Distributions I’m looking forward to

I’m back. Since I’ve spent a week outside visiting castles, ruins, museums and bookshops, there isn’t much I can write about…I haven’t tinkered, not even a single little tink. But I am looking forward to the upcoming releases of some distributions, some of them old favourites, some of them I’ve never installed before.

Debian 5.0

I have never installed Debian before, which seems crazy even to me. I think my reasoning was “Well, I’ve installed Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is Debian, right? Right? Hello? Anyone?”
Anyway, since I’ve installed almost any well-known Debian derivate, except the all-father itself, that’s what I’ll do when it comes out. That should be this month.

Mandriva 2009

Mandriva has been a favourite of mine. As a everything-and-the-kitchen-sink, I thought it came very close to Ubuntu. That’s why I tried a few betas of the next release, and to my surprise I didn’t like them at all. Installing software proved to be impossible, and using the nvidia driver didn’t work either. I hope these issues won’t show up for me in the final release. It’s scheduled to show up on the servers early next month.

Ubuntu 8.10

This one’s a given. As I mentioned before, I think Ubuntu does the best job in providing an OS for the “normal” PC user. By that I mean someone who doesn’t want to know about computers, and instead just use them. Unlike previous releases, I haven’t tried a single alpha. If any of the betas have the final new artwork, I probably will install that. Ubuntu will hit the download mirrors somewhere in the final week of October.

Sidux 2008-04

Another one I haven’t tried yet, but a distribution that seems to have a very loyal fanbase, at least judging from the comments on various newsboards. On the surface, it doesn’t have any special feature that really grabs my attention, but it’s said to be fast and stable. We’ll see. Like Ubuntu and Mandriva, it should appear somewhere next month.

Fedora 10

Fedora Core 1 was one of the first Linux distributions I ever installed (and messed up completely). Since then, I switched to other distributions, vor various reasons. One is the love of Fedora for bleeding edge software…I like a bit of stability on my PC. Another is the fact that it’s RPM based, which to me has always been slower than pacman or apt. But since it’s been a while since I tried Fedora, I’ll probably give it a go when it comes out, which should be November 18th.

PCLinuxOS 2008

Ah, the distribution that is slowly becoming legendary by not appearing. In the last month, I’ve noticed quite a lot of grumbles about the delay, which is a change of pace for the once fan-favourite number one of the Distrowatch rankings. Of course, PCLinuxOS is supposed to be a rolling release OS, but downloading a 600+ MB ISO, and having to download an additional 600 just for updates isn’t really everyone’s cup of tea. Apparently, it’s “very close to release”, but it has been very close to release for a while now. Fingers crossed.

And last but not least:

TinyMe 2008.1

Interesting, because it’s based on PCLinuxOS 2008 (or 2008.1?), which doesn’t exist, and even more interesting because it offers LXDE, which is Openbox made easy. There aren’t many distros that offer Openbox as the default WM, because, let’s face it, Openbox is for geeks 😉 LXDE tries to make it a bit easier while maintaining the obvious Openbox advantages of simplicity, configurability and speed. I’m curious to see how TinyMe holds up against my own Arch + Openbox configuration (which I think is absolutely perfect for me, but did take some time to get right).
The first alpha release of TinyMe has just appeared, so I guess the final release is still some time away.

In any case, I have some busy months ahead of me 🙂

San