Submitted by Recently we’ve seen the releases of both Ubuntu 8.04 ‘Hardy Heron’ as well as Fedora 9 ‘Sulphur’, to mostly positive reviews. PCWorld Australia decided to pitch these two popular Linux distributions against one another.PCWorld was especially satisfied with Ubuntu’s excellent hardware recognition. “Each installation found and recognized all of my hardware without requiring a reboot,” they write, “Even my media card slot, which Windows can never locate a driver for on its own, worked right off the bat.”
When it comes to Fedora, there were a few problems on the X.org side, but what they loved was the support for SELinux. ” Most users will find that the biggest benefit of SELinux is its management of root user authority: The program alerts you when you’ve had root privileges activated for more than a few minutes, so you can minimize your exposure from this vulnerability.”
They conclude:
For users who are already familiar with Linux, Fedora 9 is an excellent choice. Robust security features and installation options make it somewhat more versatile than Ubuntu, which offers a more streamlined (and therefore more restricted) installation. For most users, though, including millions interested in trying Linux for the first time, Fedora lacks the polish and ready-to-run simplicity of its more popular rival.Ubuntu 8.0.4 offers a level of functionality comparable to that of Mac OS and Windows, from delivery to installation to daily use. Unfortunately, the ties that bind all Linux distributions – primarily a lack of support for major Windows- and Mac-based business, design, and gaming applications – still hold Ubuntu back from mass popularity. For users with such moderate computing needs as Web browsing, e-mail, and basic document creation, however, Hardy is a compelling option.
The article is uninformed about the technologies used in Fedora.
For example, Pulse Audio was first introduced in F8, Ubuntu was a follower. From the wording it would seem it was introduced in F9 following Ubuntu.
PackageKit is not just for yum, it’s for every package manager out there.
Also it seems the hibernation, suspend and overall power management features where not properly tested. That’s a big improvement in F9.
I think the concussions are good, but the rest is far from good.
I am happy to say that F9 is the first time Suspend and Hibernation actually worked on my hardware.
NFORCE4-SLI board with GEFORCE graphics.
on the same laptop and for me Ubuntu gave me less “headaches” to configure/setup my environment.
Fedora brings up very very cool new stuff (ext4/selinux/usb installation/packagekit)… Bleeding edge so to say but the downside was that things didn’t run as smooth as Ubuntu, at least in my case. Is it me or PackageKit doesnt work that well ?
Maybe I got the wrong idea because there was so much buzz around this release. But apart from the problems I had, it’s still a big jump compared to other releases.
Ubuntu on the other hand is better polished and hardware recognition is very nice indeed.
The plus for both is the Java integration (ides/sdks/package) that its great… Cannot get better than the way it is now…
I think each distro had its own audience and niche…
But for everyday use I choose Ubuntu for it.
Fedora = slow, Ubuntu = fast
At least on my computer.
Could you give us more information, like what kind of hardware you have ?
Your comment worth nothing..
ubuntu = slow, beos = fast on my hardware.
see? about as much info
(1.05ghz Pentium III-S Tualatin, 128mb ECC pc100, 10k rpm 18gb raptor UW SCSI-2 HDD, ATI Rage Pro Turbo 8MB onboard video, Adaptec 2940uw PCI SCSI controller, onboard 3com 3c905 NIC, onboard cristalfusion CS4236 audio, dvd burner)
Edited 2008-06-03 16:43 UTC
Wow, you have a computer still able to run BeOS?
I’m impressed, this must be quite rare nowadays..
Just for fun, could you measure the time BeOS takes from the bootloader to the functionnal GUI?
I remember 14s on my (defunct) Celeron333 but my memory is fuzzy and nowadays OS take so much time booting that sometimes I doubt that 14s was really possible..
14s is turtle-slow. My C-64 was ready in 1s.
So what?
Your C64 didn’t have a multi-tasking OS with memory protection, a modern GUI etc.
Comparison with comparable setup are interesting (BeOS and Linux or Windows have the same features), C64 was different so this comparison is useless.
He was joking
Also, OS/9 booted in just a few seconds on comparable machines to the c64, like the Tandy CoCo 3 or Dragon 64… It was a multitasking Unix-like OS
The machine is actually at work, right now. I’ll time it tomorrow morning
I’ve been putting it together over the last few weeks as I have spare cash for parts. I’ve been wanting to run BeOS again and didn’t have any machines that supported it well
As it stands, it is 100% BeOS compatible. Even the motherboard only supports up to a max of 768mb of memory, which is the upper limit of BeOS that isn’t patched up
I might stick my nvidia 5500 in it since there are proper drivers now. The CPU is a 1.4ghz tualatin, but I can’t jack the FSB past 100mhz, so it’s stuck at 1050mhz. Plenty fast, though
I don’t mind much as it keeps the CPU cooler, too.
I’m probably going to put in a much larger scsi drive for storage and a smaller scsi SSD drive for the OS. Improve boot times tremendously
Yes, I spend FAR too much money on obsolete computers 
I’m going to bump the memory to 768mb of ECC PC100 in a few weeks. It’s going to be a splendid machine. It’s a tiny desktop, not a tower, so it can sit on top of my NeXT
OK, just tested. It went from boot loader to being able to use the GUI in little over 18 seconds. This install has always been a bit slower than my old BeOS machine on booting, for some reason.
It is a really weird BeOS “distro”. It uses the Zeta Kernel, drivers, bootloader, and Bone installation with BeOS R5 PE “userland” and all the Haiku replacement components and system hacks and updates (AGP driver and such) as well as OpenTracker.NewFS (OpenTracker.NewFS is a heavily optimized version of OpenTracker that was made to speed up FS operations such as directory listing and file manipulation. It’s extremely fast compared to the standard Open/Tracker.). It’s a weird beast that works amazingly well ^_^
Heres a link to the Read.Me for my install.
I’ve updated it a bunch and installed/removed programs, so this isn’t totally correct, but it will give you an idea.
http://helf.freeshell.org/What_is_new
It doesn’t matter. Both are Linux and Ubuntu is much faster.
I have to agree with the over all end result, if your familiar with Linux, then use Fedora. If your not to great with it, or your just learning about it, get Ubuntu.
I mean, after all, Fedora is biased off of RedHat, the Great-Great-Great Grandpa of almost all of the mainstream Linux distros.
I have swapped on and off between those two distros so much i have a spindle of burned CD’s PER distro, and i have no qualms about it.
Off to Grab Fedora 9 now!
I don’t agree. There are many other factors that play a role. If you are familiar with GNU/Linux, and want a distribution with long term support, Ubuntu 8.04 (or RHEL, or CentOS) is a far better choice, because it is supported for a far longer time than any Fedora installment.
Not all Linux/UNIX experts want to ride the cutting-edge wave. If you need to get your work done, it’s often far more comfortable to have a stable (in terms of support times and package changes) environment.
Which is, of course, nonsense. Debian is not based on any other distribution. Ubuntu is based on Debian. SUSE was based on Slackware and Jurix. Of the non-Red Hat mainstream distros, Mandriva is the only distro I can think of that was originally based on Red Hat.
Um, no.
First of all, Fedora is hardly the best distro for experienced users. Such a distro would be Arch or Debian. However, beyond that, Ubuntu has some clear advantages from fedora, starting from the fact that apt is (from my experience) vastly superior to yum, continuing with the much bigger support base and the larger amount of packages in the official repositories, and finishing up with the fact that Fedora’s “newer technologies” tend to be on the unstable side.
In addition, you claim RH is the “granddady of all modern mainstream Linux distributions”. This is patently false. Ubuntu, Knoppix, (insert countless LiveCDs here), MEPIS and others are all Debian-based. In addition, there’s Arch, Slackware and Gentoo, which all use their package management own system.
I think he meant best distro for experienced users between Fedora/Ubuntu
Could you elaborate? Cause apt offers nothing significant over yum the only difference im aware of is actually on the other side in that yum can handle different architectures.
Maybe yum is slow?
[root@turtle ~]# time yum -y update
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
fedora | 2.4 kB 00:00
livna | 2.1 kB 00:00
updates | 2.3 kB 00:00
Setting up Update Process
No Packages marked for Update
real 0m6.637s
user 0m3.845s
sys 0m0.319s
Is 6 seconds really a problem for you? And im not even using fastmirror package or cache.
new technologies are unstable for both of them reguardless. look at network manager or pulse audio I heard gripes from many Ubuntu users about the stability even though Fedora tested it first.
I just dont see big differences between these distros as far as software.
I believe the correct term for that would be ‘better’, not ‘best’, hence the confusion.
While we all know that RedHat isn’t the “granddaddy ” of them all in-terms of heritage, we all must admit that the vast majority of things that we take for granted now in Linux has come from the RedHat camp. At leats that is what I think he meant. It would be nice if someone would do the same thing to for fedora that Ubuntu has, namely take the latest release of Fedora, chisel at it until its stable enough and more user friendly then release. If Ubuntu can do it with Debian there is no reason why someone can’t do the same with Fedora. That is all Fedora really needs stabilization and attention to detail. That is the only real thing that Ubuntu offers (I’m an Ubuntu user and will probably never budge, but I want all distros to succeed) but its very important and I think its the reason why Ubuntu is where its at today.
I would have to say Slackware would be the Great-Great-Great Grandpa of all linux distros ;P
Last I tried any RPM based distro was Redhat 6, that was back when Redhat was a fairly decent company and went all corporate. It’s hard to say which is better here. No matter what anyone says some people will always prefer RPM over Deb and vice versa. But Fedora does seem to incorporate and develop a lot of tools and Ubuntu just takes from it. Both are pretty beta though but that doesn’t mean they don’t perform well. I mean Fedora is testing grounds for Redhat while Ubuntu is essentially a Debian Sid snapshot with some extras/fixes etc. Everytime I see a new Ubuntu release I see people having problems for the first few months. Myself personally, I’ll stick with Debian. People who say Debian is old and outdated don’t know what they are doing or have no clue at all for that matter.
Edited 2008-06-03 11:05 UTC
What puts me solidly in the Fedora camp is the community’s attitudes and goals in contrast to the massive Ubuntu hype machine.
That’s funny that is exactly what puts me squarely in the Ubuntu camp. The community is large and full of enthusiastic albeit a little newbish community. They have an audience of new users and almost any issue you can think of will have been encountered and discussed in their forums. Meanwhile I have yet to here anything either in the forums or from Fedora about the issues installing the distro because of a 4 year old promise controller that worked rather well in Fedora 1-4 but now hasn’t worked for the last 3 versions.
My first ever post on OSNews.
I’ve yet to use any version of Fedora, but as a Linux newbie (first started with Gutsy) Ubuntu works well for me. The new 8.04LTS detected every single piece of hardware on my 11″ Fujitsu laptop, including the WiFi chipset, card reader and webcam…. which, similar to the article, is one better than Windows which needed a driver for the card reader.
It took a little over 2 hours for me to have a desktop with everything I needed (most of the time was spent downloading updates and packages).
Another thing that helps is the huge amount of online documentation available.
Lastly, I seem to get slightly longer battery life on Ubuntu compared to WinXP…. more so since I ran powertop, but I can’t back it up with ‘scientific testing’ or whatever.
I’ll still stick to my Mac Pro for my work since I need Adobe/Corel software and colour management to make a living (digital painter/photographer/retoucher), but as a mobile solution, Ubuntu is heavenly. Now if only someone introduced a touchpad interface/program similar to the recent MacBooks for Linux.
I’m not bashing Fedora in any way, since I’ve never actually used it, but I did a lot of searching online before I took the Linux plunge, and it seemed much easier to get info/help on Ubuntu compared to any other distro. Who knows,… I may gravitate to another distro as I gain more experience.
Question: I’ve got the firewall running (firehol) but do I need an antivirus solution (I’ve never used one for my Mac)? I don’t plan to ‘share’ files with windows systems, anyway.
Cheers.
Edited 2008-06-03 12:53 UTC
I don’t think you need antivirus, I’ve certainly never used it on any Linux I’ve run.
I would agree with you, unless he is running WINE for known target applications (Office macro’s, etc). Then maybe an anti-virus just in case. Not for his own infection, but so he can’t pass on anything to a friend.
I don’t have friends (aside from you guys) so I guess I won’t bother. I’d rather spend the time backing up my data for the next ‘clean install’ I’ll be performing in future.
Yup, I’ve been bitten hard by the Linux bug.
You usually don’t need an antivirus app for Linux (or for OSX for that matter, just don’t run Safari). If you are adamant about getting one then there are a couple in the repository. The best one imo is clamav because they update regularly, the downside is the awful UI. The easiest way to install it since you don’t seem to be all too familiar with Ubuntu is to open add/remove programs and do a search for virus scanner. Check the box on the left and it should be good to go. Note it will slow down you startup a bit (not by much though) but its added a new startup process so you may notice your startup taking a bit more than usual.
or for OSX for that matter, just don’t run Safari
In a world where unauthorized remote access to OS is getting harder, it’s well known that the trend is to use cross-plateform application as an attack vector (firefox, flash, VLC, “you-name-it”…).
Could you please give an example of a real threat (no proof of concept) concerning Safari that haven’t been patched already ?
Sure enough, Safari is no more bullet-proof than other web browsers, but please explain how it is more insecure than say firefox ?
AFAIK Firefox users are not safer than Safari users…
The fact that some coward modded me down for no reason clearly demonstrates my previous statement is correct!
Thank you anonymous coward !
That has to be the worst piece of reasoning I’ve ever seen.
There were a couple of reports about bugs in safari that could give hackers access to the OS. I like safari but I don’t trust, after all the first jailbreak for the iphone used a simple buffer overun to access the iphone internals from the browser (using a tiff image).
Clamav like all Linux antivirus apps is primarily directed against Windows viruses. You only need it if you are running a Linux mailserver or fileserver for Windows clients.
Would anyone seriously consider buying an HD-DVD player at this point, or is that just an old ad in rotation?
Still a bunch of movies in HDDVD format. And people like me exist, who are A/V whores and buy anything. I still have Reel to Reels…
I have Fedora and Ubuntu both installed at my house.
I use Fedora so I am always ahead of the curve at work where we use RHEL exclusively.
I have Ubuntu loaded on my wife’s computer.
In my environment Ubuntu takes a lot less tweaking to work correctly then Fedora does. It is also very easy to upgrade between versions then Fedora is currently.
Fedora takes some additional tweaking to get working but I love to tinker so I do not mind if I break my machine. I do mind if I break my wife’s.
I have been using Fedora since Fedora Core 4, but I have had nothing but problems with Fedora 9 and have had to go back to Fedora 8. For example wine keeps segfaulting the kernel.
You might try this:
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=188898
There have been some problems with Wine in the latest kernels. Its not just effecting Fedora 9 but also Ubuntu 8.04.
There is a workaround for now.
I did that to originally get wine running under Fedora 9. This is not the problem I am experiencing. My issue is after starting wine it will segfault the kernel.
There’s no such thing as segfaulting the kernel. You mean kernel oops or kernel panic, only one of which you’ll notice at the time, unless it oopses something like X.
Gaaah? Have you reported this? In indded you’re crashing the kernel (as in OOPs) this -is- a major bug.
– Gilboa
I’ve been using Fedora 9 now for awhile and its very nice.
There are many new features across the board but the nicest has to be the ability to upgrade without a full re-installation.
Am I the only ‘experienced’ user that likes Ubuntu because I don’t have to tinker with stuff to make it work?
The thing that really got me about Fedora 9 is media support. The first time you to play an MP3, it wants you to download the MP3 codec (some package from a company I’ve not heard of). If you want to play a movie, it directs you to a package from that same company that you have to PAY for. I know I can go add another yum repo to get the normal open source stuff, but this seems completely bizarre to me.
Ubuntu, of course, just works (ok, you have to download codecs for movies it prompted and nearly automatic).
I’ve been evaluating both for work. Fedora will be recommended for our ‘workstations’ that need newer stuff than RHEL/CentOS. It’s easier to integrate with our existing RHEL systems and they don’t need to be watching movies. Any standalone machines or laptops will likely be getting Ubuntu since it’s easier.
First, the codecs/MP3/etc problem is a legal problem that’s being shared by -all- the major U.S. based distributions.
Don’t shout at RedHat/Fedora/Ubuntu – shout at your lawmakers.
Second, AFAIR, your claim that the codec problem can be solved automatically under Ubunutu is false – much like Fedora you Ubuntu requires the unofficial RestrictedFormats package to start the process (of gaining the required codecs).
Fedora tried to solve the -legal- problem by giving the user the option (beyond using external repositories) to download legally licensed codecs – but this never remove the option to use unofficial software repositories such as Livna and FreshRPMs.
You may argue that adding these codecs to Fedora is less user-friendly – but that, IMHO, is a matter of personal taste.
– Gilboa
Ok, i was mistaken a bit, a lot of the common features that we take for granted originated / were developed by the RH team.
Debian has such a slow update and release cycle Shuttleworth did good by making Ubuntu, if it was up to the Debian team “Bleeding Edge” would be a lost cause.
I mean, come on, Of all of the distros between Fedora biased ones and Ubuntu, I have more problems with Ubuntu than what I do with Fedora.
Now, I don’t expect every one else’s to do line mine, as the saying goes, mileage can vary, but, in and to my experience, RH/Fedora has always had the better distro.
Ubuntu is just way to “this is for Noobs” like for any linux user to ever take it serious, it is like Toddler Linux. Use it for a while, learn about it, then move on to a real, serious linux.
You know, one where building your own Kernel or such is not answered by on the boards “Why do you want to do that?”
So yeah, Ubuntu is great for people just out of Mac / Windows, and they want to head in to the shallow end of the pool, but for serious power users that LIKE bleeding Edge and Top of the Line, then Fedora is for you.
And I understand wanting stable system, but as i have said, I have NEVER had a fedora system go bad on me, was where i cant even count that high on how many timer an Ubuntu one has done such. I just like getting deep and dirty in the configs and tools of the system, and it is fun. However, doing so with Ubuntu is kinda frowned upon.
Although Fedora vs Ubuntu “discussions” are a great source of entertainment, it’s kind of useful to realise that the two projects have different goals and different audiences.
I don’t get why people think Ubuntu has better hardwaer compatibility than Fedora.
It may certainly be the case, but I would suspect that newer kernels would have better compatibility. Fedora generally has newer kernels.
Am I missing something?
(also 3d support should make it into mainline updates for newer Radeon cards (R5xx/X1xx) Real Soon Now – unless the updates have already been pushed. I jumped ahead and got them directly from the build system (koji))
It’s not that there is hardware that is not support directly in Fedora, it’s the ease in which it is set up.
For example, for a machine with an NVIDIA card, Ubuntu will prompt you something like, “Your video device requires a binary driver to fully function. The Ubuntu developers cannot modify this driver and cannot properly support it. Click here to download the driver and install it automatically.” Fedora will tell you everything is fine with the open source NV driver. If you know you need to install the binary driver for 3d, you to go download it from NVIDIA yourself and follow their install procedure (it may be in a 3rd-party repo, but not the default repos as far as I know). Then, you will likely have to reinstall the driver whenever your kernel is updated.
Fedora 9 is apparently more difficult because the version of X.org they are using is incompatible with the Nvidia drivers.
Nope – no more difficult for nVidia users.
nVidia had their typical “two week lag” where their drivers come out to support major versions of X Server a couple of weeks or so after a major distribution starts to support it.
They have now released their new drivers.
(For fedora, this has been the case in 8 of their 9 releases – nVIdia support has arrived shortly after the distro has been released.)
Let’s be fair here, Fedora 9 uses an ‘unreleased’ version of Xorg 1.5. Nvidia can’t be blamed for not releasing a driver for something that isn’t even out yet. Xorg changed their API for the next released. While this would have been fixed by Xorg themselves if nvidia’s driver was open sourced, but then again, Xorg hasn’t released their full set of drivers for 1.5 yet anyhow.
Nvidia actually is doing a great job at releasing new drivers supporting new hardware and new versions of Xorg. Look at some of the other graphics card companies. With the major exception of Intel, they pretty much all suck at varying degrees (though it looks as though ATI/AMD is finally getting their act together).
No, lets really be fair here – nVidia (employees) are almost on record saying that they will NOT support even major releases of X unless a (major?) distribution supports it first.
Since those proprietary drivers are now out, whether or not Fedora has a prerelease X or not is a moot point.
Hardware support in this case is equal. Not in the case of ati though – the fglrx still does not support Fedora 9. But then again, Fedora currently has in testing free 3d drivers for R5xx based cards. Swings and roundabouts.
Except for “Restricted Driver Manager”, i would say hardware support is similar. With one you have newer kernels supporting more hardware. With the other, you have out of-the-box GUI to get proprietary driver support.
Does it ask you if you want to use the binary drivers and automatically install them for you if you do? If not, it is still a bigger pain to set up Fedora than it is Ubuntu (at least in this regard).
…why the fonts appear cut-off and crappy when you fire up the Fedora 9 live images (this is the case for me with both the GNOME and KDE x86_64 images).
I’d love to use Fedora 9 but it strikes me as too risky at the moment. Linux is my main desktop rather than a fallback, and KDE 3.5x on Debian Testing works very well with a bit of tweaking. Just as well as Ubuntu, in fact. I need something that’s darn reliable.
I didn’t think that much of this review. It focuses too much on bling and the latest and greatest. Many readers might be less interested in hearing about a spinning 3D cube and more interested in stuff like whether their wifi will work, whether Open Office will behave and open Word docs, whether they’ll be able to import all their bookmarks and listen to their favourite soundz, etc.
Compiz does not equal usability. Strange that so many reviewers appear to think it does, since Linux now has masses of good, solid usability to sing about.
people should start on ubuntu then move up to debian once they’re comfortable. the more you learn about linux the less great ubuntu becomes.
i have 8.04 on a laptop but everyting else in my house is debian. i find a lot of the little things they’ve changed to make it easier annoy the hell out of me.
I am using Fedora 9 on my home box and I like it. The issue with Flash crashing in Firefox is a pain but I think it is more of an Adobe issue.
On my eeepc, I started with eeedora but I just couldn’t get it to work right. I kept getting kernel panics. I installed eeebuntu and it worked very well with the eee. It was pretty wild to see compiz running more smoothly than my home box. The only Ubuntu issue I ran into was the failure of USB flash drives from being recognized. The Ubuntu forum had a fix for it by commenting out the CDROM in fstab. I get the feeling that there is more support for Ubuntu on the eeepc. The Fedora version was less polished and not as much forum help. It makes me wonder how much longer Fedora 9 will stay on my home box.
I’ve been using Fedora since it was still called Red hat 6.2 ZOOT! I’ve tried others through the years but still end up with fedora/red hat.
I’ve tried every Ubuntu since it was in beta and I’ve just never been excited about it.
Here’s a personal experience that I thought was quite amusing.
At work, I decided to install over my Debian Sid install (yeah, I know, kind of crazy to be using my workstation on that.) So while looking for a distribution, I gave Fedora 9 a shot.
Now Ubuntu decided with Hardy that they would scrap gnome-cups-manager, which seems to not have a lot of development done on it. Instead they grabbed the system-config-printers from Fedora.
Well under Fedora 9, it did not detect any of the printers on the network. Ok, fine, Debian hadn’t worked with that either, with it’s default printer manager. Hplip’s hp-setup worked wonders though, and I was printing right away.
Ubuntu 8.04 (remember, using Fedora’s software) worked flawlessly. Found all the network printers, and it was just a matter of click, click, done.
This is where polish shows.
My biggest complaint about Fedora is that it is basically (even after release) an unstable system, in as much as Debian Sid is.
Right now I think I’m most looking forward to CentOS 5.2 and openSuSE 11.0 (which by the way, I think all previous versions of Suse stink, but the newest version has impressed me, though I don’t like their Gnome set up, KDE4 was pretty shiny on it.)
Fedora 9 disappointed me very much:
First of all I’ve switched off IPv6 and left IPv4 only during the installation. After reboot I noticed that it does opposite thing: have not installed IPv4 and left only IPv6!
Secondly choosing the Russian keyboard layout prevented me from typing English letters at all, and no layout switcher was offered. That is why I have had annoying problems when I was prompted to create a user.
Both distros do not work with my TV-tuner correctly. The tuner works somehow, but the driver can not control sound gain registers in SAA7134HL/TD1316AL, so the sound volume was too low.
KDE 3.5 in Kubuntu can not switch keyboard layouts via hotkey. I had to google about two days to find a way how to enable this manually via X11 config. Looks like it is still a big surprise for linuxes that some people use languages other than English.
No sound (from mic) in skype under Ubuntu, but it works under Fedora.
Sound mixers look confusing with my Audigy 4. They (alsamix, kmix) should not look like a space ship control panel. The hardware really hardly has 1/3 sliders and connectors than the mixers show.
I’ve tried each the ICQ-messengers offered in both distros – no one could manage all Cyrillic encodings from different other-side ICQ clients.
There is no easy way to watch movies on the attached TV.
KDE4 is a real garbage in both distributions, especially the taskbar.