2009/4/3 Malcolm Johnston <[email protected]> > Regarding Martin Visser's comments in the final "Sound Problem" posting. I > don't want to incite a Holdens versus Faclcons type debate here, but how > would one briefly characterize "mainstream Linux" these days? > ... > > All this may be just me. I haven't had a decent look at distros like > Ubuntu, > and this is why I ask my question. What, in a nutshell, is their appeal? > One one level it's all Unix, of course, but, given that, what are the > appealing differences? > >
I don't always like the way debian (and perhaps by extension ubuntu) modify the conf files and arrange things for various software - I don't want to have to figure out the debian-way on top of figuring out the software itself - but the thing I keep coming back to is the packaging system and particularly apt/aptitude. It's gold [1]. I've used yum utility with centos which does a similar thing but I had more trouble getting what I wanted (that may be because of less experience and the fact I was using one version below current). The other thing is that debian and its non-commercial nature seems like an interesting phenomenon in itself. It feels big, comprehensive and reliable (that ssh thing last year notwithstanding :) ) but it's not backed by any big company or an overt commercial interest. Seems to me that there is definitely something valuable there in the way it brings together a lot of the best free/open-source software into a unified system that can be shown off to the world. [1] it also helps that there are isp's like iinet who provide free mirrors for debian/ubuntu/* repositories which you can use if you are customer -- Daniel Bush http://blog.web17.com.au http://github.com/danielbush -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
