Fedora 12 is available now. So is openSUSE 11.2.

[struggle4progress]

http://fedoraproject.org/
http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_11.2

I haven't tried either yet. Fedora is Red Hat's project, and I was never much liked Red Hat

OpenSUSE is eager for folk to buy the retail version

[struggle4progress]

1. Hmmm. OpenSUSE offers a 4.7gb download. I might pass on that

[pokerfan]

3. Apparently designed to fit on a single DVD

I think Ubuntu has the right approach insofar as their distro still fits on a CD. Everything else (including GIMP on 10.04) can simply be downloaded from the repositories as needed.

[struggle4progress]

4. openSUSE has a helpful little chart pointing out that the dial-up download time is about 8 days

OpenSUSE has some live CD versions that come in under 700mb, but the DVD version makes me wonder if installing the live CD will involve downloading another 4gb of stuff

BTW, Ubuntu apparently plans to remove GIMP from its standard distro in the next release; I don't whether that means GIMP will be pulled from canonical as well

[RoyGBiv]

5. It won't be pulled ...

It's just not in the default distro.

The argument is basically that it's more powerful than most people actually need and that it is very big. All that combined with the desire to keep the full distro distributable on one CD tipped the scales.

During the developer's discussion, it was mentioned that if you want it, all you have to do is a standard apt-get install of it after the initial installation.

[RoyGBiv]

6. Re: SuSE ...

The CD version, IIRC, is a bare bones installation. It will start downloading a bunch of other stuff depending on your installation preferences.

The reason the distro is so big is that it has a lot of redundancy and a great number of things that most distros leave to post-install setup. For example, you can set up a LAMP server just with what's on the DVD. If you want Apache, a lot of distos require you to download that later, or they are distros tweaked specifically for that and not much else. SuSE has it all right there ... plus all the KDE games, the *entire* KDE system in fact, which includes a lot of applications, a bunch of other games that consume a lot of space, etc. Their intent was to distribute a fully operable system meeting the needs of as many people and groups as possible without requiring a lot of downloads afterward.

Now, that's the intent, but it doesn't really work out like that. For the average user, what you get is the redundancy, but you'll still need to do a lot of post-install work for various things, e.g. multimedia, graphics drivers, some wireless stuff, etc.

It's a good distro to work with because it lets you play with what's available, but in the end, you're not going to need ten different kinds of calculators and half a dozen ways to play solitaire.

[struggle4progress]

2. Fedora's layout looks surprisingly like Ubuntu's

[pokerfan]

7. It's desktop is Gnome, isn't it?

[struggle4progress]

8. *slaps forehead*

um .... yeah ... i guess it is ...