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What Your Choice of Linux Distro Says about You
iter8 writes "NewsForge has an article explaining what your choice of distro says about you. There's no comment on what using Windows or OS X does for your rep. I use Mandrake, so that makes me suave and sophisticated."
Oh please, this is just as reliable as the Which OS Are you? quiz.
... is BBSpot's OS Quiz.
If you want something informative, there's the old reliable Distro Watch and if you want something funny, try:
Actually, slackware isn't the oldest distro. That credit is generally given to SLS, which appeared in mid-1992; however, there also was MCC Interim Linux (available from the university of Manchester in feb 1992), and TAMU, from the Texas A&M university (about the same time).
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Neither of them is still around in a recognizable form, though. Slackware's still around, and has deviated little from its origins.
Oldest surviving distro then.
Silly rabbit
"If John Wayne had been a Linux user, he would have used Gentoo."
I don't know...could John Wayne even use a PC? He seems more like the Linspire kind of guy.
Actually, which distro is it that runs on PCs that have been shot with a rifle out of frustration?
'Cause I think that's the one John Wayne would be running.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Windows needed drivers installed for ethernet, sound, video, abuncha motherboard stuff, and a few other things.
Linux has needed alot fewer things manually set up for me.
"I want to just use my computer not fix it."
That sums up why the last time Windows puked up on me I started running off of Knoppix until I had an installed Linux going.
Especially since often the quickest fix is outright reinstalling, and I had my fill of that.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Now I know I'm a complete bitch and everything, but since when where X and TCP/IP features of the GNU/Linux system?
Since the moment that they were featured in the first comprehensive Linux distribution.
All Linux distributions have features that were not necessiarly created by Stallman or the creators of the distro, but that doesn't make them any less of a feature.
Swaret and pkgtool are damn fine things, and I'll challenge you to show me how they come up short. I mean, I do kind of long for those sweet, sweet ebuilds of gentoo, but i can just type in
orand that is that. Oh yeah, and you can also point out that Slackware users don't need or want wizards and guis; we'll take a swarm of xterms, thank you.
"Less power to the government = more power to the people = free people."
Fot the sake of accuracy and nitpicking, it should be pointed out that traditionally anarchy is not only opposed to the state but also to capitalism, because capitalism creates inequality which creates unfreedom.
That sounds about right to me. I've tried the others and keep coming back to Slackware. I've been using it since it came on a fistful of floppies. I remember downloading my first copy from a friend's FTP site on a 14.4K modem.
I still don't like package management. If I have the choice, I'll download the source and compile it myself.
Slackware seems to be the only distro that actually believes you and does the right thing when you try to set up a box without a GUI. All the others I've tried install all kinds of X stuff even if you try to turn it off. I was working with Red Hat Enterprise AS 3 the other day; I said NO samba, NO bind, NO a bunch of other stuff. Needless to say, it installed samba, bind, and a bunch of other stuff anyway.
Well, you're wrong. No offense intended.
Sorry, I'm a Slackware user (since '96) and you are the one who is wrong here.
Slackware is not 50% faster than the other distros. Sorry, there just isn't enough crap running on FC2 or Gentoo or Suse to slow down the same machine that much. And yes, I'm talking runlevel 3 or 4. I find Slackware zippier than the others, yes, but 50% faster? Give your head a shake.
Also you will find if you take the time to do the critical analysis that having everything in the kernel is not measurably faster than having a lean kernel with modules. I prefer the latter myself and have done the tests -- it's not worth the effort to compile everything into the kernel and then have a kernel that's only usable on a limited subset of machines. Build the kernel as generic as possible, modularize everything and now you have a kernel you can throw on all your machines. Or are you a Gentoo user in disguise and think that a full compiler environment is required on every machine? The package system is there for a reason. Use it. The dependency hell that all the other distros have doesn't exist on Slack, which is one of the bigger reasons I enjoy it.
I have a USB2 hdd with a development-ready version of slack9.1 and slack10.0 on it (since I have both in my environment). If I need to build something I mount it, chroot to the proper environment, build, checkinstall and now I have the package available for all my slack91 and/or slack100 machines, and I save myself the 600 or so megs I need for a proper development environment on every machine and I save myself the problem of keeping the development environments up to date on all the machines. Hell I even have a script that'll make pretty much any Perl module a Slackware package without destroying perllocal.
There's another reason you want to turn off ALL unessential services: security.
/etc/rc.d and comment out all the lines that start services you're not running, "just in case". You can always uncomment them if you change your mind later.
I run Slackware at my apartment, and when I installed it, the first thing I did was make sure that the only services I installed in the first place were the ones I was going to be using daily. Since I'm using the laptop as a workstation, that means I installed almost nothing except CUPS and the client for DHCP so I could hit the web from KDE.
You might also want to go into
But, backup for your point, I have a pretty minimal set of stuff running. And, my Slackware runs like the wind on a Pentium-III, 600Mhz with 384MB Ram. Including, believe it or not, Netbeans IDE, which is a resource hog and a half. Slackware gives it plenty of room, and I didn't even recompile anything (I like kernel modules). Fedora ran like crap, by the way, and wasn't java friendly (it installed a weird C library and I couldn't get the install to work).
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Gentoo.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
If easy means you can not read anything presented to you on the screen and mindlessly click "Next", then yes Debian is hard to install. If easy means you don't have to do much to get it to detect fairly common ethernet cards and even IDE RAID controllers, then Debian is easy to install and the others are sometimes harder.