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No distros ready to compete

urbandk 3rd Jun 2009

Canonical's Ubuntu still seems too buggy to me, based on my anecdotal experience.

Fedora 11 is super fast and stable but requires some know-how to run.

OpenSUSE just seems bloated and better for desktops, but I haven't tried it on a laptop.

I'm sure others can chime in about the merits of other distros, but I don't think any has the star power of Microsoft or Apple.

Maybe with Google's entree with Android or Intel/Novell's with Moblin the gap could narrow.

Tried a Moblin Beta liveCD on a laptop I've got. It's pretty slick, a much better interface than Gnome or KDE for netbooks, IMO.

I think speed might actually make more of a difference than people say. Windows loading services and longer times to load from hibernate do make a difference, in my experience.

Maybe Windows 7 will close the gap. We'll see.

In any event, I don't see Windows dominance stopping any time soon, or ever, but that doesn't mean there can't be a good, viable alternative.