[GRLUG] The battle of the distros

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Mon, 2008-11-10 at 14:43 -0500, John-Thomas Richards wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 02:27:14PM -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > > I won't be correcting you, I think both the Fedora and Ubuntu team's
> > > have done an excellent job of just getting things to 'work'.
> > > I'm not an expert on compiling and to me it's really frustrating to
> > > find common applications or packages that I HAVE to compile for my
> > > kernel, to often find using make && makefile has errors or something
> > > goes... I just don't have the time for it.
> > I'm curious what applications those would be?  I've used LINUX as my
> > primary desktop for a decade,  and I haven't had to compile an
> > application in years.  And I'm pretty sure I haven't built a kernel in
> > at least five years.
> I'm with you; I've used Linux as an end-user (only) for eleven years and
> have not had to compile an app (other than e17, which is in heavy
> development) in a long time.  Part of that reason, though, is I run
> Debian; Debian has probably a larger number of apps in its repository
> than any other distro.  (There.  The onslaught begins.)

With the Novell build repository, everybody is pretty much even in the
available packages.

> > > I'm sure there will be the onslaught of people telling me why Debian,
> > > or Slackware are more fit distributions... but maybe I'm not 1337
> > > enough to handle them ;) .
> > Nah, I don't care what you use. :)   I settled on openSUSE back on
> > release 10 and haven't seen any reason to change.  Generally, distro
> > hopping/shopping is a colossal waste of time.
> If a user would settle on a distro and learn it's quirks, life would
> become a lot easier.  

Yep,  disto hopping is a very good example of making the perfect the
enemy of the good.  I've been using LINUX since kernel 0.99a and I've
seen a strong reverse correlation between distro-hoppers and people who
actually succeed with LINUX.  The distro-hoppers mindset is to try
another distro everytime they hit a snag,  which means they are
constantly trying distributions and find LINUX to be unproductive.  It
would be interesting if there were some four or five flavors of Windows,
Windows users would probably get stuck in the same cycle.

>  When you boil it down, Linux is Linux.

Yep.  

>   If a user
> will take the time to learn the quirks of openSUSE, openSUSE will likely
> meet his needs.  It could be Ubuntu or Fedora or Mandriva or Puppy or
> whatever.  Make a decision and take the time to learn the distro.

Yep.