Ubuntu, SuSE, Fedora and Debian Comparison

I have installed the following OS on my PC of following configuration.

Hardware: PIII-800MHz/192MB/20GB/Intel 82815 Video
OS: Ubuntu 6.06 / Suse 10.1 / Fedora 5 / Debian 3.1

I have installed all these OS, with mostly same configuration (2.6 kernel/ GNOME interface, services…). I have not done any tweak. Here is my observation with ranking. This ranking is based on performance on my PC only.
Rank 4. Suse 10.1:
Installation – slow, Eye candy desktop, Monitor not recognized properly.
After installation – Very slow desktop
Rank 3. Fedora Core 5:
Installation – dead slow, wonderful X configuration
After installation no X, due to issue in locale setting
Rank 2: Debian 3.1:
Installation: Easy and fast first phase installation, second phase installtion after reboot failed (but managed with apt-get manually, package selection interface is not user friendly
After installation – Cool, wide range of applications
Rank 1: Ubuntu 6.06:
Installation: crashing but managed through command line (using fdisk, mkswap and swapon), installation speed is normal
After installation – Fast, Cool, eyecandy, high performance.

Moral: Good installation method does not mean good desktop performance. Ubuntu wins!

Fedora Core 5 on HP nx6120 laptop

I have installed Fedora Core 5 on my HP nx6120 Laptop. It looks faster and stable than previous releases.
My observations:
1. Faster booting – it takes 60 seconds to get login screen.
2. Faster GNOME – takes 4 seconds to get desktop from gdm.
3. Samba client and Server – I am able to connect to all my Windows PCs and Servers in LAN without any issues. Windows Printer was configured using System->Administration->Printing tool successfully.
4. Tamil support is excellent with good fonts rendering (definitely better than Ubuntu Dapper).
5. I have set SCIM as default Input Method frame work, which fits natively to the entire desktop.
6. OpenOffice – starts and works faster. (Why there is no default menu item for Draw tool?)
7. I installed FC5 with GNOME as desktop. After installation when I try to install additional applications, yum always fetches from online repos and mirrors. An option to add a CD/DVD as repository (as in synaptic) will be a nice feature *** really worth feature ***. How to vote for this feature in Fedora Core site?
8. Beagle is an wonderful tool. The Deskbar applet finds most useful and well configurable (But unable to input tamil based on scim).
9. Power Management – Hibernate does not work. Can anybody help me in doing it specific to Fedora Core 5?
10. Network Manager is awesome. I did not do any console based configuration. My wired and wireless working fine with this tool. I am able to switch between these two just like that.
11. Totem consume more CPU and also not stable – definitely we need a good default multimedia player. ( I know that mplayer, xine and vlc are there – I meant **default**. I don’t talk about the proprietory formats. I want open formats to be played efficiently and stable). Can any one tell me why most distros keep totem as default?
12. Minimizing XMMS (borderless windows) causes restoring of all other windows and flickering – waiting for this bug to be fixed.

In summary Fedora Core 5 is definitely a great desktop - thanks to fedora team!