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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."
There are plenty of hardcore code, library, kernel hackers running distros like fedora, suse, mandrake, etc
There are also plenty of totaly linux newbies using gentoo, archlinux, etc
I know that this article is a joke (not a funny one either), but these stereotypes need to come to an end.
Sunny Dubey
The entire point of the article is to piss off everyone using any of those distros.
that is because most journalists are frightened by Slackware. It's the oldest existing Linux distro (Yggdrasil was the very first) and as far as I am concerned the single best distro for doing what linux is supposed to.
Slackware on a machine is usually 50% or more faster than the fedora,redhat,mandrake and it makes sense where things are and where config files are insteaad of the randomized placement found in other distros. (which is the single bigest problem with linux, I dont care who is right, let's pick one filesystem layout and EVERYONE use it.)
I have tried ALL linux distros and I keep coming back to slackware. It just works.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The people I know who use Debian, myself included, have less patience for crap that doesn't work. Though harder to install, unlike the other distros, you only ever have to do it once.
Tongue in cheek or no, the myth that Debian is behind other distros has continually been dispelled. Debian/Unstable is consistently ahead of other distros. What other distros besides Debian, and maybe Gentoo, currently include Kernel 2.6.8, KDE 3.3.0, and Firefox RC1?
Debian users simply loathe frigging around with the basics of their system, an experience all too common with some other distros. We prefer to spend our time frigging around on Slashdot, et al. Or advocating free software.
Well, you're wrong. No offense intended.
Take a warm fuzzy distro and install it. do a 'ps -auwwx' and look at all the crap running.
Take Slackware, install it like I would (install everything, don't let anything but SSH start as services). Then recompile the kernel specifically for your platform. Compile everything you *NEED* into the kernel, and don't make anything as modules. Now boot. It'll boot faster, run faster, and be far more enjoyable.
Why start and use things that you don't need? No printer, why CUPS or lpd? No SMB network, why samba? Do you really need/want Apache, MySQL, pcmcia services (on a desktop), etc, etc, etc, if you just want a fast running machine? Nope.
Most distros have fallen into the Microsoft way of thinking. Go ahead, start up as much crap as you can. They use might use it someday (or probably won't). If it's slow, they'll buy a bigger, faster computer.
The biggest reason for me to upgrade my home machines:
1) to support more drive space for things I work on.
2) to compile things faster
and very occasionally
3) Better video support for the games I occasionally play.
Again, that's Linux. I'm not part of that Windows gaming world, where you're almost expected to be running the latest/greatest hardware (and overclocking it at that) to play your games.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
"This distribution is popular with those who always count in binary, and are politically correct in a free software kind of way. Many are suspected of having been nursed on a TTY. Debian users take pride in the fact that their distribution is always several releases behind the latest version of the kernel, but makes up for that by being more difficult to install and use."
uh... no....
I use debian because it takes zero effort to upgrade packages - no BS, and if there's a change in the default /etc files, i have the option of keeping my old config or use the new package maintener's version. Unlike rpms, the debian packaging system doesnt just dump the files. it checks more than that.
I dont ever have to download ISOs and reinstall the OS from scratch.
There's also a lot less crap installed on my machine than distros like Mandrake or Redhat.
I dont have to worry about rpm packages breaking my system. Packages aren't outdated because I'm running unstable...
I actually find it quite easy to install with their newest installer
i'd rather spend time getting work done than wasting time configuring my system and updating broken packages. I don't want to read packages of documentation from linuxdoc. I just want things to work without the need of manually changing LD_LIBRARY_PATH or using a distro that comes with a beta version of gcc (redhat).
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