KMinOZ

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I have a Laptop with Fedora and consider moving to Ubuntu or another distribution that runs satisfactory on a laptop. Would be great if anybody could help me with the questions I have:

1) What does Ubuntu include? I couldn't find this on their website and don't want to download hundreds of Megabytes after the installation as I had to do it for Fedora.

2) Is OpenOffice and Fedora included?

3) Is Wine included and running without problems?

4) How good is Ubuntu with supporting current multimedia files, e.g. flv, mp3, dvd player etc

5) How likely is it that I can install Ubuntu over my Fedora installation without cleaning the harddisk first?

6) How good is wireless network support?

7) My laptop is not the youngest - is Ubuntu as resource thirsty as Fedora?

8) Does Ubuntu include mySQL and PHP?

9) I used Suse some years ago which was very comprehensive. Is the current distribution still meeting my criteria above?

htnakirs

7. Depends on the GUI you intend to use. I hear IceWM is the least resource hungry. Using KDE on either distro will take up similar resources.

4. PC Linux OS, in my view, supports most media types out of the box among the main distros.

b0uncer

They both (Ubuntu and Fedora) come with a Gnome desktop by default, for both you can install any other desktop if you like, for both you need extra libraries/codecs for the basic multimedia engine (usually gstreamer or xine, Ubuntu uses gstreamer, not sure about Fedora today) to be able to play everything you can find (in Ubuntu you can install a meta package or a couple of library packages to get the codecs, or just play the file in Totem which leads to apt trying to find and install the needed codec automatically) -- in short, the software side in both of them is about the same. It's just what comes in the box and what you download after the setup yourself (using a package manager), and what's under the hood. I myself prefer Debian-ish distributions over Fedora-ish, but in the end it's not a big deal.

If you used the DVD for Fedora, I wonder what all you had to install from the web that wasn't on the disc if it was such a big thing? I mean, the DVD includes tons of software..so probably if it didn't have what you wanted, probably no distribution has Ubuntu has a selection of software that comes with the installation, a lot less than Fedora with default selections I guess, but that's the beauty of it -- there's not so much to remove/switch if you aren't ok with them. And in my opinion the programs that come along the installation do fit into the system, whereas with Fedora it has always been (for me) a huge consumption of time going trough the package selections before or after the setup to get it fit for me.

Whatever one Linux distribution can do, the others can as well -- so don't be afraid of missing something by switching a distribution. If you feel OK with one distribution, don't switch; the others can't offer anything you couldn't get by modifying your current distribution, and most of the time you're not satisfied with the standard installations anyway, so you'll do some modifications anyway. Nowadays the top things on distribution selections seem to be ease of use, good looks right out of the box and easy package management. Both Fedora and Ubuntu do deliver these (maybe apart from good looks, if you dislike them), so neither one is a match winner.

EDIT: Well it seems I only talked about Fedora and Ubuntu..but it is the same for all (at least unspecialized) distributions; the differences are in personal taste, not what they can do.

Cinematography

1) It comes with the basics; web browser, media players, wordprocessor, etc. Compared to other distros, it doesn't come with very much out the box.

2) Most distros, including Ubuntu, come with Open Office.

3) Wine is not included, but it runs wonderfully in Ubuntu.

4) It's okay with multimedia. Personally, I think Suse 11.0 (KDE) is a little better in this department. But installing the codecs shouldn't be a problem at all with Ubuntu.

5) You shouldn't install an OS over another OS; period. You should always do a fresh install. It is recommended that you backup your home folder, and whatever folders you've saved important files in, and partition your drive.

6) I don't know. From what I hear it's good, but I've never tried it.

7) Ubuntu is resource thirsty. I would recommend Xubuntu for older computers, or Kubuntu.

8) I don't know.

9) I use openSuse 11.0 now and it works wonderfully.