Five crucial things the Linux community doesn’t understand about the average computer user

5 reasons why Linux still isn't exactly taking the world by storm? Only 5? I can think of way more than that - and the reasons stated are obvious. There is a great diagram on page 2 though, showing a timeline of Linux distros, clearly graphing the branching out from Debian, Slackware and Red Hat. Note that (open)Suse has stayed on the same track for some consderable time now. That really shows from the minute you boot openSuse up - joined up thinking and the most complete home computer OS of the lot, save OSX, which is just leagues ahead of everything.

openSuse 10.2 is superb: it has the best desktop, the "slab" which is a sort of quick access panel giving you a place to put everything you want to be able to find in an instant, and of course, YaST2 - simply the best "control panel" ever. Of course, the package manager is not great - it's no apt-get - but I've found it OK. Apparently, openSuse is the first Linux distro to support hibernation on almost all major brand laptops, out of the box. That said, some users have reported trouble with getting drivers. So the minus points are package management and drivers... mmm... so what's new there? For all the great things you can say about it, Ubuntu gives trouble when it fails to detect what version it is! That would be like a WinXP machine downloading Win2k updates and Win2k apps! And don't think I'm making it up either, because our local server runs on a schizo Ubuntu with an identity crisis - causing all sorts of pain. And they say Ubuntu is the beginners' choice!

To be honest, despite my own preference for openSuse, Fedora seems the most solid and simple distro yet. It's refined in ways that couldn't be possible for openSuse (which is new in comparison, while Fedora is on v6) and solid in ways that Ubuntu won't be for some time. If my life literally depended on it, I'd choose Debian - it's package manager is great and it's like a Toyota - but if I was choosing for my department I'd go Fedora as a client because it's the quiet guy that just gets the job done, and full-blown Suse as a server because it can take the most abuse and has configuration and control tools that take the pain out of sysadmining.

Whatever... Go openSuse! and Slax! Looking at the timeline, you can see that Slax and openSuse branched off from Slackware - SuSe back in '94 and Slax in 2003. So perhaps I should really go Slackware, but I'm not sure I have so much time on my hands. Anyway, if I was a real purist I'd go Gentoo - you virtually have to build the fracking thing yourself from scratch, for frack's sake!

Anyway, it's all academic really - I'm blogging away here from my WinXP laptop that I only bought because I couldn't afford a Mac ;-)