[svlug] Fedora or Ubuntu for novis

[Luke S Crawford]

Alan DuBoff <aland at softorchestra.com> writes:

> On Thu, 11 Sep 2008, Don Marti wrote:
> Anyway I know all of our milage varies, but Debian tastes better 
> to me...

Huh.  I had the opposite experience with a recent install of a Via
NanoBook (the Everex Cloudbook)  It comes with gOS, which looked slick
until I tried to update it, after which grub (and a bunch of other things)
broke.  Not wanting to spend a lot of time learning an obscure and poorly
maintained derivative of ubuntu, I installed Debian 4.  The X server didn't 
have the correct ModeLine (800x480 screen... debian stretched it to 640x480)  
the wifi didn't work, and none of the suspend functionality worked.  I was 
nosing around on the 'net looking for info on how to make suspend-to-ram work,
(with a laptop of this size, easily the most important problem)  and several 
people said it 'just worked' in ubuntu 8.04.    Being lazy when it comes 
to my workstations (workstations, in my world, are treated as disposable.  
Heck, the nanobook costs less than a decent unsubsidized cellphone ($300) 
so I can carry that 'disposable' attitude into the hardware, almost.  
Normally I just mean that I'm prepared to lose all data on a workstation 
and start over at any time.)  I decided to just install Ubuntu. 

 This was my first experience with Ubuntu (outside of making ubuntu 
Xen images for my VPS customers)   and I was very pleased.  Out of box I 
got a nice working laptop.  really all I had to change was the font size 
in the terminal application.  Everything else, suspend to ram, wifi, 
etc... "Just Worked"  I could even configure the wireless from the gui 
with no extra effort.  In my world, GUIs that work reliably are pretty rare.

Of course, I haven't tried to play multimedia on the thing (to be truthful,
I've not even tried to play music)  and the wifi sucks pretty badly
(it's the hardware, from what I understand, the antenna is placed in an 
unfortunate position)  The hard drive is like molasses on a cold day,
 and, of course, I haven't even touched the webcam.

But all the important bits work.  Heck, even my Verizon USB modem was 
almost plug and play.  The kernel module was included... all I had to do was
plug in the USB thing and execute pppd with the proper settings.   
(next time I have some free time, I'm going to pull apart both of those things
and try to put the modem where the webcam is.)  

But yeah.   I guess it's been a while since I've played with a modern
desktop-focused distro, so maybe I'm just easily impressed, but I found
ubuntu to be almost grandma ready.

(disclaimer: I've not played with fedora in a desktop situation)