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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.
I'd prefer a bit more in-depth reviewage, but I guess you can only do so many install/wipe cycles before you get bored. What would be really useful would be a page with a number of these reviews for smaller distros.
/Brian
I'm not sure this applies to the average person who is attempting to decide which Linux to install and use, but it's interesting to see a few of them evaluated from a dummied-down perspective. I guess a few of these may be on their way out as viable commercial alternatives, but from the response we saw on Slackware's demise (not), there seems to be no lack of friendly competition and enticements.
Partly off-topic I guess but...
What's the situation with Linux Standards Base? Is any of the distros 100% compatible? Having a single standard would make life whole lot easier for users and for companies. For example: NVIDIA offers Linux-drivers for their cards. In their download-page there are packages for just about every major distro there is. It causes extra hassle for them. And I guess the situation is more or less similar for other companies as well.
How long will it be untill we start to see software that is not offered in several packages (for each distro), but in one package with instructions "this package will install on a LSB-compliant distribution"?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I dunno, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but I think you should just need to install a distro once, and then from then on, you should be able to do kernel upgrades, etc. (when you really need to) without having to upgrade the whole distro.
Debian is very close to this. Unfortunately the extremely slow release schedule is a major annoyance with Debian. If you run testing or unstable on your desktop machine you should be happy with relatively recent versions of everything. If you run stable you'll find rather old versions of everything patched to hell. Maybe I'm just disillusioned but Debian just doesn't cut it for a server OS. I love the ease of upgrading but using Apache 1.2.9 and similarly outdated releases of mysql, postgresql, and php4 is a major annoyance. I could build the packages myself but there goes the whole ease of use... So for my desktops and non-production servers I run Debian unstable or testing but on my production servers I'm planning on moving 100% to FreeBSD. I don't think any Linux distribution has the ease of use and updating while using up to date software that FreeBSD has with the ports system. Some people were working on copying the FreeBSD system while using the Linux kernel (it was a debian group) but I don't think they are very active...
Ports + CVS update + linux kernel would be awesome...