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The Linux Distribution Game
Ladislav Bodnar writes: "I have installed and used many Linux distributions. The editorial, entitled The Linux Distribution Game is the result of my personal experiences - it aspires to be a gentle introduction to the many distributions out there. The rest of the DistroWatch site provides pure facts; this is the only exception, although I promise to be as unbiased as possible." This page is nearly worth it for the logos alone; the links to obscure and semi-obscure distributions are a nice resource.
In their page for debian, I noticed that for Debian, they said that the default desktop was "GNOME".
The policy of Debian is NOT to have a default desktop, and GNOME is not favored over KDE (or vice versa).
The default window manager is WindowMaker.
The URL is
http://www.distrowatch.com/debian.htm
> If any of the other distros do have advantages over RedHat (which I kind of doubt).
:-)
Yeah, many advantages. Depends on the distro tho, and what it's tailored for.
some things include:
1). better localization (i.e. asian distros for asian countries).
2). much better package managment (i.e. apt/dpkg in debian and debian based distros).
3). ease of use (well, this is subjective, but redhat is probably medium in ease of use, there are many distro's whose sole function is ease of use).
4). background of users (i.e, slackware is liked by people with more UNIX background)
5). choice of default packages (redhat ships default with GNOME, and many users prefer KDE, and (most) distros ship KDE default).
6). number of packages available (e.g. debian probably has the most)
7). security (i.e, some distros aim to be the most secure)
8). stablity (i.e, Debian/stable)
9). the newest pacakges ALL the TIME (i.e, Debian/unstable)
if you're wondering, I use debian
Go there now and build a linux box the way it was meant to be: linux from scratch!!
You will write to thank me for it later.
Wax on, wax off baby!
I basically agree, but a minor quibble:
Redhat does make Gnome the default, as opposed to KDE. But what that means is that during installation a screen comes up, with a bunch of choices. Gnome is initially checked. Changing the default is as simple as checking KDE. I hardly think this belongs in the top 10 reasons to choose a distribution.
Yes, FreeBSD is a very nice OS and I'm using it right now, BUT it isn't THAT much better.
Let me explain: I've been using Debian Linux for 3 years now and got fed up by constant instabilities in the linux kernel (VM) and the package chaos. At the end I had like 150 packages installed, half of them being some obscure library on which some obscure package I needed depended. It worked, but it wasn't nice. So I gave FreeBSD a try. My Friend is a FreeBSD advocate (or should that be zealot) and he finally convinced me of FreeBSD. I backed up some data, wiped the discs and installed. It worked and after some adjustments I was feeling right at home.
BUT...
Many features that are advocated by advocates (or zealots..) weren't relevant to me or just plainly don't work.
- XFree86 DRI support doesn't work if you don't install X11 CVS. So no ports for this.
- Sound (emu10k) would often not work, needing a few reboots (mind you.. this never happened with Linux, so it shouldn't be a hardware issue).
- Ports would often not fetch or build, because they depend on some other port with a specific version, which in turn isn't available anymore.
- Securelevels are nice, but as soon as you rise em one above the lowest you cannot start X anymore, so this gets ruled out for workstations.
- CVSupping the source is nice, but what for? I got the same with apt-get upgrade and it finished faster.
- Compiling from source is nice, but I didn't see any improvements over binary packages.
I could go on for a while now..
Bottom line is: FreeBSD is a nice OS and I like it, but it isn't that great compared to e.g. Debian. Both have their shortcomings and had I known about them beforehand, I might have not switched.
I'm writing this to contrast the "FreeBSD is soooo much superior to Linux"-posters and give people a little less biased picture from my experience with BSD.
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
* the ports collection can't be beat by any distro
Actually, it can very easily be beat by many distros. Ports is nice if you're installing a program from scratch and leaving it, but if you update your ports collection, there's no method to update a single package! You need to uninstall every package that depends on the one you're trying to upgrade by hand, then install all of them AGAIN through ports. Until there's a 'make update' that updates a single package (or a package and everything that depends on it) after updating the ports tree, it won't be nearly as flexible as a simple 'rpm -Fvh file.rpm' or the apt-get equivalent.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?