5 Most Anticipated But Flopped Gadgets of 2012

September 22, 2012 By ishayat 11 Comments

Like every year, the year 2012 also started with the promise of many great devices that will rule the others. When the year is nearly at its end with almost all of those greatly anticipated products are now at the displays in the stores and in the pockets of the customers, it is the time to ask how many of those left the stores and made it to the pockets. With all those grand announcements and bold campaigning, there are many gadgets that failed to impress the customers. Here are the 5 gadgets that took the fall after the epic rises boosted by anticipation.

Nokia Lumia 900

The almighty Nokia Lumia 900 was this year’s flagship released by the Finnish phone makers. It came with the latest Windows Phone version of that time and yet it failed miserably to attract the attention of the customers. The update was promised to have more than 250 significant changes that will change the user experience and yet it was as locked as before. Therefore, it was less likely to be chosen by the customization lovers and on the other hand, the conservative ones already have iOS to satisfy their needs. Therefore, the only customers were the ones who wanted to try something new which is not practical to everyone’s budget and the result is obvious.

LG Optimus Vu

Samsung created this field and LG took the opportunity. LG Optimus Vu was intended to be a Galaxy Note competitor. It should be a moderate hit as there were no competitors other than the Galaxy Note, but it was lacking too many things to attract any attention from the Note. Firstly, it was Gingerbread which was late for that time. Secondly, the form factor was a bit odd. Not great for watching videos and not good for carrying either. And last but not the least, it does not have a microSD slot, another great shortcoming which would not be missed by a consumer who can consider this type of phones. The failure was too obvious to avoid.

Google Nexus Q

This is a great product with lots of features and yet there was no doubt that it would flop. The insane $299 price tag is enough to make this streaming device a flop as there was lots of alternative streaming device with more features with lower price tags. Even the Apple TV could not do well till its third generation lowered the price to $99. Despite its ‘audiophile-grade” amplifiers and features like NFC, the price was never right for the utility. Honestly, it is hard to find a reason to buy a Nexus Q and even if someone can, it is even harder to justify the price.

ZTE Grand X

It was presented as a gaming smartphone within budget. To be honest, NVIDIA Tegra 2 and GeForce ULP GPU are not enough to make it call a gaming smartphone at this time of the year. It might be called a budget gaming smartphone but still the price is higher than what the consumers are ready to pay for such phone. The look is too close to the Galaxy Nexus but the performance was not. Gaming smartphone that does not properly response to touches? A perfect recipe for flop.

PlayStation Vita

PlayStation Vita is one of the greatest failures in the history of Sony. The first and obvious cause is the shortage of games. The PlayStation Portable was also suffering from the same problem and yet it passed it time with a moderated success, but now that people know that developers are not interested, they are not taking the risk. The market of mobile gaming is already snatched away by the iPhones and iPods. There are too few people now days to buy a separate device for portable gaming where the iPhone can offer great games at a cheaper price. The difference in the collection is too much to be ignored. So a flop was almost inevitable.

Whether promotional failure or poor performance, these products could not keep up with the expectation of the consumers this year. In this dynamic market of complicated demands, the reasons to blame are too many and sometimes there are none but there are still flops. That is what makes the technology consumer market more interesting than the others.

Apple Breaks Record In iPhone 5 Pre-Order, Samsung Breaks Ethics

September 18, 2012 By Abhishek Prakash Leave a Comment

When a “Job-less” Apple launched iPhone 5 few days back, many speculated it as the biggest fail from Apple ever. To an extent Apple event was missing the charm and spark of its late founder Steve Jobs but several observer in the industry went to the extent of defining it as the start of decline of Apple. Too high user (read observers because not everyone uses iPhone) expectations from iPhone 5 did disappoint lots of tech-lovers all over the world and also put a smirk on Samsung lovers which resulted in a number of iPhone 5 jokes on Facebook and Twitter. Truly, despite of so many new features, iPhone 5 is just another smart phone in the market.

But these negative reviews have never demoralized a true Apple fanboy. Apple products are like sex, you want it even if you oppose it. No matter what the world says, Apple has a cult following and its products are status symbol, pride possessions for many. And the pre-record sales of iPhone 5 has once again showed the world who is the boss. In the latest press release, Apple claimed to have sold more than 2 millions iPhone 5 within 24 hours of opening the pre-orders. Going by these stats, it is predicted that the sale will cross 10 million mark by the end of month.

The crazy fan-boys, the die-hard technology lovers, the wanna be cool teenagers, who doesn’t want an “apple pie”? No doubt that this craziness drives the Chinese teenager to sell their kidney or virginity. A screenshot of ebay India shows that people are willing to buy iPhone 5 for even double of its price.

EBay-India-Iphone 5 — Image Courtesy: CompTalks

Samsung, the biggest competitor to iPhone with its Galaxy series is not just standing as a mute spectator. Just 3 days after the launch of iPhone 5, it has spread the . Apart form that it has also started, kind of, smear advertisement campaign comparing its flagship Galaxy S3 with iPhone 5. Why Samsung is mentioning its software to compare the features with iPhone is beyond fathom.

It will be interesting to see if launch of Galaxy S4, to be available worldwide by March’13, will be able to refrain users from buying iPhone 5. But if you thought that negative reviews will hurt Apple and iPhone 5 could be a big flop, you just got an egg on your face. By the way, do you remember when was the last time an Apple product failed?

The battle of developers: When Apple and Adobe went head to head

September 17, 2012 By Guest Author Leave a Comment

What happened when Apples CEO, the late Steve Jobs went head to head with Adobe and replaced them with what he considered a more stable development platform in the form of HTML 5? In an open letter to Adobe posted online, the Apple CEO claimed that Adobe had consistently failed to provide a stable and secure supported Flash player that could host mobile games. Mobile casino games were suddenly gaining in popularity and the failure by the Flash player to render these games successfully on an iPhone or iPad casino platform was leaving Apple red faced.

Apple, the titans of technology did not want to concede defeat and let Android users overtake them in the mobile casino stakes and realising the need for games that were iPad casino compatible there needed to be a solution that would maintain the high standard of state of the art products Apple had established themselves as delivering. Apple made the switch to HTML 5 for a wide variety of reasons, all made public by Jobs at the time of their announcement. HTML 5 was determined to be the way of the future and mobile casino games have never looked as good. The iPad casino is the perfect platform for these games and unlike the outdated Flash games the HTML 5 games are integrated with features such as the touch screen. Creating a casino on iPad probably was not what Jobs had in mind when he canned Adobe Flash, but the decision has had far reaching effects on the mobile casino industry.

HTML 5 won the battle over Adobe for several reasons, all of them based on technology issues. Adobe said Flash was an open system and they were closed, but the opposite was true. This meant that everything Flash related was controlled in its entirety by Adobe and support was not forthcoming. HTML 5 is completely open and has set standards governed by a committee, making it the ideal platform to develop mobile casino games. iPad casino games can be developed by any developer using HTML 5 provided that the standards are adhered to, making the market open and a greater range of games available. Safety, security and reliability were all overriding concerns for Apple and the final outcome of the matter was that Adobe actually conceded defeat and moved their focus away from developing mobile compatible Flash programs to focusing on their Adobe Air technology for mobile and adapting their programs to HTML 5 code for the internet.

Author Info: Craig Hallett is mobile enthusiast and keeps an eye on the latest in mobile games development.

5 Reasons why iPhone 5 is just another smart phone?

September 15, 2012 By ishayat 2 Comments

Apple Inc’s new iPhone pre-order starts from today featuring a larger, taller 4-inch screen and LTE connectivity. It is not difficult to say that there will be lines outside of the Apple store to get this smart phone. However, the device is clearly missing the ‘wow factor’ that could have kept the company ahead of all other rival companies. The iPhone 5 looks like just another upgrade to the popular iPhone lineup, like they released the iPhone 4S as an upgraded version of the iPhone 4 last year.

The phone Apple unveiled on Wednesday was the same phone that appeared online a long time ago in plenty of leaked images. Some of the features like LTE connectivity and 4-inch screen were nice, but nothing was actually surprising. We just saw in the event how the rumors eventually turned out to be true on the event. Tim Cook, Apple CEO did say earlier that they will “double down” on secrecy to prevent leaks but he clearly failed. Now let’s take a look at the features that Apple highlighted in their event and check why these features are missing the ‘wow factor’.

The new 4-inch screen Retina display

The iPhone is now taller and larger with a 4-inch screen. It’s surely a nice thing if you think of it as an iOS device. But when you compare it with Android phones, most of the Android phones out there have got 4-inch screens and some of them show 720p resolution whereas iPhone is only showing 1136×640 resolution. The phone is now wider and Apple claims that this new shape is designed to fit in the hand perfectly. This is clearly not the best explanation we expected from Apple as all the big Android phones out there including Samsung Galaxy S3 with 4.8-inch screen and HTC One X with 4.7-inch are currently ruling the smart phone market. Moreover, all the docks and stands designed for the old iPhones are not going to work with this one as the Lightning technology won’t make your docks and stands bigger and taller.

The 8-megapixel iSight Camera

The iSight camera is a little bit better than the old 8-megapixel camera we saw in iPhone 4S, but it still is nothing rare if you think about Nokia’s PureView technology and Nokia Lumia 800 with 41-megapixel camera that they revealed a long time ago. All the other smart phone makers are now thinking about releasing smartphones with 12-megapixel camera like the Sony Xperia Sand Nokia N8 so releasing an 8-megapixel camera is really nothing attractive.

The all-new A6 chip

The new A6 chip introduced in the iPhone 5 will perform faster than the old one. The new chip promises up to twice the CPU and graphics performance than the iPhone 4S but the other vendors are already working on faster quad-core chips and phones like Samsung Galaxy S3 and HTC One X already available with quad-core chips. The smart phone is thinner than the old one and also 20 percent lighter than the 4S with the new A6 chip. However, these are nothing new or innovative that we usually expect from Apple.

LTE

The LTE connectivity is another feature the company highlighted yesterday. The latest iPhone supports ultrafast wireless standards including DC-HSDPA and LTE. However, this was only a feature we wanted to see in iPhone as other phones already have this feature for a year or more.

No NFC

We were looking forward to see the near field communication technology (NFC) which is also a common thing in other latest phones nowadays but it’s also missing. Some experts believe it was a wise decision by Apple because of the slow adoption of NFC in U.S. When AllThingsD asked Apple Senior vice president Phil Schiller why the iPhone 5 does not include NFC, he said “Passbook does the kinds of things customers need today.”

These are the reasons that make iPhone 5 just another smart phone. The new iPhone is larger, taller, looks really cool, offers longer battery life and a good camera. It is certainly true that the iPhone 5 is better than the previous iPhones. However, it’s not good enough to be the ruler of the smart phone market as there are plenty of Android phones out there with similar and even better products. Popular companies like Samsung, HTC and Motorola now has the chance to easily attract Apple customers with devices like Galaxy Note 2 and HTC One X+ as Apple has failed to be innovative this time. If you also feel the same or have something different to say, don’t forget to share it with us.

10 Reasons Why Raspberry Pi Sucks. Think before buying!

July 22, 2012 By Abhishek Prakash 66 Comments

Raspberry Pi has been in news for quite a time and is seen as some sort of computing revolution that comes in a price tag of $25. For an average technology enthusiast, it generates quite a bit of curiosity. If you pondering over the question “Should I buy Raspberry Pi”, the answer is a big NO. I’ll give you not one but ten reasons why Raspberry Pi sucks.

It’s all hype that is created around Raspberry Pi and the manufacturers are cashing on the hype. There are limited availability of the stock and I had to wait for 3 months after registering. And when I finally got it, I was highly disappointed with whatever I was given in the name of a micro computer. There are several additional things you need to get your Raspberry Pi working.

Here are 10 reasons why Raspberry Pi sucks:

The price tag $25 is a deception. It is simply not available. While another model is available for $35, it is much more than $35 if you are not lucky enough to be an US resident. Raspberry Pi, a UK-based company, selling a $35 device in 32.7 GBP. And since I used my French Credit Card, additional blow for using foreign currency. So this so-called $35 device cost me around $55. Talk of being cheap, huh!
Second blow, Raspberry Pi does not comes with a power lead. I know that Raspberry Pi FAQs clearly tell that it doesn’t provide power lead and it can be bought separately but imagine your self buying a cellphone and they tell you dude, we sell phones not chargers, buy it separately.
No memory what-so-ever. You just bought a computer without a memory.
No OS pre-loaded. Obviously there is no question of OS without memory.
It has a Micro USB power port but official website advises not to use your computer to power it up. Great! Another option gone. Now you don’t have any option other than buying a power lead.
The basis concept behind the birth of Raspberry Pi is “a tiny and cheap computer for kids” that can be used school computer labs. Now the Raspberry Pi is a naked device that doesn’t come in a box. How long will it last before breaking apart? Despite of promises of a default case included by as early as 2012, it still does not have one.
There are only two USB ports. One goes for your keyboard and the other for your mouse, hdmi port for the monitor. Now you can have no more connectivity. Enjoy!
No Wi Fi here. Go back to stone age and use wired Ethernet connection. By the way Raspberry Pi A doesn’t even have the option for Ethernet.
You have to boot from the SD card. You cannot use a USB device as storage.
You pre-order it and wait for months before you could get your hands on it. And then you realize that you have to spend more money buying its case, SD card, power lead etc.

Before some one start pouncing at me with “value for the money” and “this is the best you can get in this price” stuff, I definitely am not looking to Raspberry Pi as a replacement of regular laptops but there are better alternatives to it available in market for e.g., . Considering the additional price you have to pay for SD card, power lead etc. it comes almost in the same range. Only you get better configuration for a few dollars more.

While Raspberry Pi is a great concept in itself, it’s not the best out there. What you think of it? Does Raspberry Pi sucks or you have reasons enough to love it? Do express your views.

Too Many Hacks? Get Notified When Your Password Is Stolen

July 15, 2012 By Abhishek Prakash 1 Comment

Hackers having a field day now a days. If you check any hacking news site you will find out 3-4 hack news coming on a daily basis. If you think only small time, poorly managed, neglected websites and forums or compromised by hackers, time to change your thinking. The big hotshot brands as well as internet giants have been suffering at the hands of malicious hackers with users’ password stolen in a series of hacking events.

Who got hacked?

Sony had a real hard time dealing with hackers when its Play Station network was hacked several times along with its other sites in a series of hacking. in February this year. Popular professional social networking LinkedIn was hacked last month. And last week Yahoo’s database has been compromised putting approximately 400,000 users at risk. These were just a few examples as the list is too long to be listed here. A number of forums are hacked regularly leaving users’ information (personal, financial etc) at risk.

Wisdom pearls to avoid suffering:

While there is little you can do as a user to avoid being hacked when the compromises occur on the server-side, you can surely follow few guidelines to avoid suffering when your xyz online account is among the victims.

Never use your email password for other online accounts. You may use the same password for different online accounts other than email, though this too is risky but since all of use tens (if not hundreds) of different online accounts such as various forums, social networks, a normal human being just cannot remember so many account-password details.
It’s a cliché but needs to be repeated. Have a strong password with a combination of alphabets, upper case, lower case, numbers and special characters.

Know when email password stolen:

Should I Change My Password is a wonderful website run by The Avalanche Technology Group based in Australia. It maintains a database of all the leaked that has occurred. You can use this website to find out if your email account was compromised ever. One additional feature, you can select for email notification. Just check the box below the search button (refer to the picture below). You will be sent an email if your email account is compromised in a new hack. This leaves you worry-free for checking again and again for your email account safety.

Isn’t it a wonderful application? What you Say?

20 Must Have Applications for Your Mobile Device

June 20, 2012 By Guest Author Leave a Comment

The variety of apps coming out these days for mobile devices like Android phones, IPhones and smart phones in general is nearly mind boggling. Sometimes it almost seems as if there is an app for nearly everything you could possibly need to do under the sun and sky. Al though you probably won’t find an app that cleans your house or walks your dog any time soon, (at least not until Android phones can turn into real androids) there are plenty of excellent must have apps your mobile device could probably use. Install these and you’ll make your mobile experience and life easier, more entertaining and more useful in all sorts of ways. Some of the apps below are for all kinds of mobiles, others for Android or iPhone devices. Check which ones apply to you and keep in mind that if an app is available for any one model, it might soon also be available for many more; the market is growing all the time!

Navigation

Google Maps Mobile (free):

Never carry a map with you anywhere you go from now on with Google Maps for Mobile devices. This handy little application hardly needs much introducing. It’s basically the same ever useful Google maps online system plugged directly into your mobile phone, helping you make sure you’re never lost or lacking for directions on how to reach point A, B C, or your nearest decent bar & grill.

The Google Maps mobile app also includes features for finding places, compass navigation, indoor maps and even offline navigation if you’ve cached your location data for certain areas.

MapQuest 4 Mobile (free):

The MapQuest 4 Mobile app is free for download and incredibly useful as a GPS navigation tool. You can spend a wad of money on a state of the art navigation system for your car, or you could simply download this MapQuest app without forking over a penny. Get access to turn by turn instructions, spoken driving directions and rerouting advice for those occasions in which you miss a turn or take the wrong road. MapQuest 4 Mobile is great for either driving or walking. Like Google maps, it also has a location finder that will tell you where the nearest cafes, bars, hotels and other venues are.

Social Networking

Facebook Mobile (free):

It seems that almost everyone around these days has a Facebook page. It’s understandable, the instant communications, photo and information sharing abilities it gives you are always handy. With the Facebook mobile app, which you can download from Facebook’s homepage, you can stay in contact with all your friends and coworkers just about anywhere, at any time.

Twitter Mobile (Free):

Like Facebook, Twitter has become nearly ubiquitous as a social networking tool for everyone from teenagers to Major corporate executives and Political figures. The quote and link sharing site that allows you to spill your random thoughts a thousand times a day to your list of followers is the perfect networking tool for mobile phones.

Music

Shazam App (free, with premium version):

Ever had a song you like come up on the radio and wanted to know its name? The Shazam app lets you simply bring your phone close to the music, and it will immediately tell you the song’s name, artist’s name and even feed you streaming lyrics as the song plays. The premium app, called Encore, also gives you music recommendations, handing over the names of tracks similar to the stuff you already like.

Grooveshark Mobile (free with premium version):

The Grooveshark mobile app lets you play all your favorite music in streaming audio format on a continuous basis from your mobile phone. The internal search feature can help you browse through thousands of songs and artists without hassle and the app’s file organization system lets you make as many playlists as you want. Grooveshark Mobile also has built in radio stations for random music listening.

Entertainment and Fun

Angry Birds (free):

Fire your angry birds at dozens of pigs all day with the angry birds game on your mobile phone. Angry birds, the sensationally popular iPhone-based strategy puzzle game, is now also free for download to other smart phone platforms.

Tracking Your Finances

Mint Personal Finance App (free):

It seems that nothing beats the Mint.com personal finance app for simplicity, usefulness and total reliability. This little app is becoming very popular and rightfully so. Its clean, easy to use features let you track almost all the imaginable details of your financial life and organize them into interactive visual graphics and categories for easy understanding and dollar planning, all stored in one single interface.

E*trade Mobile Pro (free):

E*trade has become recognized and indispensable to investors everywhere for its online investing platforms. Now, they’ve brought this same technology to your mobile device and packed it with more features than could be easily listed here… Either way, some of the E*trade mobile app’s key tools let you track the market and all your investments, while also letting you buy or sell stocks directly from your mobile phone.

XE Currency App (free):

This neat little app from the currency trading people at XE.com is about as useful as something gets for those travelling occasions in which you want to change from one international currency to another and have no idea what the current rates are. With the XE currency App, you can track and calculate exchange rates live from nearly anywhere.

Keeping up with the News

Reeder (free):

This app from the folks at Apple gives your iPhone a sleek new Google Reader based RSS app. Take a few minutes to format the Reeder app for all your favorite news or commentary sites, and you’ll see just how fast and navigable the news feed that flows into your phone is.

Pulse (Free):

An Android based news feed that arranges all the latest that’s happening in the world into an easy to navigate series of miniature image tiles, Pulse is best used for a low quantity of RSS feeds and works great for those who don’t want to deal with information overload but do have a few key sites whose feeds they’d like to keep up with.

Google Reader (free):

Google Reader has been around for a while, but only in web form. Now, however, it’s finally available as a mobile app. Google Reader is a simple, no frills or flash solution to getting the news feeds you want.

Video and Photo Fun

Instagram (free):

Recently bought by Facebook for $1 billion dollars in cash and stock, the Instagram app grew from 0 to more than 30 million users in just a couple years, and with good reason. It’s simple, has a cool feature and its completely free. Just take whatever photos you want with your phone, use Instagram’s filtering system to change the picture’s look and color, and then send it off to your friends through Facebook, twitter or another social network.

Staying Productive

Evernote (free with premium upgrade option):

This unbeatable note taking and agenda making app is available for all your wireless devices. It lets you take photo, text and audio notes, clip pieces of web pages for later storage and do text searches within photos and images. Best of all, you can store these personal notes remotely and synchronize them across multiple devices for constant up-to-the-minute recorded organization of your thoughts, ideas and personal or business notes. A premium version is also available if you want greater upload capacity, better sharing options and improved search features.

Dropbox (Free with several premium upgrades):

The remote data storage platform Dropbox is available for several different smart phone models, and can be a lifesaver when it comes to protecting your data. The basic free version allows you up to 2 gigabytes of storage and an additional 500 megabytes per referral you make to the site. Upgrades are available for up to terabytes of storage space. The great thing about Dropbox is that it lets you store your files, documents, photos, etc for viewing and use anywhere while also letting you share them with whomever you like quickly and easily. It even has offline viewing options available with a special “favorites” folder.

Mobile Security

Prey (Free, open source with premium version):

Prey is an ideal open source solution for protecting your phone, tablet or computer. This ingenious little app can be installed invisibly, easily and without taking up much space. After that it does nothing but wait until the moment you most need it – when your phone is stolen. That’s when it works its magic. With a simple internet or text message remote activation code, you can suddenly track your phones activity, location, hardware status and other data. Best of all, you can also remotely trigger your phone into locking up, sending messages to a thief and causing all sorts of trouble.

McAfee Mobile Security (free, with premium version):

This tough little security app is designed to protect your phone against intrusions, viruses and spyware. It also offers unlimited cloud backup storage of data and a notification feature that sends a message to a friend you choose in advance if your SIM card is replaced.

Random Extras

Spool (free):

This handy little app lets you save videos and web pages that you’ve opened up for later viewing on your smart phone while offline. It’s a pretty handy and entertaining app feature for those occasions when you know you’ll soon be traveling through a connectivity dark zone for a while.

Swackett (free):

The Swackett app covers one of those situations people have been dealing with since clothes and going out were invented – how to dress for the weather. Swackett gives you up-to-date weather forecasts and, most important of all, tells you how you should dress with a cool little human body visual called a “peep”.

About the Author: when he is not writing about the best in class business TV, internet, and phone bundles, Steven Taylor is immersed in the blogosphere covering topics ranging from mobile devices to social media.

Why Linus Torvald said “NVidia, Fuck You”

June 18, 2012 By Abhishek Prakash 9 Comments

In a dramatic event at Aalto University in Finland, Linux’s founder Linus Torvald could not suppress his frustration with NVidia and showed the middle finger to the chip manufacturing giant NVidia with praising (pun intended) words of “NVidia fuck you”. It happened when a girl asked him about the poor support of the Graphics chip sets from NVidia for Linux.The interesting part of the Linus’ conversation is as follows:

I am very happy to say that …its the exception rather than the rule. And I am also happy to very publicly point out that NVidia has been one of the worst trouble spot we had with hardware manufacturers… and that is really sad because NVidia tries to sell chips.. a lot of chips into the Android market and NVidia has been the single worst company we ever dealt with… So NVidia Fuck Yeah..(middle finger gesture).

You can see the video here:

Why the “middle digit” for NVidia?

It’s not a secret that Linux operating systems have troubles with a number of hardware manufacturers. Most of the hardware manufacturers focus more on Windows and Mac rather than the Open Source OS. Driver issues are one of the most common problem one faces while using Linux. In fact the most common issue comes with wireless itself.

But while there has been at least some support from other manufacturers, NVidia has been a big pain in a**. A simple Google “” will show you the condition. Forums are flooded seeking help on the graphics issue but NVidia has paid no heed to years of requests, complaints and threats of Linux users. And this is specially surprising when NVidia is pushing hard in Android market (Android OS is based on Linux kernel).

Linus is surely justified in his frustration towards the apathy shown by NVidia to Linux. As a Linux fan, I have great admiration for Linus Torvald and I stand in solidarity with him.

Your views?

Do you think Linus’ outburst is justified against NVidia in such a manner or the chip-giant NVidia is right in their decision for the selective support to various OS? Do let us know your views. Cheers

Tired of Ubuntu? 5 Best Alternatives of Ubuntu

April 21, 2012 By Abhishek Prakash 11 Comments

Without exaggeration, Ubuntu is definitely the king of all Linux distributions. Perfect for beginners, apt for learners and powerful enough for advanced users, it has almost all the qualities. But satisfaction is not the virtue of a normal human being and thus there comes a point when you get bored of Ubuntu (Yeah, right. Now don’t kill me for this). Looking for some worthy competitors of Ubuntu I have shortlisted 5 Linux Distributions that are capable enough to take the place of Ubuntu. Please bear in mind that the list doesn’t contain any other member of Ubuntu family such as Lbuntu, Kbuntu etc.

Fedora:

Fedora is the Linux distribution for experts. Avoid it if you are a beginner but do give it a try if you have experience with other Linux distros. According to DistroWatch Fedora is the third most popular Linux distribution, after Ubuntu and Linux Mint and it is also well supported by the community. You will miss “apt” here, if you are a long time Ubuntu user.

:

Linux Mint is distant cousin of Ubuntu. Built on Ubuntu itself, it has the capability to run “out of the box”, mostly. If you find Ubuntu complicated to use Linux Mint is your silver line of hope in Linux sky. When the world was divide over Unity and Gnome 3 and missing the features of Gnome 2, Mint gave a wonderful gift to the community, Cinnamon. A great desktop environment which has best of both Gnome 2 and Gnome 3. Experienced users might find Mint too easy to use which might not go down well with some people.

Slackware:

Slackware is one of the oldest Linux distributions and it is often termed as the “original Linux” for its closeness with a true “Unix Like” system. The closeness to Unix system makes it difficult to use. Beginner Linux users should stay away from Slackware, as it is user friendly only with selective friends not everyone. But if you are an experienced one, a command line warrior, then Slackware is your arena.

ArchLinux:

Another Linux distribution for advanced users. It could be termed as a distant cousin of Slackware as it too believes in the philosophy of least modification from the original distribution. One of the best thing about Arch is that it is very light on hardware requirement. It follows rolling release cycle which means it is continuously under development without any specific release date, so your system is always up-to-date. Best suited for sys-admin users.

OpenSUSE:

This one is for beginners. No other distribution uses KDE desktop environment as beautifully as OpenSUSE. Gnome 3 and Unity haters can find solace in the KDE environment of OpenSUSE although Gnome 3 is also an option here. Package management is RPM (similar to Fedora and Red Hat). Ease of use gives it an edge over its cousin Fedora and provides a full fledged desktop experience.

There are several other distribution that did not make the list. I would like to know readers’ view on what they think can replace their Linux distribution. What you say?

Image Source: Wikipedia and flicker/tuxstorm

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