[NTLUG:Discuss] Whats the most Vanilla Linux Distro...if there is such a thing

[Steve Baker]

NTLUG wrote:
> I am looking for suggestions on a linux distro that isn't "tainted" by
> the people making it.

That's kindof an odd question.

There isn't really a "true" thing called Linux that is somehow being
messed with by the distribution makers.

Rather, there is a more or less standard kernel - a core of basic
tools from GNU - and a bazillion separate little projects providing
everything else.

The art of making a distro is deciding which of those tens of thousands
of programs is worth distributing - which version of each of those packages
is most stable - and what options they should be built with.

That represents maybe 100,000 individual decisions to be made.   The likelyhood
of any two distributors making the same set of decisions independantly is very
small - so so *some* extend, all distributions differ somewhat from one another.

> When I say tainted...with RedHat, they tinker with everything so in many
> cases if you get something on the internet, you are going to run into
> some problems installing it.

If you could somehow make a chart of distribution 'sameness', there would be
a cluster of distributions close together in the middle of the diagram - with a
few others spread further out away from that center.  Then there would be another
(much smaller) cluster with RedHat, Mandrake and a couple of others that used
RedHat's set of choices as their starting point.

RedHat have done some pretty nasty things over the years - there was the issue of
the GCC version they put out which was grabbed from some unreleased CVS checkin
that didn't even have a version number assigned to it by the GCC team.  There was
the version of Mesa they put out where they'd done a similar thing.   This is NOT
a good thing.

I guess if you are looking for the distro that's at the center of that larger
cluster of similar Linuxes, I'd have to say that Debian would be right there
in the center.

 > I would like to find a distro that doesn't
> have that kinda of problem.

I like SuSE, but GenToo and Debian would be high on my list.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
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