Distributions in 2004

Red Hat's Fedora Core continued its successful transformation from Red Hat Linux, despite worries in some circles that it would be a (possibly broken) test bed for the company's main commercial product - Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Although Fedora Core 2 was indeed somewhat buggy, this was due to an ambitious move to kernel 2.6 combined with the inclusion of SELinux functionality, rather than sloppy work, and most of the problems were ironed out before the release of version 3. The current stable release has formed the base for the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (currently in public beta testing), which is expected to go gold during the second quarter of 2005. An interesting side effect of the split between Red Hat's community and enterprise products was the emergence of several distributions developing "new" products by recompiling source RPMs that were used to build RHEL 3 - these include CentOS, Lineox Enterprise Linux, Scientific Linux, Tao Linux, White Box Enterprise Linux, and a few others.

Mandrakesoft continued its financial recovery after the disastrous previous two years that almost saw the popular distribution maker going out of business. This was at the expense of the distribution's status as a truly free product in both senses of the word - now those users who cannot or do not want to join the €60/year Mandrakeclub have to wait weeks before they can put their hands on (a limited set of) Mandrakelinux ISO images. The company also implemented a new development model, whereas a final and bug-fixed "Official Edition" is released about a month after a "Community Edition"; however some users tend to view the latter as just another (potentially buggy) release candidate, despite frequent explanations and claims to the contrary by Mandrakesoft's officials. Nevertheless, the new release model seems to be working and both Mandrakelinux releases of the year - versions 10.0 and 10.1 - received positive reviews in the media.

Despite the company's acquisition by Novell in late 2003, SUSE continued in its usual twice-per-year release cycle of SUSE LINUX. Somewhat unexpectedly, it also released a full and installable ISO image of SUSE LINUX 9.1 Personal for free download, and although the company has not repeated the generous giveaway after the recent SUSE 9.2 release, this exercise probably helped SUSE gain much market share, especially among home users. Version 9.1 also formed a basis for the all-new SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server (SLES) 9 and Novell Linux Desktop, both of which targeted enterprise users. SLES 9 was seen as the first viable alternative to Red Hat's own enterprise range of products, with full support for all popular processor architectures and backed by a large company. Novell Linux Desktop is currently being used and tested by Novell in a large-scale internal migration of its desktop computers to Linux.

For a second year in a row, the developers of Debian GNU/Linux failed to produce a new stable release. This has resulted in heavy criticism of the release process - not only by users and fans of the distribution, but also by some of the Debian developers. Although the argument that Debian's stable releases are designed primarily for servers and therefore do not need frequent upgrades is valid, the fact that the time needed to produce a release is getting longer is worrying (hamm to slink - 7.5 months, slink to potato - 17 months, potato to woody - 23 months, woody to sarge: 29+ months). Nevertheless, development continued at high speed and Debian has now become the most widely-used base for new and remastered Linux distributions, overtaking Red Hat/Fedora in this role. One of those was Ubuntu Linux, a new project funded by Mark Shuttleworth, a South African Internet millionaire. Ubuntu Linux was probably this year's most pleasant distribution surprise; after promising stable and up-to-date biannual releases based on Debian Sid, its user base increased rapidly in a very short time.

Following a dramatic growth in popularity during the previous two years, the source-based Gentoo Linux has now matured into a mainstream, yet unique distribution that appeals to many technical users. Its adoption might be slowing down, though - not because Gentoo's founder Daniel Robbins is no longer with the project, but rather because most binary distributions have improved their package management to the point that dependency issues are no longer as annoying as they used to be. Also, some users have found that maintaining and updating a Gentoo system is time-consuming and not entirely fool-proof. Still, Gentoo has emerged (pun intended) as one of the most prominent and innovative Linux community projects, with unparalleled documentation, active community involvement, and ongoing work on support for new hardware architectures.

Other popular distributions continued with regular releases. Slackware Linux 10.0 came out in the middle of the year and indications are that 10.1 (still based on the 2.4 kernel series) is not far off. There were concerns about the state of health of Slackware's founder and maintainer Patrick Volkerding, but according to a recent update in the current change log, he is feeling much better and is able to continue work on the distribution. In the meantime, Knoppix has further solidified its position as the king of Linux live CDs, prompting many articles in the media and even catching the eyes of publishers at O'Reilly Media, who brought out a book called Knoppix Hacks. Earlier this month, Xandros put out the third release of Xandros Desktop OS in as many years and, like the previous two versions, reviewers seem highly impressed. However, Xandros's own code remains proprietary and closed, and with a price tag attached to the product, many users find it more acceptable to install and use one of the other user-friendly, but free distributions, such as MEPIS Linux or PCLinuxOS.

What is there to look forward to in 2005? Fedora, Mandrakelinux, SUSE, Ubuntu and Gentoo are likely to continue with their twice-per year release schedules. Debian 3.1 Sarge will hopefully come out early next year, soon to be followed by other Debian-based products, such as Linspire 5.0 (currently in heavy development), Progeny Debian 2.0 (incorporating Componentized Linux), as well as the inaugural release of UserLinux. Another project worth watching is Specifix Linux founded by former executives and developers at Red Hat. Many of the leading distributions have been providing AMD64 ports of their main products and the support for this fast growing platform is expected to increase considerably during the course of the year - not only on the application level, but also by improved support for AMD64 binaries in the new GCC 4.x compiler series. Now that the challenges associated with migrating to kernel 2.6 are mostly a thing of the past, focus will be on integration of new applications, such as the upcoming Qt/KDE 4.0 or OpenOffice.org 2.0. As always, expect a few pleasant surprises along the way.