Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zanny 4445 days ago
"plays nicely with hardware" isn't really an Ubuntu thing. Hell, some distributions like Manjaro and Mint play better with hardware by including proprietary graphics drivers on the disk if your system can't boot on Mesa. Ubuntu doesn't have that.

In my experience of Linux distros, Fedora, Suse, Manjaro, Chakra, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, all the Linux derivatives like Zorin / Elementary / Mint / Bodhi, Crunchbang, etc all do the exact same thing and do it right:

Boot ISO, get live desktop, have a launchable guided installer. There are only a few such installers, a lot of distros reuse them (but some still duplicate the work needlessly) and they all perform relatively the same.

The outliers are your Arches, your non-live Debians (the default iso isn't live, for example) and your Gentoos, where you don't get a live desktop and have to do the routine manually.

> one that looks decent (e.g. fonts)

I've been installing Suse 12.3 and 13.1 a lot recently because I find a lot of users like Yast, and I think they have gotten their fonts pretty well in order. They used to be the poster child for bad font rendering, too.