[PLUG] Distributions

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky zznmeb at gmail.com
Mon Apr 6 06:29:21 UTC 2009


On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 6:42 PM, drew wymore <drew.wymore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 6:32 PM, Dan Young <danielmyoung at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think there's plenty to differentiate distros, and as you say, it's
>> generally not hardware support. Freedom, distance from upstream,
>> community, frequency of release, and stability are a few of the real
>> differences, IMO.
> Dan,
> I can agree. The one and only thing I'd love to see which i think would help
> greatly in adoption is a common packaging system/dependency resolution
> system. I haven't played much with apt based systems but I do like
> yum/packagekit, it used to be a PITA but it has definitely matured over the
> years. I seriously doubt that this will ever happen though.

Well ... OK ... brief differentiator list:

1. Color: openSUSE, green, Fedora, blue, Ubuntu, brown

2. Packaging: openSUSE, RPM, Fedora, RPM, Ubuntu .deb

3. Release cycle: openSUSE, 8 months, Fedora, 6 months, Ubuntu, 6 months

4. Distance from upstream: about equal

5. Size of base repositories: I'm not sure here, but I think Ubuntu is
the largest, followed by Fedora and openSUSE. But you can usually find
packages for all of them.

6. Stability: I have no decent hard evidence on this. But if it's
solid stable "ancient history" you want, stick with RHEL/CentOS,
Debian stable or SuSE "enterprise" distros.

7. Freedom: they've all made some kind of bargain to get multimedia,
Java, Flash, Acrobat Reader, etc. Except gNewSense, that is. :)

8. Community: I've browsed all of the forums and they all seem pretty
much the same.

9. Tools for building your own distro, release media, etc.: I have no
idea what Ubuntu and Fedora have here. openSUSE has some neat tools,
although the documentation is a bit on the rough side. Gentoo had some
neat stuff but the documentation was non-existent and the whole Gentoo
release engineering effort appears to have disintegrated. So I'd give
openSUSE the nod here.

In the end, what switched me from Gentoo to openSUSE was the release
cycle. I'm not at all happy that openSUSE decided to slip the 11.2
release from six months after 11.1 to about 11 months after 11.1, and
*then* switch to an eight-month cycle. I downloaded the Ubuntu and
Fedora betas but haven't had a chance to do much except boot Ubuntu
once.

But at this point, I'm not sure I can hold out on openSUSE 11.1 until
November, when both Ubuntu and Fedora will have had two releases. As
far as the announced feature set is concerned, Ubuntu appears to have
more stuff that I want than Fedora. But I'll beta test both of them
and possibly switch my workstation over from openSUSE 11.1.
-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://www.linkedin.com/in/edborasky

I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.



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