Added to my todo at the bottom.
added to my todo.
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templeOS?
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Hard pass.
Must support 1920x1080.
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SteamOS maybe??
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I think it might be worth an “honorable mentions” category, with Hyperbola, but I don’t know if it should be up there with the other fully-featured distros.
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This is great.
I’d suggest adding Antergos either as a honorable mention or as a footnote to arch. It’s basicly a installer and theme pack for arch. It uses the arch repos so both the wiki and aur are more compatible then they are with manjaro.
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Fedora ships with Intel microcode. That doesn’t make it the most unfree distro out there.
I agree. Fedora’s good on the freedom front. They’d avoid a zero.
Very few distros actually ship proprietary software by default, excluding the GPL firmware. Debian asks users. Ubuntu has an opt-in at install time.
Compare that to Sabayon, which ships Flash installed by default. That’s a zero in my mind. That’s the kinda stuff I want the zero rating to reflect.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the whole GPL’d firmware. Are you talking about binary blobs that have source code somewhere?
I’m talking about bytecode in GPL drivers. In BSD land, it’s possible to have closed source binary drivers (since the BSD license is not copyleft), but this isn’t possible in Linux (legally, anyway). Linking a driver against Linux triggers the GPL, and the resulting driver would itself be GPL.
As kind of a half-measure to get around this, some stuff in the linux-firmware source tree just uses assembly to write “magic numbers” to memory first, and then initialize the device. After that stage, the code is human readable.
Intel microcode is a good example, and AMD has one too. Most video drivers have it, lots of wireless chipsets do.
Presumably, the source code that generates that assembly does exist somewhere at the hardware manufacturer, but it’s not released. Only the resulting output of that code, which is then comitted to the linux-firmware tree, and licensed under the GPL.
This is why the “open source” / “free software” thing matters for Linux firmware. Those are not proprietary binary blobs. They’re freely licensed binary blobs. Not all binary blobs are proprietary, but all binary blobs hinder the user’s freedom to edit and modify it.
It’s a weird example where something has a Free Software license, but is not Free Software. Open source is about licenses and access to source code, Free Software is about the freedoms the user has.
Is amdgpu binary only? I thought it was open source.
AMDGPU is part of linux-firmware, and the vast majority if it is human readable. All of it is GPL-licensed. But it contains the bytecode I’m referring to.
It’s a difficult case. Different distros have addressed the situation differently. Fedora ships the amdgpu firmware, because the license is Free Software. Debian, on the other hand, classifies it as non-free, and puts it in the non-free repo.
But neither Debian nor Fedora would get a zero in my book. GPL licensed firmware is somewhere between “debatable” and “okay” on the freedom scale.
Putting Flash or Google Chrome as the default browser without asking or giving users an option to opt-out isn’t. Shipping a binary blob with a proprietary license would also be a problem.
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Yeah, that was in the back of my mind before I posted, but I forgot to do it. I’ll add it to the todo list.
Ah, okay. That makes sense.
I see this as an acceptable thing, but not great.
I agree here, for sure.
One thing i think needs to be made clear is that stability can (also) mean:
- platform API stability
- package stability (i.e., can i upgrade without the repository being broken)
- policy stability
- software reliability (i.e., once installed, does it crash if left alone)
- as stated, leadership/political stability
Most Linux distributions nail #4. Even “unstable” distributions like Debian SID.
Most bleeding edge fail #1 and #2
Older distributions seem to nail #5.
The major problem with debian “unstable” is package breakage in my experience. Upgrading is a roll of the dice and may be broken from time to time due to missing dependencies or broken packages, etc.
I took all of those (except API stability) into consideration when making the stability rating.
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Oh good. I didn’t see it mentioned in the description of stability though 
. I did see stuff about number of users and leadership, but IMHO the package repository and platform are more important for end user desktop being broken or not.
I’m sure you’re aware of it but for a linux noob they assume stability = does it crash. Just as important is “will running apt-get upgrade (or dnf update in the case of fedora) break my shit today” 
Better than Manjaro.
@imhigh.today Dude, bro, fam. I get where you’re coming from, but this is targeted toward beginners. Killing scores and demonizing a distro as being “anti-freedom” or whatever is what turns people away from Linux to begin with. Let’s save that for another day or discussion.
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I love this idea, but I do have one gripe. Should beginner friendliness really drag down the entire score? I mean , you aren’t going to be a newb forever, and there is already a user friendliness. I don’t think a steep learning curve should reflect as a poor distro. Maybe the beginner friendliness should only go to 5 like age?
In all fairness, I am a Gentoo user who fights this idea with Gentoo and Vim all the time.
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Great effort putting all this together and no doubt this will help some folks who are new to Linux.
The “elegance” category, which I assume refers to the overall design and aesthetics of a given distro, is a subjective element. Also some of these distros have multiple DE’s available to choose from, many of which are more/less elegant than others.
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Yes
Because
So the score for beginner friendlyness should be weighted as is.
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Tempted to add my own scores , mostly I agree but would probably tweak some scores a bit . Debian is 6/5 age? I mean lol but so should be redhat kinda maybe
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I mean, there would be no consensus on those score in any Linux community know to man, they might not be perfect, but definitely not too far from what a new user might experience, IMHO.
Check dates: Elementary released 31 March 2011.
Arch released 11 March 2002, both according to Wikipedia
[edit: I say this to try and help, not to criticise]
Oh, and nice summary, looking forward to a linked DE/WM review later 
[edit: I R Noob, don’t even know what is Difference yet between window manager and display(?) environment (?) until guide …]