Linux Shootout: 7 Desktop Distros Compared

In the last couple of years, desktop-friendly Linux distributions have taken enormous leaps -- they're easier to install, better maintained, and more powerful than ever before. There's also that many more of them -- which means that many more possibilities to sift through.

In this roundup I've looked at seven Linux distributions, all mainly aimed at desktop users. Some ought to be household names; some are less widely sung but still worth looking at. All are meant to be top-of-the-line, "throw-and-go" distros for general use, so I paid careful attention to how they behaved on a fairly broad range of hardware -- how display, networking, or other default configurations were set to behave both out of the box and after an update (if one was available).

1 - openSUSE
2 - Ubuntu 8.4
3 - PCLinuxOS
4 - Mandriva Linux One
5 - Fedora
6 - SimplyMEPIS
7 - CentOS 5.1.

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