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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
Problem is how you look at it. You see Windows, and you see one company behind it. You look at Linux and you see lots of companies behind them, and think of it as dilution of focus.
Thing is, it's the wrong comparison. Think of RedHat Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, Suse Linux as the equivalent of Windows. Linux, the brand, would be like wordprocessor. There are different wordprocessors out there (MSWord, WordPerfect, Lotus WordPro, StarWord etc), each made by a different company/group.
So, you do have an entire company focusing on one version of the OS (RedHat focuses only on their RedHat Linux OS). When they add a feature that everybody like, other distributions add the feature (again like WPs... MS adds a feature, and it gets copied over to WordPerfect, WordPro etc).
As to performance and ease-of-use, I would say Debian does rival RedHat in ease-of-use. Their package management system is far superior to the RPM system that most commercial dists. use.
Think of it like this, Microsoft has had for the longest time, two distributions in their company (NT and 9x line). One company, two distributions. RedHat has always only had one distribution (RedHat Linux).
Who is more focused?
Je ne parle pas francais.
I might as well switch to WinXP, where I know that the entire company is focused on one version of the OS, not dozens of competing distros. Isn't Linux kind of shooting itself in the foot with the distro system? Wouldn't cooperation be more efficient than competition?
You seem to be missing the point of Linux... It is not just a company that decides what you need and you have to live with it. It is many companies and groups of people around the world that had a need for something that worked and produced it. Being open source, you are allowed to use it to your desire. There are two ways of looking at this. If everyone "worked" together on the same thing then unity would be an advantage for that one specific product, but what about the rest who need something slightly different? What if every developer that worked on a a mailer only did sendmail? What would happen to your choices of mailers? I do not see multiple choices as a disadvantage. I see it as more progress and more choices for myself. With XP or a one distribution world you would be STUCK with what you were given.
The reason Linux is where is at today is because of the diversity.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
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.
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.
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?
When I started eating ice cream, I vaguely knew there were other flavors besides rocky road; but I knew that rocky road was the biggest, oldest, most successful ice cream. So, why would anyone want to eat any of the other flavors? Do they seriously rival rocky road in terms of tastiness and coldness. Do they have rocky road peanut type innovation? Does anyone eat them besides the people that make them as vanity projects?
If any of the other flavors do have advantages over Rocky Road (which I kind of doubt), then I may have to reconsider my eating of ice cream. I mean, if I can't get all the benefits of ice cream in one flavor, what's the point? I might as well switch to water.
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...