Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
* 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...