Review: CrunchBang ("#!") Linux 11 "Waldorf"

Main Screen + Openbox Menu

This is the last week of classes for me. I have turned in all my assignments and a handful of days until finals, so I can take today and tomorrow to write a couple of reviews at my leisure. The first will be #!.

#! should be familiar to many readers here. It is a lightweight Debian-based distribution that uses Openbox. While it is not technically a rolling-release distribution because it is pinned to the stable release, there were tons of preview releases for this version. Now that Debian 7 "Wheezy" is finally stable, so is #! 11 "Waldorf". Since version 10 "Statler", the Xfce edition has been dropped, so #! is back to using Openbox exclusively.

I tried this on a live USB made with MultiSystem. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

Preview: CrunchBang ("#!") Linux 11 "Waldorf"

I've been a fan of #! ever since I tried version 9.04.01. It's quite lightweight, yet the UI doesn't feel antiquated, and it's quite well-stocked with features that normal users would find useful. Two months ago, the first testing images of version 11 "Waldorf" went online, so I am previewing that now.

#! is a Debian-based Openbox distribution. It used to be based on Ubuntu, and at one point, it gained [and then later lost] an Xfce edition. It aims to be quite lightweight yet have the niceties of other distributions with more mainstream DEs.

I tried the 64-bit edition on a live USB made with MultiSystem. I should also say that until I finally get a new OS for my laptop, I will probably be trying the 64-bit editions of various distributions (after which point I will go back to trying the 32-bit editions), so I will not mention that bit after this. Follow the jump to see what this is like.

Review: Edubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot"

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Well, it's that time of year again: it's October, so another edition of Ubuntu has been released. This includes its official derivatives, like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and Edubuntu. Today I'll be testing Edubuntu because I feel like it doesn't get reviewed enough, yet it provides the same experience and support as standard Ubuntu, aside from having a whole bunch of educational applications included in the live session (hence the name).

So what's new with Edubuntu? Version 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" came with Unity for the first time, and I reviewed Edubuntu then; I found that while I didn't encounter any stability issues, I couldn't use the interface very easily and it didn't seem that polished. Since then, version 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" has seen a few new features and revisions to the interface, along with the replacement of GNOME 2 by GNOME 3, but most of the work has gone into fixing bugs and making the experience much more stable and polished. One other thing is that the GDM login screen has been replaced by the lighter yet more polished LightDM; as the live session has automatic login, I wasn't able to see that.

The live ISO file is 2.6 GB, which is a pretty hefty download, but that can be explained by the large number of extra educational programs included. I tested Edubuntu using a live USB made with UnetBootin. I did not test the installation, but fear not, because I will test the installation procedure with either Kubuntu or Xubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot", and I hope to review those soon. Follow the jump to see what the latest version of Edubuntu is like.

Review: Linux Mint 11 "Katya" LXDE

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This week, I again found myself in the position of not having much to write about here. Then, I saw that Linux Mint 11 "Katya" LXDE had been released, and considering that I had previously reviewed Debian-based Linux Mint Xfce, I thought that this would be a great opportunity to try Linux Mint's newest Ubuntu-based lightweight distribution.

Recently, the various editions of Linux Mint have undergone much flux. The only certainties are that there will be two GNOME editions, one Ubuntu-based and one Debian-based. I guess it's also pretty much certain at this point that the Xfce edition will stick with the Debian base. Outside of these things, for now, it seems like the LXDE edition, which I am reviewing today, will stick with the Ubuntu base, but that may or may not change after this; furthermore, the KDE and Fluxbox editions appear to have moved to the Debian base, but neither edition has seen release candidate ISO files released, meaning that there still seems to be a lot of work to be done on both. (As a side note, I will probably review the KDE edition once it is released.)

I tested this LXDE edition on a live USB made with MultiSystem. I did not test the installation. Follow the jump to see whether this really makes good on its promise to be a more lightweight version of Linux Mint.

Review: Linux Mint 11 "Katya" GNOME

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Linux Mint is currently my favorite Linux distribution of all and is the one I use almost exclusively on a regular basis. Since the release of Linux Mint 9 LTS "Isadora", I have made it a point to review new releases of Linux Mint. Six months ago, I previewed Linux Mint 10 "Julia" GNOME RC. Since then, I have also reviewed two versions of Debian-based Linux Mint. However, due to Ubuntu's fixed 6-month release schedule, I haven't been able to check out the latest version of Ubuntu-based Linux Mint until now.

Regular readers of this blog know Linux Mint needs no further introduction. The only things to consider while reading this are that Linux Mint also has a Debian-based version that is going strong, while Ubuntu's state of transition (what with Unity, Wayland, et cetera) could pose difficulties for Ubuntu-based Linux Mint in the future.

I tested the live session through a live USB made with UnetBootin. Though this is an Ubuntu-based distribution, I tested the installation anyway through VirtualBox with 1024 MB of RAM allocated to the guest OS with the live USB session as the host OS. Follow the jump to see if this new version of Linux Mint is just as good as ever.

Revisited: SimplyMEPIS 11.0

Before I start, there are two things I would like to say. The first is that this was meant to be posted in the middle of last week. However, that got thrown off with the Blogger outage, and after that I got really busy with studying for finals, and yesterday I was traveling back home from college, so today is the earliest that I've been able to post this at my leisure. The second is that I meant to write reviews of Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" based on opinions of one of my friends in college who is new to Linux but willing to try it out. However, we both got really busy and it never worked out. I managed to put most of my opinions of the new Unity interface in my review of Edubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal", so please refer to that if you want to get a quick idea of what I think of it.

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A couple weeks ago, I tried out SimplyMEPIS 11.0. It didn't exactly work; Plymouth failed to load, and X/11 refused to start when I aborted Plymouth and logged in through the CLI. I went through the forums looking for similar issues and/or fixes and found nothing. I tried going on the MEPIS IRC channel but found myself the only person there. So I gave up and posted a rather negative review. Boy, did I get a lot of feedback on that review — in fact, that review has gotten the most comments out of any of my posts ever. Wow! But then, a lot of it was negative, saying that "it shouldn't be called a review", et cetera. There were a few helpful suggestions here and there, and one of them (which is apparently a tip suggested on the MEPIS forums, and somehow I missed that) was to add the line "xdrvr=intel confx" to the end of the first GRUB line for MEPIS.

Well, I tried that, and it worked! So I owe readers of this blog an apology for testing too late, getting frustrated too easily, and getting cranky and whiny too easily. I'll try not to do that again. With that in mind, follow the jump to read the review that I should have written the first time around.

Review: SimplyMEPIS 11.0

Yesterday, the MEPIS developers released SimplyMEPIS 11.0, a year after the release of SimplyMEPIS 8.5, which I have reviewed before. (I went back and read that review and had a pretty good laugh at how short and shallow it was. Please feel free to do the same. That said, if you feel like doing the same at this review, please explain why in the comments.) In that review, I liked that it included many codecs and useful programs out-of-the-box along with the MEPIS tools, which were basically the Linux Mint tools before Linux Mint existed. I didn't like that Synaptic Package Manager refused to work.

For those who don't know, MEPIS was one of the original user-friendly Linux distributions (notwithstanding Slackware, which was user-friendly for its time), alongside Mandrake (now Mandriva); furthermore, it was the original user-friendly Debian-based distribution, as it came into existence two years prior to Ubuntu. On that note, interestingly, in a sign that Ubuntu really has stolen the spotlight, many articles announcing the release of SimplyMEPIS 11.0 accidentally called it "SimplyMEPIS 11.04", referring to the recent release of Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal". Furthermore, like Mandriva, it started with KDE, though while Mandriva has since then grown a GNOME variant as well, MEPIS has stuck exclusively with KDE; that said, there is a variant of MEPIS called AntiX which uses the lightweight Fluxbox and IceWM instead of KDE.

Though I didn't write that in the old review, I tested SimplyMEPIS 8.5 a year ago using a live USB made with UnetBootin. Although the MEPIS wiki says that using the "dd" command is faster and easier, it seems to imply that SimplyMEPIS 11.0 can still be written to a USB correctly with UnetBootin, so I did just that. I thought about testing the installation procedure, but I ended up not doing so for reasons that will become more clear if you follow the jump.

Comparison Test: Linux Mint 7, Windows XP, Fedora 11

Edmunds.com's InsideLine has a very nice method of formatting comparison tests of cars, so I will try to emulate that for this comparison test of OSs.
The contenders are Linux Mint 7 "Gloria", Windows 5.1 "XP SP3" (yes, 5.1 is the technical designation of version XP SP3), and Fedora Linux 11 "Leonidas".
Linux Mint and Windows are booting from my Sony VAIO desktop's HDD, while Fedora is booting as a live USB from my Sandisk Cruzer Micro 8 GB USB stick.

Summary:
3rd place - Windows 5.1 "XP SP3"
While this is the dominant OS in the marketplace, it just doesn't seem to be up to the snuff of the other OSs. The aesthetics, while subjective, look cartoony, and that's the least of its worries. Though its support for commercial games and other productivity/graphics/other software is very good, it requires too many auxiliary pieces of software (i.e. antivirus, etc.) to run stably, and it is far slower than the other 2 OSs. Any peripherals need extra installation of drivers, and any other codecs need to be installed (separately) afterwards.
2nd place - Fedora Linux 11 "Leonidas"
This is one of the heavyweights of Linux distributions. Based on the commercial (but still free software) Red Hat, hardware support out of the box is excellent without needing to install 3rd-party drivers. Codec support is somewhat spotty but is easily remedied through one or two command. While support for commercial software is somewhat spotty, it is easily remedied through Wine or other similar software or through use of alternatives. The mix of software out of the box is excellent, though aesthetics, while subjective, look too utilitarian and old-school.
1st place - Linux Mint 7 "Gloria"
This is a nice up-and-coming distribution. Based almost completely off of Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope", hardware support out of the box is decent, but codec support is excellent out of the box. The aesthetics, while subjective, look very polished and professional (while subdued), and the mix of software provided out of the box definitely fills the niche of the average user. That said, commercial software support is spotty at best, though it does not require auxiliary software to run properly. This OS boots and runs extremely quickly and allows for much customization easily.

Specifics:
Speed (20%)
Tie - Linux Mint and Fedora
Both seem to boot in under 30 seconds and have everything else running by then. Also, slowdowns in one program do not affect other programs or OS operation. They both simply leave Windows in the dust, even though Fedora was disadvantaged by booting from a Live USB. Furthermore, neither Linux distribution needs to restart after installing new hardware or software, seriously improving productivity versus Windows.

Aesthetics (5%)
Winner - Linux Mint
Loser - Fedora
Linux Mint's interface is extremely polished and easy to use. By contrast, while Fedora's serves the purpose easily, it is not much to look at (in my opinion). Windows falls somewhere in the middle.

Commercial Software Support (10%)
Winner - Windows
As the OS of choice for the vast majority of PC users, Windows support for commercial software simply leaves the other two OSs in the dust. While this is being (slightly) remedied through Wine or virtualization, due to the closed-source nature of this software, support will never be as good in Linux until developers start to take notice of it.

Out-of-the-box Software Support (10%)
Winner - Linux Mint
Loser - Windows
Simply put, both of these OSs have far better out-of-the-box software mixes than Windows. That said, Linux Mint has the fully-featured OpenOffice.Org right out of the box, while Fedora only provides AbiWord (and not the accompanying Gnumeric). Still, Windows' Microsoft Works isn't up to snuff with these pieces of software, and both distributions have more and easier-to-use system utilities than Windows.

Out-of-the-box Hardware Support (20%)
Winner - Fedora
Loser - Windows
Fedora provides out-of-the-box support for my peripherals, even my webcam, without the need to install proprietary drivers. Linux Mint does this too but for some reason cannot seem to register my mic properly. Windows, on the other hand, needs 3rd-party driver support for any peripheral to work.

Stability/Security (25%)
Tie - Linux Mint and Fedora
Put simply, Windows will die without antivirus or antispyware protection. This is partly due to the horribly designed user permissions system. By contrast, both Linux distributions need one to manually activate a virus for it to work; furthermore, more market share for Linux will not lead to increasing incidences of viruses on either system.

Customizability (10%)
Winner - Linux Mint
Loser - Windows
With Linux Mint, custom themes and other software can easily be downloaded from an online source and installed with the click of a button; they can also easily be reverted as well. Fedora isn't as great as some extra work needs to be done to get the customizations to take effect. By contrast, Windows practically can't be customized (meaningfully) at all.

Scores:
1st place - 2 points
2nd place - 1 point
3rd place - 0 point
Tie (1st place) - 2 points each
Tie (2nd place) - 1 point each

Final Scores:
Linux Mint - 1.7
Fedora - 1.6
Windows - 0.7

Though it may seem like Linux Mint mathematically won, in any case, both Linux distributions blew Windows out of the water, but I felt more satisfied using Fedora anyway.
This is not very scientific at all and should not be taken too seriously.