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The Complete guide to Linux Distributions
theGEEK writes
"Techweb has "Your Complete
Guide to Linux Distributions" - it's a fairly large article aimed at corporate types for integrating Linux into the company. "
Covers all the biggies and some of the minors more geared towards
the suits.
Obviously, a web publication is better than a book for tracking Linux... But why did they write it like this? Couldn't they have set some wide standards of comparison? They comment that SuSE has feature A, and Red Hat has feature B, but they don't mention that Debian has A or B, they just say it has feature C.... ?? What the heck? Like it doesn't? In several cases it does, and Red Hat has A, and SuSe has B...
Not to mention the fact that SuSE is at 6, and Hat will be at 6 by the time anyone who reads this actually sorts through all this double talk and orders it...
They might as well have just put up a table of what's avaliable and provided links... Oh wait, there is already a page of links at www.linux.org... maybe they should have just reviewed www.linux.org, and not tried to pick such a wide moving target.
Slackware, the best distro ( IMO ) got sidestepped and given a 2 sentence overview. How pathetic. It deserves to be given at LEAST a semi-in-depth mention. The reason a lot of people, like myself, enjoy Linux is because of the power it lets you have over the operation system and not the other way around. Slackware embodies this power.... http://www.slackware.com
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
Like others have said, as a whole the article wasn't too bad. It does suffer somewhat from outdated information, hwoever. For example, Caldera no longer sells WABI. They also didn't mention that WABI only supported 16-bit Windows apps in the first place.
...
I also was shaking my head a bit at the "reconfigure without reboot" aspect that Debian was touted to have. IMO, that's effectively true with all Linux distributions. I know we don't have to reboot our Redhat-based servers for most configuration changes. I was expecting to see for Debian "potentially better packaging / upgrade system" rather than what I did see here.
Some have mentioned that there wasn't mention of Linux support for other architectures in the article. Two things: 1) It *was* mentioned that Linux ran on Sparcs, Alphas, etc. etc. 2) The article was focusing on the x86, so comparing Debian/Alpha and Redhat/Alpha would be inappropriate anyhow.
Even the BSDs got a mention under "Alternatives". That was pretty cool, even though I'm not a BSD user.
I did like the fact that for once we get an article posted that *isn't* Linux vs NT - rather it focused on "So you want to use Linux."
A more current rewrite of the article would be nice, though
-- Rick
just made a quick search for my favorite distribution as a sanity check, and:
Distributors such as Stampede, notes Raymond, have taken Red Hat sources and recompiled them for Pentium-only architecture, vs. the default 386 compile.
i am not an expert, but i don't think stampede has done this at all, afaik every package is compile from origonal source, and not the srpms, but certainly, it is not the basis of the distribution. they write further:
Although this adds some processing speed, it sacrifices Red Hat support, and because the performance bottleneck is more likely to be in the I/O system, recompiling doesn't add that much real difference.
which i don't buy either - overall stampede feels damn snappy, although i haven't seen an actual fact-based analysis anywhere.
i haven't (and now probably won't) read the whole thing, but this is atleast one knock against the article.
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