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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.
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.
Oldest surviving distro then.
Silly rabbit
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.