It’s not unusual for Linux distributions to be available in several builds. Ubuntu has long-term support and cutting-edge editions, Zorin has Core and Pro builds, and openSUSE has Tumbleweed and Leap. Tumbleweed, which we’re reviewing here, is a continuously evolving build comprising the latest stable version of each component, which is updated as and when new code appears. Leap, which is based on SUSE Enterprise Linux, is a stable release that receives periodic updates.

The version that we installed was running the 6.6.3-1 kernel (the very latest build was 6.6.4 at the time of writing), and is available with a choice of desktop managers, including Gnome, Xfce, Cinnamon, Mate and KDE Plasma 5, the latter of which tops the installer’s list of options. That’s therefore what we chose for our tests. In our installation, this sat on top of the X11 Window System rather than Wayland.

As well as the regular 64-bit and 32-bit builds for desktop use, there are alternative builds for ARM, IBM Z family mainframes, RISC and PowerPC. It will also run on Raspberry Pi.

The installer is logical, but not the most friendly on test. Setting up Wi-Fi requires that you know which security protocol your network uses, and we failed on our first three attempts to boot into openSUSE at the end of the process. Despite the installer apparently completing, our test machine still attempted to start the OS we had previously tested. We solved this by forcing the installer to delete all partitions on our internal drive even if it thought that wasn’t necessary.

Once it was up and running, however, everything was far more logical, and there were only ten updates ready to download, reflecting the fact that the installer was still fresh, having been downloaded just the day before. A further 11 appeared later in the day.

It’s not only core components such as SAMBA, git and the kernel that receive rolling updates in Tumbleweed: bundled applications are likewise cutting edge. Thus, at the time of writing we found LibreOffice 7.6.3.1 and Firefox 120 pre-installed. Email is handled by Kmail, but if you prefer Thunderbird, the version accessible through Discover, openSUSE’s software manager, is version 115.5. The versions of GIMP and Inkscape available through the manager, both of which are options rather than pre-installed software, match the latest releases available through their respective sites.

KDE Plasma should be familiar to anyone switching from Windows, as it features a traditional taskbar and menu. Commonly used applications can be pinned to the bar for easy access, and menu options are filtered as you type to reduce the number of matching applications.

Plasma lets you add secondary toolbars, and also features widgets, with a generous selection pre-installed but dormant. We saw this implementation in Nitrux, which also uses KDE Plasma, although in a significantly tailored form. For our money, the version seen here, where window controls remain attached to the windows themselves, feels more logical.

The comprehensive settings app is supplemented by YaST (Yet another Setup Tool), which provides password protection for more sensitive options, such as configuring the boot loader, administering printers and managing users. Tumbleweed scored 1,167 in the single-core Geekbench tests and 3,241 in the multicore benchmark. This puts it broadly in line with the other distributions on test, suggesting that deployment decisions would be better based on factors other than performance. openSUSE is one of the oldest Linux distributions still being actively developed but, with Tumbleweed, you’ll always be running one of the newest builds available. This is its primary appeal, since other factors such as the choice of desktop managers, and pre-installed applications, are common to many rivals. Although we initially experienced some difficulty with installation, your mileage will likely vary and, once up and running, it was regularly updated – as promised – and as stable as any other distribution on test.

If your preference is for KDE, rather than Gnome, this would be our pick of the bunch.

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On first encounter, Nitrux 3.2 is a moody beast. The default UI is dark, file management windows have black backgrounds and apps are dimmed when they lose focus. Yet somehow, even if you’re not a fan of dark modes (as this writer isn’t), it works.

You can switch between windows for some real showmanship: apps swoop around each other to make space, and where two windows sit side by side, they part to let hidden windows through. The default font is skinny but easy on the eye, and while the launcher is too angular for our tastes, that’s a matter of personal preference.

Where we think it’s less successful is in detaching the windows buttons – close, maximize and minimize – and putting them up in the screen’s top left corner, where they sit on the end of the menu bar. This is, presumably, why apps without focus are dimmed: so you know which one you’re going to close or enlarge when you click them. A side effect is that when switching between a browser and word processor, if you’re referring to the former while writing in the latter, your reference material will frequently change brightness.

Elsewhere, the file manager (called Index) has a grid of quick access buttons for common folders, such as Music, Documents and Pictures – but when they all sport the same icon and there’s no label, as was our experience with the default theme, you have to hover over each one and wait for its name to appear in a tooltip.

If you don’t get on with the default desktop, there are other themes to choose from, including some with more traditional window controls.

The Calamares installer is logical and offers plenty of guidance, such as the requirements for a secure password. Once up and running, you might not recognise a huge number of pre-installed applications other than Firefox, and there’s no office suite ready for use, although LibreOffice is available through the NX Software Center. So are staples such as Thunderbird, GIMP and Inkscape, which are likewise absent. You’ll find placeholders for Steam, Waydroid and Bottles, with the latter two providing layers for Android and Windows apps respectively.

However, it didn’t detect the two printers on our network until we’d entered their IP addresses.

Behind the scenes, this is a Debian-based distribution using the 6.6.2-1 kernel and a modified version of KDE Plasma to render the NX Desktop. There’s a generous selection of desktop widgets, and a configurable button on the dock, which you can use to run scripts or activate an applet.

The root directory is unwritable by default which, says the developer, strengthens security and minimizes points of failure. It should also mean that if an update fails your machine remains bootable. Other security measures have been implemented elsewhere, such as disabling core dumps, implementing strict password expiration and deactivating the root account. There’s a built-in backup tool – Kup – that can be set to kick in after you’ve been using your computer for a set period, which is an unusual and useful option. The X11 display protocol has been dropped in favour of Wayland, providing a shorter and more secure route between application and display.

One happy benefit of the switch to Wayland, which is taking place across most distributions, is a probable speed bump, and certainly Nitrux feels fast in everyday use. This was particularly evident when we were browsing the web, with pages seeming to arrive more quickly on our domestic broadband connection than they do in other Linux distributions or on our Windows box. We suspected that our broadband had been upgraded (and checked), but that wasn’t the case.

There’s a lot of interesting technology in this distribution, and it’s refreshing to encounter such an individual interface. Going down this road is a brave and largely successful move that has garnered significant praise, including when we named it the best Linux distro for new users.

However, with this review written, we’re now looking forward to returning to a more conventional environment.

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A key player in the Zoho software and services empire, ManageEngine offers a wide range of IT management solutions. The OpManager product family delivers network, server and application performance monitoring, and ManageEngine version 12.7 delivers plenty of new features.

There’s a focus on compliance and security, with support for single sign-on using security assertion markup language (SAML) and SNMP 3 with tougher SHA-2 authentication. Root cause analysis (RCA) profiles compare data collected from multiple devices to help with problem remediation, Cisco ACI, IPMI and VPN monitors are present and OpManager integrates with Slack and Microsoft Teams for alert notifications.

ManageEngine’s flexible licensing schemes are good value for SMBs as they’re based on devices, not elements or sensors. The OpManager Standard edition costs £195 per year for ten devices and provides availability, interface and SNMP/WMI network monitoring services, with the Professional edition on review adding features such as virtualization host monitoring.

Along with perpetual licenses, they’re also all available as Plus versions that include OpManager’s add-on modules at discounted prices. For example, Professional Plus starts at £983 per year for 50 devices and includes network configuration management (NCM) and NetFlow analysis (NFA), along with firewall and application management.

Whichever edition you choose, you won’t wait long to see it in action: it took us 20 minutes to install it on a Windows Server 2022 host and run an initial scan of the lab’s IP subnet. For device identification and classification, OpManager is a veritable sleuth as it’s endowed with over 11,000 device and 56,000 vendor templates.

It had no trouble figuring out what our lab devices were, correctly identifying all our Windows servers and workstations, routers, switches, NAS appliances, VMware and Hyper-V virtualization hosts and printers. Adaptive alert thresholds are assigned to devices where OpManager uses machine learning algorithms to adjust them for you, and they can be linked to a range of actions using the integral drag-and-drop workflow builder.

The OpManager web console and its multitude of dashboards is capable of presenting a lot of information about your network, with the handy heatmap widget showing a grid of colored blocks representing each device and their status. Detailed custom dashboards are created by choosing from over 200 available widgets, and network operations center views can present support departments with the big picture.

Virtual monitoring is extensive, as OpManager discovered our VMware ESXi and Hyper-V hosts and provided views of system and VM utilization, guest OSes and datastore usage. Add the NetFlow module and you can view all common flows and use the free NetFlow Generator utility to translate raw packets into NetFlow data.

OpManager’s RCA profiles are similar to the SolarWinds NPM PerfStack feature and are just as easy to create. The list of available metrics is very basic, but you can choose devices and monitored items such as CPU and memory usage, add them to your RCA dashboard and view them all on one screen to help identify complex problems.

The Application Performance Management (APM) plugin is a worthy addition as it monitors and reports on a huge range of apps. We used it to check on our AWS account, where it provided details on service availability, EC2 instance and S3 bucket status, plus monthly billing charges and forecasts.

It may take time to get to grips with its myriad components, but ManageEngine’s OpManager is a powerful monitoring solution with a lot to say about your network. The web console is well designed and easily customized to suit, while SMBs will approve of OpManager’s affordable licensing plans.

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Many Debian-based distros, Linux Mint included, use Ubuntu as their jumping-off point. The latest release – 21.2 Victoria – is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and will continue to be supported until 2027. That means it currently uses the 5.15 LTS kernel, but there’s a bleeding-edge edition, aptly called 21.2 Cinnamon Edge, that uses 6.2 should you prefer.

Where many Ubuntu spin-offs stick with Gnome display manager, as used by Ubuntu itself, Mint’s default is Cinnamon. This started as an offshoot from Gnome 2 when version 3 was released. Version 3 was the first to drop support for the panel (taskbar in Windows parlance) in favor of a purer shell, which likewise demoted widgets and jettisoned desktop icons. Cinnamon puts all of these front and center, which is one of the reasons it’s often held up as an ideal distro for anyone switching from Windows. It also has a Windows-like menu, with applications sorted into categories, and essential tools – such as the browser and settings – kept in view up the side. You can pin your most used apps to the panel so they’re never more than a click away.

Cinnamon is certainly a sturdy, tidy interface, but we think it feels a touch old-fashioned when compared directly with Microsoft’s Fluent UI for Windows 11. If it doesn’t immediately grab you, you can tweak the colors, install a theme, or opt for one of the alternative desktop managers, since Mint is also available with Mate or Xfce. And, while it seems highly unlikely that Ubuntu is going to disappear any time soon, the Mint developers are maintaining a parallel build, LMDE – Linux Mint Debian Edition – based on the Debian codebase, from which development can continue.

Whichever build you choose, you’ll need at least 2GB of memory and 20GB of storage, although 4GB and 100GB are recommended. These are hardly onerous, and the same specs apply to the Cinnamon Edge release.

Getting up and running is a familiar process, which starts with booting into a live installer and stepping through the wizard. However, because of changes to Ubuntu’s shim-signed bootloader, compatibility with Secure Boot was broken for the ISO that was current when we performed our tests. We therefore had to disable Secure Boot to proceed and, unless the ISO has been fixed by the time you install, you may have to do the same. Linux Mint says that it’s working on a fix.

Once up and running, pretty much everything was ready for use. Our monitor was recognized and its native resolution selected, our two network printers were installed, and a range of default applications were in place. Three desklets – effectively Windows-style widgets – for a clock, launcher and digital photo frame are installed but not activated. You can add others from a desklet store, where we’d highly recommend the weather desklet and notepad.

LibreOffice was ready to roll, and while we can’t say the same for GIMP and VNC, they were available through the software manager, which was set up to work with Flatpak. Thunderbird was pre-installed for handling mail, and Firefox was set up as the default browser.

Hypnotix, Linux Mint’s bespoke IPTV application, is perhaps the most impressive of all the default apps. Its integrated catalogue includes links to more than 1,200 broadcasters, organized by country, with 92 from the UK. Pick a country, then click a channel in the sidebar to tune in. It was quick, efficient and very smooth on our consumer broadband connection. At the time of testing, it wasn’t possible to save favorites, but that may change as work is ongoing for a future release.

Linux Mint with Cinnamon is a pleasant place to spend a lot of time, and while we don’t think Cinnamon feels as dynamic as Windows 11, its familiarity will likely be a significant draw for more cautious switchers (although we would urge anyone in that position to also consider “new kid on the block” Zorin). Hypnotix and the desklets are the star turns in this distribution, and they’re reason enough on their own to make it one for the shortlist.

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Many Debian-based distros, Linux Mint included, use Ubuntu as their jumping-off point. The latest release – 21.2 Victoria – is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and will continue to be supported until 2027. That means it currently uses the 5.15 LTS kernel, but there’s a bleeding-edge edition, aptly called 21.2 Cinnamon Edge, that uses 6.2 should you prefer.

Where many Ubuntu spin-offs stick with Gnome display manager, as used by Ubuntu itself, Mint’s default is Cinnamon. This started as an offshoot from Gnome 2 when version 3 was released. Version 3 was the first to drop support for the panel (taskbar in Windows parlance) in favor of a purer shell, which likewise demoted widgets and jettisoned desktop icons. Cinnamon puts all of these front and center, which is one of the reasons it’s often held up as an ideal distro for anyone switching from Windows. It also has a Windows-like menu, with applications sorted into categories, and essential tools – such as the browser and settings – kept in view up the side. You can pin your most used apps to the panel so they’re never more than a click away.

Cinnamon is certainly a sturdy, tidy interface, but we think it feels a touch old-fashioned when compared directly with Microsoft’s Fluent UI for Windows 11. If it doesn’t immediately grab you, you can tweak the colors, install a theme, or opt for one of the alternative desktop managers, since Mint is also available with Mate or Xfce. And, while it seems highly unlikely that Ubuntu is going to disappear any time soon, the Mint developers are maintaining a parallel build, LMDE – Linux Mint Debian Edition – based on the Debian codebase, from which development can continue.

Whichever build you choose, you’ll need at least 2GB of memory and 20GB of storage, although 4GB and 100GB are recommended. These are hardly onerous, and the same specs apply to the Cinnamon Edge release.

Getting up and running is a familiar process, which starts with booting into a live installer and stepping through the wizard. However, because of changes to Ubuntu’s shim-signed bootloader, compatibility with Secure Boot was broken for the ISO that was current when we performed our tests. We therefore had to disable Secure Boot to proceed and, unless the ISO has been fixed by the time you install, you may have to do the same. Linux Mint says that it’s working on a fix.

Once up and running, pretty much everything was ready for use. Our monitor was recognized and its native resolution selected, our two network printers were installed, and a range of default applications were in place. Three desklets – effectively Windows-style widgets – for a clock, launcher and digital photo frame are installed but not activated. You can add others from a desklet store, where we’d highly recommend the weather desklet and notepad.

LibreOffice was ready to roll, and while we can’t say the same for GIMP and VNC, they were available through the software manager, which was set up to work with Flatpak. Thunderbird was pre-installed for handling mail, and Firefox was set up as the default browser.

Hypnotix, Linux Mint’s bespoke IPTV application, is perhaps the most impressive of all the default apps. Its integrated catalogue includes links to more than 1,200 broadcasters, organized by country, with 92 from the UK. Pick a country, then click a channel in the sidebar to tune in. It was quick, efficient and very smooth on our consumer broadband connection. At the time of testing, it wasn’t possible to save favorites, but that may change as work is ongoing for a future release.

Linux Mint with Cinnamon is a pleasant place to spend a lot of time, and while we don’t think Cinnamon feels as dynamic as Windows 11, its familiarity will likely be a significant draw for more cautious switchers (although we would urge anyone in that position to also consider “new kid on the block” Zorin). Hypnotix and the desklets are the star turns in this distribution, and they’re reason enough on their own to make it one for the shortlist.

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Jabra’s PanaCast 50 video bar ensures that no-one feels left out, with its triple 13MP 4K camera turret presenting a full 180° horizontal field of view (FoV). What’s more, lurking inside this 650mm wide cylinder is an 8-microphone beamforming array teamed up with pairs of 50mm woofers and 20mm tweeters.

Speaker tracking is a cut above the rest, too, as the PanaCast 50 incorporates no fewer than nine Edge processors, including two Edge AI chips. These allow it to provide integral video analytics, apply always-on people counting and use Jabra’s Virtual Director technology to focus on the active speaker and zero in on them with its automatic 6x digital zoom.

The camera provides a USB-C port for BYOD meetings or connection to a permanent room computer. Jabra also offers two-room system solutions where one partners the camera with its Android-powered touchscreen tablet while another comes with Lenovo’s ThinkSmart Core + Controller devices.

The kit includes a wall-mounting bracket, with the optional aluminum table stand costing £63. We also checked out Jabra’s Bluetooth remote pad (£39), which provides camera and audio controls plus direct access to whiteboard sharing.

We reviewed the model with a grey fabric cover, but Jabra also offers a black version for the same price. Whichever model you choose, you’ll find integral Wi-Fi 5 services plus a 10/100 Ethernet port at the back for remote management using Jabra’s free Xpress web portal.

BYOD installation is easy: you simply connect the camera to a USB port on a Windows or macOS host computer and wait for the drivers to load. It will work happily with any UVC-compliant VC app, but don’t forget to download Jabra’s Direct app otherwise you’ll miss out on a wealth of features.

The app’s camera controller window allows you to play with the image quality, set a zoom level, move the camera view and save two presets that can be accessed from the remote. From the general settings tab, you can control people counting, enable the Virtual Director and turn on the new dynamic composition feature, which puts the four most recent speakers in a split screen.

A large monitor is recommended, since the highest resolution is a very wide 3,840 x 1,080 pixels. The PanaCast’s army of Edge CPUs come into play here as they apply Jabra’s patented video-stitching technology to produce a single image from the three camera feeds.

This works perfectly as we couldn’t see any joins and the cameras deliver a pin-sharp image with great color balance and contrast. Speaker tracking is very responsive, too: we could walk around our meeting room and, even without speaking, the camera followed us while we were moving.

Jabra’s microphone expertise shines through. Remote participants could hear us clearly at a five-metre distance, and the quad speaker combo was just as impressive. Jabra won’t beat Biamp’s 2023 Excellence award-winning Parle VBC 2500 as the PanaCast 50 lacks a little in the bass department, but it delivers a clean and clear sound quality with a 65% volume level quite sufficient for our 24m²meeting room.

Remote monitoring and management are good, with the Xpress portal providing analytics on camera and room usage. “Packages” group camera settings together and, when you install the local Jabra Direct app, just copy a package URL to it.

You can remotely apply settings that override the local app. During room creation, you add a device serial number and apply maximum and safety participant capacities. The camera uses its people-counting skills to provide room usage details and will warn you if the room is over capacity.

This sleek cylinder delivers great video and audio quality, fast speaker tracking and a wealth of advanced features. Jabra’s Xpress web portal offers smart remote management services, and the super-wide view helps make the PanaCast 50 ideal for all-inclusive meetings.

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Fedora Linux is refreshed every six months, with version 39 shipping in November 2023, 20 years (and one day) since the first iteration’s debut. It was originally a spin-off of Red Hat Linux, but the tables have been turned and it now forms the basis of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS Stream.

Of the five versions on offer, we reviewed the desktop build, which sits alongside server, cloud, containerized and IoT editions. Each release receives support for 13 months, with version 40 scheduled to appear in April 2024, and build 39 reaching end of life in November 2024.

Fedora has a free-to-download media creation tool, much like Microsoft’s equivalent for Windows, and the Raspberry Pi imager for the single-board computers. This writes the latest build to a bootable thumb drive. Use this to start up, and you’ll encounter one of the best installers we’ve come across. It’s simple, straightforward and painless.

System requirements are 4GB of memory and a 40GB SSD, although Fedora Project notes that it’s possible to run the OS on less than this.

Our installation featured a slim selection of pre-installed applications, including Firefox 119, Rhythmbox Music Player, Boxes virtual machine environment and the latest edition of LibreOffice – release 7.6. However, we needed to install our own email client, as well as common creativity tools such as GIMP and Inkscape. You can do this through the integrated software tool, where we found 61 updates waiting to be processed on first launch. This isn’t as drastic as it sounds, as many of them were fonts and codecs.

The Flatpak package manager is enabled and, if you prefer to update manually, Fedora uses the DNF package manager for RPM.

Where some distributions are just now managing the transition from the X11 display server technology to Wayland, Fedora began that process several releases back, and release 39 marks the 14th edition since it completed the transition. Wayland’s frequently touted benefits, not just by Fedora but in general, include greater security and better performance.

The default desktop environment is Gnome 45, which isn’t a huge step up from 44. There are some welcome touches, though, such as subtly redesigned window elements, where two-tone colorways and full-height sidebars tidy things up. There’s also an improved workspace indicator in the top left corner. Click it once and you get an overview of your open windows, some of which might otherwise be hidden, alongside a quick way to switch between desktops. It’s useful, but you can achieve the same result by pressing the Super key.

There’s also a new Image Viewer, which Fedora notes has also been rewritten for high performance, while Gnome search has also been reworked with a focus on speed. The improvements don’t only apply in the Files app, but across several core Gnome tools, such as Software and Characters.

If you don’t get on with Gnome, there are several alternative builds – Spins in Fedora parlance – running the lightweight XFCE desktop, KDE Plasma or Cinnamon, among others. Cinnamon, as used by Linux Mint, is often touted by advocates of Windows-to-Linux switching as a reason to choose that distro.

There’s also a handful of immutable deployments, which keep OS code and apps separate, as with Nitrix. By making the core of the OS read-only, it can’t be hijacked by malicious actors or corrupted by a bad or incomplete update. The result is a more secure environment, for use in sensitive workplaces such as finance and government.

Fedora scored 1,105 in our Geekbench single-core test and 3,053 in the multicore section. These figures were broadly similar to what we saw in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based Rocky Linux, which, while slightly lagging in the single-core tests, was around 1.8% faster on the multicore tests. In neither case should it make any noticeable difference in day-to-day use.

With one of the best thought-out installers and a wide choice of desktop environments, there’s much to like about Fedora, which is why it’s our runner-up to Ubuntu. The default installation was minimal, but many will appreciate this, and all the tools you could possibly need are waiting in the software manager.

That Fedora is a primary source for Red Hat Enterprise Linux should fill you with confidence, and the fact it’s available with a variety of desktops will make it immediately familiar, whether switching from Windows or a Debian-based rival.

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