Fedora Or Kubuntu?

[gazz]

Hi all,

I have decided to move away from all things MeSsy if possible and have pretty much narrowed my flavour of choice between Fedora and Kubuntu. I find the KDE environment is more elegant (from a purely visual perspective) than GNOME. It seems there is quite a bit of Ubuntu chit chat here and I realize Kubuntu is really only Ubuntu with the KDE GUI. So, would there be any pros or cons choosing Fedora over Kubuntu? Debian vs Red Hat? Timed releases, LTS, bleeding edge, repositories...so many things to consider.

I look forward to reading your comments.

[siamect]

If this is your first Gnu/Linux experience I would recommend Ubuntu anyway.

Kubuntu is as you say Ubuntu with KDE but I think Ubuntu is more solid.

I use Kubuntu at home and Ubuntu in industrial applications.But my favorite distro is Gentoo... it is source based so it takes time to update stuff but it is fun...

Otherwise if you don't mind proprietary components, take a look at http://www.linuxmint.com

They have a few different versions built on Ubuntu and Debian and one of them has KDE.

I think Fedora is good but I have no experience... If you want to do some RedHat consulting it can probably be worth the effort.

The good thing is that you can try all...

Martin

[RKASA]

PClinuxOS is KDE and has a gnome, E17, or other desktops - what ever you want and is a rolling distro. Means just update from synaptic from time to time and no need to reinstall the next release it just keeps rolling along. It is all linux and the best distro is always the one you like the most. I have found the forum at PClinuxOS the most user friendly for noobs and a family of helpful vet's. Happy hunting. It uses RPM not deb. I think its history goes back to Mandrake. If time permits you might give it a test drive.

[dharmabm]

If you want bleeding edge, you will definitely not get that with debian, their forte is stability which means they are slow to release new software (unless you run sid, which isn't always stable). I have been running various flavors of linux since the early days of redhat, but I have never really liked fedora much, for no reason I can articulate. For the longest time I was a diehard deb fan, but my current favorite is Archlinux, which you have to manually build by hand but is one of the stablest distros I have used, and fun to manage, but not very good for beginners. I would second both Martin and rkasa's suggestions, PCLOS is definitely a good starter and a rolling release, which means there are never any major upgrades requiring re-installation, once you install you always get the most up-to-date version every time you update the package manager. Sabayon is another good rolling release for newbies, based on Martin's favorite Gentoo, and is very comparable to PCLOS in terms of packages included by default. I have found their updater to be a little finicky, but otherwise a good distro. They use gnome by default but I believe a KDE install is available and not too difficult. As Martin said, the best thing is you can try them all, and most (including all those mentioned so far) have a liveCD, so you can have a look without actually installing. My preference is to use a USB stick and Unetbootin to create my installers, that way I don't have to waste a lot of cds by burning every distro to disc. Plus I run 5 different distros on my primary laptop, and usually rotate 1 or 2 partitions to try out my latest experiment. So, whatever you start with you can't go wrong, but don't expect to be tied to one distro forever, there are 1000s to choose from and just as many reasons to try as many as possible.

Regards,

Kevin

ps. my favorite resource is http://distrowatch.com/

it will give you a real good sense of what is available, and keep you up to date on what is up and coming in the linux world.

[dave_boo]

IMHO timed releases (especially set for to frequent of an interval) are more detrimental than helpful. F/OSS world changes so fast that it's hard to get out a polished stable distro and keep up a regular cycle such as some companies do. Imagine pushing out a release and it's buggy. A n00b tries it and has some sort of failure totally preventable had there been more testing time. The n00b then swears Linux off. Adoption recedes rather than surges. Developers lose heart and switch platforms.

I'm all for people living on the bleeding edge. However that bleeding edge should be controlled by the user; not forced upon them. If I SVN my lib-x264 (too frequently looking for that fraction of a performance upgrade) and the system becomes unstable who do I have to blame but myself?

I also don't really worry about LTS. How often does a home Linux user run the same distro version? And someone that's intelligent should learn over the course of 2 years enough Linux to build updates from source, perhaps keeping their distro of choice going for a very long time.

Repositories. According to Wikipedia's article on repositories, it appears that Ubuntu has some 1,5x as many packages as Debian. SuSE and Fedora are right behind Debian.

From what I read you're super wet behind the ears in regards to Linux. As such I'm going to echo what others have said and point you towards Ubuntu, or more specifically Linux Mint. I just installed Linux Mint 9 on my test partition and was pleasantly surprised. They copied the SuSE slab (which I actually hate) but kept the majority of the feel Gnome. Recognised everything out of the box (which considering the machine would have been ridiculous if the opposite was true) and bowled me over when I directed it towards my NAS. It played EVERYTHING out of the box. From xvid (need to re-transcode those) to 480p mkv to blu-ray rips (straight off the disc--hadn't had time to set up the handbrake parameters to my liking). And it did it all without even having the nVidia driver installed. Yes you heard that right, it played full bit rate blu-ray without stutter. Neither Ubuntu nor SuSE can do that from my experience.

If you don't want to follow the herd, than get SuSE. YaST is great and there's plenty of repositories out there to add in all the little stuff you need. Forums I'm not to sure on since most of my questions (which would probably be more advanced than you'd ask starting off) get answered in IRC.

Hopefully some of this helps.

[gazz]

Thanks loads for all the input. Will take a look at Mint as well as Kubuntu via live CD or USB (currently testing Fedora). A friend is looking at the Ubuntu live CD I gave him and which we'll install tomorrow since he has decided to go with it...the next GNOME release looks like it may be more of what I'm looking for judging by the screen shot I viewed the other day. Once again, thanks.

[pavlik]

KDE4 is based on Plasma desktop.

I tried playing around with both Kubuntu and Ubuntu and after few weeks remained with Ubuntu.

KDE4 looks cute but Plasma tends to live its own life and doesn't really care about your opinion.

Google the phrase "kde4 plasma crash" and you will know a lot of interesting stuff about KDE4.

Luckily it's pretty easy to switch between Gnome and KDE in Ubuntu.