[NTLUG:Discuss] attn: newbies!

[Christopher Browne]

On Mon, 09 Apr 2001 10:25:20 CDT, the world broke into rejoicing as
"Gorwood, Steve" <sgorwood at ti.com>  said:
> Perhaps a page comparing the different major distributions: i.e.,
> why would a user choose slackware over mandrake, mandrake over
> redhat, etc.

> I don't suggest that you rate the distributions in terms of quality
> (which changes dramatically from release to release), but each
> distribution brings a different philosophy, approach or goal to the
> task and has a different target end user.

It may be easy enough to characterize Slackware, but I'm not sure how
you're going to be able to distinguish between Red Hat, SuSE,
Mandrake, TurboLinux, and Caldera without being _forced_ to opinionate
in a way that is going to lead to acrimony.

After all, they _all_ have pretty common sets of goals, specifically:
             To sell boxes to users.

In the interests of maximizing the numbers of boxes sold, all of these
are:

- Plucking source code from much the same rivers of development
  efforts,

- Sponsoring development of their favorite bits of hardware drives;

- Using the _same_ package management tool, RPM;

- Building progressively prettier sets of installation and system
  management tools.

Three of those factors lead to convergence of code bases; the last
item on the list leads to diverging sets of custom system management
tools, which strikes me as mostly a Bad Thing.

Over the last couple years, their _policies_ have been to try to IPO,
and get tremendously wealthy.  It's not going to be easy to agree on
_technical_ or _functional_ differences.
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