Friday, March 15, 2013

Ubuntu and Its derivatives- an update.

Ubuntu and its derivatives- an update.
It is more than 3 years of critical writing on Linux.
I am going to call it a day soon since the electricity bill is up and I have decided to cut down on my carbon footprint on this planet.
I have few books and the collection of ideas are put in print and digital forms.
That is in expectation of these blog ideas will vanish into wilderness when new form factors and new ideas hit the market. 
That is natural and one has to move on.
Only book I have not done yet is TQM-Quality for the Developers.
Linux is now matured fully and Quality as an inbuilt system should come into effect since tablets will hit the market and poor old 32 bit computers and many 64 bit computers will be relegated to the attic.
The Quality Cycles of 5 years would do the job and when the Linux community gets a complaint from window's migrant (Linux guys will quietly will find a fix) one should investigate whether it is due to hardware or software or user learning curve (steep or flat)  or Quality issue.
If the issue is not of quality the developer should leave the community to address the problem leaving his or her precious time for consolidation of issues related the platform he/she is involved in developing.
Equally he / she should see the penetration of the distribution among newbies.
If the distribution does not penetrate thir is a fault in marketing the PLUS Points.
May be virus or aesthetic values or damn indifference of the user.

Ubuntu 12-04
First time in my life I am using Ubuntu as a base for introducing it to resistant users like my daughter.
If they run into problem at home with any issue with Windows, they are now independent to sit in front of a Linux Box and sort them out themselves, while I am away doing things not related to Linux or house work.
Ubuntu's Unity has matured enough to be recommended to a newbie (if old Linux guys are grumbling, let them do it at their own peril and at lib) and canonical should invest its resources on Mobile Market and Cloud Computing.

1. I recommend Pinguy Linux since it has many derivatives including light weight distributions for netbooks.

2. Linux Regal Titan is a very good one for 64 bits.

3. Black Opal (Ubuntu mix) has sorted out many of the windowing and workplace problems.

4. UberStudent 64 bit is heavy (4 GiB) and I am glad to see they have put out a 32 bit one with less packages (2.5 GiB).
It used to have a CD version too.

5.Ultimate Linux light is  a good one for games.

6. ArtistiX is for Video, Audio and the Artists

Then, there are Dream Studio, Ubuntu Studio and many more distributions to cater for many tastes.
Ubuntu is still the number one that has penetrated the mind and soul of average users.

For specialist Linux users there over 300 other distributions which is not Ubuntu, to have a go.

Unfortunately Gentoo derivatives except Sabayon is falling behind and TinHat has to do lot of catch up.

OpenSuse 12.3-KDE

OpenSuse 12.3-KDE
OpenSuse has released a clean desktop on both 32 and 64 bits.
It is under  1 GiB and has all the productive utilities and I have no reservation in recommending it to a newbie.
I have not tested its Grub file and software center but I honestly do not believe they will have any issues if one is only having windows as  the other operating system.
Unlike Gnome all KDE desktops are heavy on RAM and make sure one has at least 1 GiB of RAM.
If you want a very light desktop Debian based WindowMaker Live is available in both 32 and 64 bits.
Since it is light, it is not packed with utilities and one has to download one's requirement from enormous resource pool of Debian which is over 66,000 and I have lost count of the number.