in May, will be open to the entire Debian repository of over 30,000 apps. Mint 8 is EXT4 compatible by default. The K-Mint versions are KDE4 compatible, by default.

The downside? Probably that it isn't RPM.

The upside? For Ubuntu/Kubuntu (from what I've read--but don't know) is that ANY of the media codecs, etc. are only one or two clicks away from being installed.

For Mint, any/ALL of the codecs you can imagine come with the distro. It works.
http://www.linuxmint.com/

-
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is
impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- Arthur C. Clarke, Clarke's first law