Thanks to the work of official developers and volunteers, evaluating a Linux distro is easier than ever. You just download the ISO image, copy it to a USB drive with a compatible application, and boot the system from there. Now, how about avoiding that step too? The portal DistroTest offers more than 200 distros to test online, without relying on images or local virtual environments.
“Switching to Linux” is one of the most frequent recommendations we see online when it comes to revitalizing an old computer, but in most cases, that recommendation is more linked to a “rejection of Windows” than to a genuine interest in the penguin. To this we must add an essential question: Which is the best distro for us?
Placing one Linux flavor above another is like starting a thermonuclear war, so the most effective strategy is to pick three or four and evaluate them either in live mode or inside a virtualizer. However, today at NeoTeo we have a proposal: Test Linux distros online, without installing anything. That is the great advantage of the DistroTest portal.
DistroTest presents a total of 219 operating systems and 628 versions, so we are not limited to the “latest version” of a distro, but we can also load older builds to study their differences. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, CentOS, Fedora, Slackware, openSUSE… all the titans are there, but in the list we also detected secondary tools like Gparted (partition management) and Clonezilla (disk cloning), a copy of FreeDOS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD.
Some distros are more complicated to install than others, and the mere existence of DistroTest removes that pressure point from the equation, at least as far as evaluation is concerned.
What can we say about performance? To be honest: It is not good. The noVNC platform does what it can, and some builds depend on QEMU for remote execution, so lag is commonplace. Several distros include additional login information (either as root or standard user), and there are time limits (for example, 90 minutes in our CentOS test). Beyond these restrictions, I think DistroTest’s vision is excellent: "Try it before you hate it". You could end up surprised.
Official site: Click here
