The State of Desktop Linux 2019

Bryan Lunduke — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 12:30:00 +0000

A snapshot of the current state of Desktop Linux at the start of 2019—with comparison charts and a roundtable Q&A with the leaders of three top Linux distributions.

I've never been able to stay in one place for long—at least in terms of which Linux distribution I call home. In my time as a self-identified "Linux Person", I've bounced around between a number of truly excellent ones. In my early days, I picked up boxed copies of S.u.S.E. (back before they made the U uppercase and dropped the dots entirely) and Red Hat Linux (before Fedora was a thing) from store shelves at various software outlets.

Side note: remember when we used to buy Operating Systems—and even most software—in actual boxes, with actual physical media and actual printed manuals? I still have big printed manuals for a few early Linux versions, which, back then, were necessary for getting just about everything working (from X11 to networking and sound). Heck, sometimes simply getting a successful boot required a few trips through those heavy manuals. Ah, those were the days.

Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE—I spent a good amount of time living in the biggest distributions around (and many others). All of them were fantastic. Truly stellar. Yet, each had their own quirks and peculiarities.

As I bounced from distro to distro, I developed a strong attachment to just about all of them, learning, as I went, to appreciate each for what it was. Just the same, when asked which distribution I recommend to others, my brain begins to melt down. Offering any single recommendation feels simply inadequate.

Choosing which one to call home, even if simply on a secondary PC, is a deeply personal choice.

Maybe you have an aging desktop computer with limited RAM and an older, but still absolutely functional, CPU. You're going to need something light on system resources that runs on 32-bit processors.

Or, perhaps you work with a wide variety of hardware architectures and need a single operating system that works well on all of them—and standardizing on a single Linux distribution would make it easier for you to administer and update all of them. But what options even are available?

To help make this process a bit easier, I've put together a handy set of charts and graphs to let you quickly glance and find the one that fits your needs (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1. Distribution Comparison Chart I

Figure 2. Distribution Comparison Chart II

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Spotlight on Linux: Fedora 14

Susan Linton — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:36:11 +0000

by Susan Linton

Fedora is the open source community driven testbed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux containing many of the technologies that will become available and commercially supported in RHEL. This means that Fedora is oftentimes considered "cutting edge." Despite its business class roots and developer appeal, many regular desktop users find Fedora just the right fit due to its general purpose nature.

The latest version was released November 2 and is still getting positive reviews. Most often highlighted were the features for the enterprise such as newly added developer tools, security auditing tools, a new virtual machine framework, and cloud and remote management software. Many are new technologies (or new to Linux) and are on their way to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As exciting as they are, many use Fedora for their plain ole everyday email/Web/chat/multimedia desktop.

Recent versions of Fedora have shipped with lovely default desktops, your choice with the DVD image. The default one-CD live image ships with GNOME, but options are available with KDE, LXDE, and Xfce for 32- or 64-bit architectures as well as the full DVD install images. However...

One of biggest complaints with Fedora is its lack of proprietary drivers and multimedia software. Some consider it a disadvantage. Fedora has a policy of shipping almost no closed-sourced code, other than what comes in the kernel, with their distribution. It's an ideology, their philosophy that many other distributions share. There are additional and third-party repositories with much of the needed software and there's never a shortage of helpful community howtos to walk users through such operations (example). In spite of this, many consider Fedora very user-friendly and in all other aspects, it certainly is.

Probably the main advantage of using Fedora is its large and loyal community. Never underestimate the utility of such a community. They help new users, maintain interesting discussion, and can even influence certain aspects of the distribution. One of the determining factors in the popularity of distributions is the size of their community. That puts Fedora near the top of the list.

Another advantage is the level of quality found throughout the distribution. Fedora developers contribute not only to Fedora, but also to upstream projects, and cherish the highest standards of quality control. Bugs are everywhere in code and Fedora is no exception, but Fedora developers seem to rise just a bit higher than some other distributions.

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