LMCE vs Pluto(home)

[colinjones]

Simple but stupid question!

What is the distinction between LMCE and Pluto(home)?? When I look at their web site, it looks extremely similar!

I know that vast amounts of LMCE are based on Pluto, and that Pluto say that LMCE is the Kubuntu branch for Pluto, but what does that actually mean in practical terms? I can't see a significant difference, what is the need for one over the other?

[dopey]

Pluto is meant to be an appliance without any desktop functionality. LinuxMCE is a fork of Pluto so the desktop functionality would be included. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds... Pluto takes over all configuration, but a desktop system needs to both configure everything and allow extreme customization...

[darrenmason]

See http://wiki.linuxmce.com/index.php/History

My main reason for switching to linuxMCE from Plutohome was that the Pluto release schedule had seemed to grind to a halt. I have a few opinions on why that might of happened.
linuxMCE has certainly generated a lot more interest and this seems to be a combination of naming (linuxMCE is a lot more explanatory than Plutohome) and marketing (video has done wonders). linuxMCE is releasing regularly and in my opinion is a more stable and feature rich product than Plutohome 0.44, but it is afterall an evolution. Pluto have not had a release since linuxMCE existed from memory.

At the moment I don't necessarily agree with the concept of integrating the whole project with standard desktop distros (KDE), although certain Media Director functionalilty could be. But I am prepared to see where Paul and others go with this.

[nite_man]

Agree with darrenmason. Plutohome still has bugs which already fixed in LMCE (scaling DVD picture to 16:9, for example). The big disadvantage of Pluto is that. You should wait a new release to fix some bugs. But I can be done much faster by releasing upgrades. As it's done for all Linux distributions.