Yesterday I spent a few hours testing the latest beta versions of my two favourite Linux distributions (Ubuntu and Mandriva). I often get torn between which one of these two I’m going to use, but generally plump for Ubuntu when some particular bit of software I want to use either isn’t available for Mandriva or I have to spend too much time making something work and not enough time actually using it.
So far my thoughts are:
- Gnome 2.30 rocks, and has moved in exactly the direction I wanted it to.
- Ubuntu’s version of Gnome is now a lot further from default than Mandriva’s, which makes swapping between the two a bit of a pain. BUT, with a bit of tweaking I can make them both almost identical (providing I use Clearlooks as a theme and do a lot of UI tweaking in Ubuntu).
- I still try and make each new machine I install look as close to the default Gnome as possible. This is something I might have to reconsider, as both of these distros look a lot better when they look like themselves.
- Epiphany 2.30 might possibly be ready to actually use as my default browser.
- I don’t like dark themes. They give me a headache and just look wrong.
- The way Ubuntu integrates social networking is miles ahead of anything else I’ve seen.
- I really like Ubuntu’s default background, which is not pink.
- The new Ubuntu theme does look a lot like Mac OS X, but I think the change was needed. Mandriva still looks like it did 4 years ago, which is not a bad thing but which makes it difficult to work out which version I’m using.
- Both distros boot far more quickly that anything else I’ve used. Rebooting Ubuntu only took a few seconds on physical hardware.
I think that’s all for now. I do have a few screen shots which I might do something with later.