What are the Real Differences Between Distributions?

toblak asks: "Everybody seems to say the Mandrake is a good distro for newbies and Gentoo, Debian, SUSE, etc, are for the Power Users. Other than different updating schemes, when you get 'under the hood' of the distribution isn't it basically the same? If I compile some source code on a Debian system don't I get the same functionality as I would if I compiled the same code on a Mandrake system? I've been using Mandrake for about a year and while I don't consider myself a newbie, I'm not a Power User either. Have I been 'missing out' on something by staying with Mandrake?"

Comments

Number 1 difference is...

[Joe Tennies]

Speed. I am running a Gentoo system. The big advantage is that you get new packages pretty quickly. All the code can be compiled specifically for you processor (that's right I have an entire system specifically compiled for my Athon Thunderbird). Gentoo also has a bunch of kernel patches applied (most specifically the preemptible kernel patch and the O(1) scheduler kernel patch). These two do wonders for the responsiveness of a desktop system (don't worry, everyone else will get these when kernel 2.6 is adapted). The big things you lose on Gentoo is the stability and tech support. Don't get me wrong, it can be very stable, but the bigger distributions have a lot more people to check such things. The biggest thing though has to be time. You can spend a lot of time tweaking the settings and it can take a while to get a program (even with a fast internet connection and computer). As someone coming from Mandrake, you will also most miss the graphical setup programs, but you will end up learning a lot more about how the innards of Linux works.

The Install...

[RevAaron]

A lot of the distinction seems to be in how the install goes. With a Debian install, it tends to be a bit more crude, low-level, but still pretty simple and straightforward. Gentoo even more so, but with long periods of waiting while stuff compiles.

Newbie-oriented distros like Mandrake and Xandros (neé Corel) on the other hand try to make things very approachable in the install- everything is laid out like in an Windows app. You usually have an X11 GUI to guide you through the process. Another thing a lot of newbie-oriented distros tend to do is install a lot of stuff that you don't neccesarily need. I guess they're working on the assumption that a lot of Linux newbies would rather have almost everything they could ever need already installed and configured, rather than hoping they have the abilities to do it later.

There's nothing you really can't accomplish on one distro that you can on another, provided you have the source and the abilities to compile libraries and applications. Some commercial apps may be tailored to a specific distro to the point that it doesn't work on another, but usually it works out fine.

Aside from ease of installation, distros have fairly minor differences like a what binaries go where, /opt? or /usr/local? things of that nature, but they're not a huge deal.

Re:Here's what I've seen

[ctr2sprt]

Red Hat likes everything nicely tucked away in /usr/bin, and /etc, completly forgeting /opt and /usr/local/bin, and /usr/local/etc ever existed. It kinda breaks some traditional locations of files.

No, RedHat is exactly correct in not installing binaries into /usr/local, and it's probably correct in not installing binaries into /opt. /usr/local is exclusively for the benefit of the administrator, the distribution must never touch it at all. In other words: /usr is for programs you install via your package manager, /usr/local is for programs you install by hand (make install). This is all very sensible and according to the FHS.

The differences

[Alethes]

The reason each distro differs is because of the target audience of the distro. With that in mind, several things change:

1. the way installation works
   
2. the way software is installed, uninstalled, and updated
   
3. the way the system configuration is managed
   
4. where configuration files are stored
   
5. where the line distinguishing the OS from the applications lies, which determines where the files for each are kept
   

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it gives a pretty good idea.

Really, every distro is a compromise between flexibility and user-friendliness. A distro that is very flexible and can be used on a wide range of systems probably is much more difficult to use, configure and is most likely a source distro with little or no package management. On the other hand, a distro that is very user-friendly will have a GUI interface for everything that the maintainers see as important, and it will have a package management system that requires as little input from the user as possible, meaning that it is a lot less flexible. Every distro is somewhere between complete flexibility and complete user-friendliness and each of us chooses which one we want to use based on that criteria.

Re:package managers

[gengee]

the way (I think) most people work with tools like rpm is to just install packages off the cd or rpmfind.net, without ever really looking at what you're doing. when you have to actually compile traceroute, as with gentoo for example, you know much more about your system, its components dependencies, etc.

Hmm...Because it takes so much more skill to `emerge traceroute` than it does to `rpm -Uvh traceroute-major-minor.rpm` or `apt-get install traceroute`? :)

Don't forget /etc and runlevels

[SpaFF]

Another big difference between distros is how their runlevels and their /etc structure is laid out in general.

Redhat, Debian, Mandrake, et. al. use a more SYSTEM V init structure whereas Slackware uses a more BSD style init. Gentoo's init is pretty much unique to gentoo (I'm still figuring that one out).

-Lee