While a bulk of the Linux community is engaged by the release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS next week, another popular Linux distribution put out its first major update of 2010 a few days ago.

I've started using Linux with Redhat 6.2, which was released in 2000. The list of popular distributions available back then was limited to Redhat, Mandriva, SUSE, Debian and Slackware. The search for 'Active' distributions on distrowatch listed 296 distributions as of today.

Last month the British Linux magazine, Linux Format, did a big comparison of the current crop of Linux packages or distributions (distros for short), concentrating on the ten most popular as measured by DistroWatch. They were SUSE (version 10.2), Fedora (Core 6), Mandriva (Spring 2007), PCLinuxOS (2007), Debian (version 4), Ubuntu (7.04 "Feisty"), Slackware (version 11) and Sabayon (version 3.4).

You know what Ubuntu is, so we will not talk about it in this article. Instead, we'll talk about some or the most popular Ubuntu-based distributions. There are enough (or not) Linux distributions derived from Ubuntu, so we thought it will be a very good idea to make a list with all of them, or at least the popular ones.

This early development comparison of Ubuntu 10.04, Mandriva 2010.1, PCLinuxOS 2010, and openSUSE 11.3 produced some of the most interesting results as of late in terms of comparing different Linux desktop distributions.

Lately, I have been looking into other distributions that, like Ubuntu, are working to make strides to attract new users. I still have Debian Etch burned to a CD, waiting for a test in our lab. Next up is going to be Fedora. In the past, I have never been too impressed with RPM-based distributions, but to be fair, most of this came from nightmare scenarios with Mandriva and SuSE.

Last week we provided benchmarks of Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4, but Ubuntu is not the only Linux distribution preparing for a major update in the coming months. Also released in the past few days were OpenSuSE 11.2 Milestone 6 and Mandriva Linux 2010.0 Beta 1. To see how these three popular distributions compare, we set out to do our usual Linux benchmarking dance.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear geeks... the time has come to announce the release of GNOME 2.26, a light desktop environment used in many popular Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, etc.

As I look through DistroWatch's list, I see a trend. The top ten at the moment are: Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, OpenSuSE, Mandriva, Debian, PCLinuxOS, Sabayon, Arch, and MEPIS. Strangely, we find two relatively non-n00b distributions in there...