Fedora. Ubuntu. Kubuntu.
As most of you know, Fedora 7 is now released; and dude did the screenshots look fiiiiiiiine. So I went right ahead and downloaded the DVD ISO.
I went into a discussion quite some time ago with a computer wizz, and an Ubuntu VS openSUSE argument came up. A long story short, at the end of it I wanted to see what Ubuntu looked like on real life, other than screenshots of course, so I download Ubuntu 7.04; I’ve had the ISO ever since then but never thought of giving it a chance.
Yesterday, I bought 4 DVD’s (each 3 LE, ya balash!) to backup some of my important files, and clear up some space from my ‘recently becoming so crowded 80GB hard disk’. Having freed 12GB, I was keen to try both Fedora 7 and Ubuntu, I had enough time to waste. So I burnt the Ubuntu ISO on a CD (there’s a pack in my mom’s closet, no idea why or where those came from; but hey, who am I to complain!) and set North, to my Power OFF button!
Fedora
I tried Fedora first. The first thing that came up to me was the fugly blue boot screen; it’s a disgrace (given that I wanted to try Fedora only because it looked nice!). The next loading screen looked nice though, crystal sharp and all. A few settings here and there, a hard time trying to figure how to partition my free space (which I couldn’t do right the first time because the options looked so darn the same), and nearly 30 minutes waiting for something to happen while the little blue wavey mouse thing was waving! (If it wasn’t for the DVD spinning sound inside my drive, I’d say it lagged and I would have normally restarted my laptop, but that noise was enough to tell me something serious is going on; it was spinning like crazy in there.)
Anyway I got past the installation, it took quite some time installing my packages and didn’t give me per package installation percentage, which openSUSE did (just like Windows); I’d have to say that openSUSE’s installer (I’d guess it’s YaST?) is by far better than fedora’s (I think it’s called Anaconda). Everything went well, I restarted and fedora started GNOME and everything seemed fine except, it was GNOME; I’m a KDE fan. So I exit the session (not trying to give GNOME even a chance to prove itself, although it turned out to be quite nice, you’ll see), and started it again using KDE, which was also installed during the installation, but I have to say, it was different from openSUSE’s; it was obvious. The differences although minor made a remark on me, for example openSUSE had their logo on the KDE menu, on fedora it’s the default KDE logo; which isn’t the nicest thing I’d like hanging there. The font management was kind of different, on SUSE all I had to do was install them all through my Fonts manager in KDE control center, in fedora nothing seemed to work (I know it’s probably me, I’m just telling a n00b’s point of view). A few others but what turned me off was the fact I could not make application shortcuts using my Win key!! Having failed to do that, I restarted, fedora was over for me.
Ubuntu
I hate to admit it, but the splash screen is breath taking, the loading bar is awesome, I was eager to see what next. Before I say this, I have to tell that I never tried a Live CD before, so whatever was shocking to me here could well be available in a similar Fedora distro. I was taken straight to a desktop, with Firefox, an email client, basically a fully functional operating system! The first thing I think of is “I can use this when there’s nothing else I can do with my laptop!”. I didn’t even have to mess around with my internet settings, it picked it up from my openSUSE installation and used it!! The experience with the installer was spectacular. Having to spend some time with GNOME, it seemed quite nice; though still, I preferred KDE. There was a secondary panel on top that was not quite what I wanted, I like a single taskbar on the left with minimum buttons, and the rest through shortcuts to my convenience; which I couldn’t make (at least the first time). The installer was very straight forward and took me less than 2 minutes configuring where I want to install Ubuntu, deciding not to delete Fedora yet. Whilst it was installing, and since I read kubuntu so many times around the packages being installed (it said “can be fully integrated with Kubuntu” so many times), I searched Google for the difference; and here it was; Ubuntu is GNOME powered, whilst Kubuntu is KDE powered. That simple. I couldn’t believe a distro were built based entirely on either KDE or GNOME, that’s pretty diversing; though the same base, debian I think?
Kubuntu
Having used Kubuntu for nearly 10 hours, I almost made my mind to port over from openSUSE. The installation itself was very fast and sleek just like that of ubuntu -in fact, it was almost the same but with a different colour theme and a different logo-, the options were very straight forward, the system was very neat, and was polished with candy ground up -again, just like ubuntu!-. I had everything tweaked very easily, fixed my resolution issue again (in 1 minute this time ;P). I couldn’t however fix the shortcuts to work the way I want them, for example Win+D to show my desktop, so that was a bummer (I could however use the Win key to create shortcuts for programs for example, unlike fedora); and I couldn’t manage to find how to get that done, there wasn’t a KDE Control Center like openSUSE had. (I couldn’t get my localhost to work after installing apache2, but it was a matter of time I know.)
One thing I noticed about (k)ubuntu is that there were no “root” account, it was just a password. If you want to run something as root, you’ll have to
$ sudo reboot $ passwordhere
which is quite confusing if you know what I mean. Anyway Kubuntu didn’t stay for long, I formatted my 12GB again and had them available for my openSUSE, now that I’ve seen alternatives I know openSUSE is the best. I just need to get a few things fixed, AND… I have the entire summer to waste on this, ey?
