[NTLUG:Discuss] attn: newbies!

[Chris Cox]

Some of the differentiators center around the vendor supplied tools.
SuSE uses YaST (for example).  Other differences center around
what tools/sw and in some cases...and it can be important... what
version of tools/sw come with the distribution.

Random thoughts,
Chris

Christopher Browne wrote:
> 
> 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.
> --
> (reverse (concatenate 'string "gro.gultn@" "enworbbc"))
> http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/resume.html
> "Robot: Your plastic pal who's fun to be with."
> -- Marketing Division, Sirius Cybernetics Corp.
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