TechHui

Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

Seems like everyone has his favorite distribution for one reason or another. I think that while there are some differences in the "default" setup, given that it is Linux, there are rarely big hurdles posed by any distribution to make it look like another. Most of the time, the difference between Distributions, and especially in the case of Debian or Ubuntu-derived ones, is the install-base in packages. For example, the "Open Terminal here" context menu in nautilus is a Plugin that's easily installed using Synaptic. Similar arguments can be made for 99% of the other distributions and their "differences".

 

But some have real differences. For example, I personally like OpenSUSE's YaST - a LOT. Even though I am not using the distribution, that's the one difference there that really is a huge plus in my mind.

 

Does anyone have similar differences that really make one distribution different from another? To me, other than the YaST which is tailored to where OpenSuSE puts their config files, really it's only drivers, kernel versions and X11 support.

Views: 88

Replies to This Discussion

For me, the main difference between distros is not so much the features, but the overall philosophy of each distro. For example, the "light and fast" vs. "user-friendly and filled with apps" distros. Think Bodhi Linux compared to Pinguy OS.

 

Open-source values are important for some users. For hard-core FOSS advocates, there's gNewSense. It has absolutely no proprietary software. Then there are the more pragmatic distros that favor "out of the box" functionality more, like Linux Mint. These distros don't mind including some closed-source firmware to make things work, such as Flash and DVD codecs.

 

On a more mundane level, some users want the most up-to-date bleeding edge stuff (Fedora). Others would rather have rock-solid stability (Debian).

 

The great thing about Linux is that there's a perfect flavor for everyone. For budding distro-hoppers, I recommend checking out Desktop Linux Reviews.

Stephan,

 

A simple means of classifying Linux distributions is by package manager/upstream development.  So a, likely incomplete, list comes to RedHat/Fedora (RPM), SuSE (YaST), Gentoo (Portage), Arch (Pacman), Debian/Ubuntu (Apt).  One could easily expand this list to include LFS, FreeBSD, OpenSuSE, Solaris, etc but for sake of simplicity and discussion I'll leave it at those original five.

 

I've used Gentoo, Ubuntu, and Arch fairly extensively, but it's been years since I touched RedHat or SuSE (never attempted LFS...).

 

Gentoo used to be a wonderful distribution, but (I hope I don't start a flamefest here - just speaking in general terms) its reputation for "ricing" and community disruption has forced many users and developers to look elsewehre.  I always like compiling from source and customizing the box, and installing Gentoo is a worthy project for any Linux enthusiast or professional.

Gentoo advantages: compile from source allows optimizations, manual installation fosters learning/hacking, Portage (package manager) has a huge library of available programs (sometimes compiled directly from CVS/SVN/Git, so you don't have to wait for Debian or RedHat to drag their feet releasing the newest Gnome or whatever).

Gentoo disadvantages: compile from source makes installing software slow, manual installation doesn't automatically come with the nice features you'd expect from Ubuntu/Windows/OS X (such as automatically mounting a thumb drive...doesn't happen until you tell it to happen), aggressive pursuit of bleeding-edge software/patches often unstable (there's a reason RedHat invented Fedora...).

 

Many Gentoo users have moved on to Arch (which I use exclusively). Arch is not quite as "hardcore," providing an Ncurses-based automated installation. That said, the base system is pretty basic, and you'll need to install your WM/sound/etc from the command line.  I don't know (don't care) if there is a GUI for Pacman. Pacman offers precompiled binaries, with capability to compile (I believe RedHat and Debian can also automate the compile -> install process).

 

Arch is really nice if you want something lean and customizable.  Pretty much any distro gives you a choice about your WM, but if you're doing something unusual for yourself it's much easier if you have a simpler distro.  An example might be writing a web server bound to port 80 interfacing to an LED digital sign controlled via RS-232, written in C++.  You can do this in any distro, but the startup scripts for RedHat/Debian are more complicated than those in Gentoo/Arch.  Since you already had to edit /etc/rc.conf to get your sound card working you're slightly ahead of the game.

 

Arch advantages: binary distribution is quicker than source, customizability, installation is easy but getting everything to work is an informative exercise, more stable than Gentoo.

Arch disadvantages: Pacman lacks the breadth of supported packages other distributions have. You can use the Arch User Repository (AUR), and you will, but that's just not quite as cool.

 

The Pacman Rosetta is a good read.

 

I've written considerably more than I had intended, but I hope this is the direction you intended to take discussion towards.

 - wjh

Marcus,

 

Please take this comment as just that - a comment, not chest-beating or insulting or whatever.

 

About six-seven years ago I was a Freshman at NC State and got the Linux fever.  I was constantly downloading, burning, and installing dozens of distributions that sounded cool from Distrowatch.com.  When speaking to a friend, who was an "elite" Gentoo user, I said offhand that I was looking for a "perfect" distro that did everything I wanted straight out of the box.  He smiled, laughed, and said I "sound like a Windows user."

 

I laughed, but it got me to thinking, and stuck with Gentoo.  The flexibility of a manual distribution allowed me to pick the very best of software and use what I liked.  By the end, I had eight hard drives with ReiserFS and ext3 on different disks, Apache2, MySQL, Fluxbox, Gkrellm, K3B, Gnome Terminal, ALSA, dozens of cron jobs, hundreds of Perl/bash scripts, VSFTPD, OpenSSH, KDevelop, Nautilus, and Kaffeine (with libdecss of course) on this overworked box.

 

Some of my application preferences have changed since this time, but that list demonstrates that a more intensive distribution gives you the flexibility to pick and chose your favorites and use what works for you.

 

Nowdays I've got a simpler Dell laptop with Arch Linux running Fluxbox, Firefox 4 (Firefox Sync is awesome btw...), Thunderbird, XTerm, Emacs, OSSv4, mplayer, Common Lisp, Eclipse w/ Android SDK.  When I save up a few grand I'll build a solid desktop and run basically the same software, with the same customizations.

 

The manual distributions also encourage you to tweak things for yourself.  An example is my Fluxbox config:

[john@arch ~]$ tail -n 2 ~/.fluxbox/keys
# show windows side-by-side
Control Mod1 t :ArrangeWindowsVertical (Layer=[current])

When I hit Control + Alt + T, the windows on my current layer are automatically resized to appear side-by-side.


Another example are my alias':

[john@arch ~]$ alias
alias bittorrent='aria2c'
alias image='feh'
alias ls='ls --color=auto'
alias pacman='sudo pacman'
alias xterm='xterm -fa monaco -fs 10 -bg black -fg white'

Generally speaking, alias' are a great way to automate those tasks that are difficult to remember.  I used to have dozens of these guys.

 

Marcus Sortijas said:

For me, the main difference between distros is not so much the features, but the overall philosophy of each distro. For example, the "light and fast" vs. "user-friendly and filled with apps" distros. Think Bodhi Linux compared to Pinguy OS.

 

Open-source values are important for some users. For hard-core FOSS advocates, there's gNewSense. It has absolutely no proprietary software. Then there are the more pragmatic distros that favor "out of the box" functionality more, like Linux Mint. These distros don't mind including some closed-source firmware to make things work, such as Flash and DVD codecs.

 

On a more mundane level, some users want the most up-to-date bleeding edge stuff (Fedora). Others would rather have rock-solid stability (Debian).

 

The great thing about Linux is that there's a perfect flavor for everyone. For budding distro-hoppers, I recommend checking out Desktop Linux Reviews.

John,

 

thank you for your insightful comments. As Marcus already noted, obviously THE strength of Linux is that it offers enough flexibility to be everything to everyone. The route that one takes might be different than the next guy, but in the end you will have a system that is tailored to your needs instead of the company that you bought your OS from. I've heard one time that Linux* is better than other operating systems because it gives back the control over your PC. I tend to agree with that, and I am pretty happy that Linux has supported me throughout my personal evolution from a casual, but interested PC user, to a Computer Scientist and Engineer. It also taught me to be pragmatic about the choices that I make (or have to make) in order to get things done.

 

I've used Gentoo before, and shied away from it after some time due to the extensive time it took to (re-)compile everything. I like it, though, and what attracts me to it is the level of technical granularity that the wiki and forums dedicated to this distribution show.

 

In terms of the philosophy, well ... like I said, I think that's mostly marketing. Even if I have less configuration files on disk, as long as I don't start the services when I do have them (pre-)installed, I still have a "lean" system. To me, distributions used to be really different in the past, like Slackware's BSD approach vs. System V everywhere else. Then it became which distro had the latest kernel or newest X11 support. Nowadays, it's whether you have GNOME or KDE pre-installed (to make it somewhat overly simplistic). The question is more whether it takes more work to get your XMonad** or Fluxbox running starting out from a Gentoo Netinstall or from a OpenSUSE desktop.

 

I personally found some gratification in the fact that at least my emacs always takes the same time to compile and install no matter where I used it, and thanks to Dropbox and .emacs it also always looks the same with the same functionality installed. :)

 

Cheers,

Stephan

 

* obviously, this remark may as well be made about any other open source OS

** great little piece of software that I use on my netbook to give optimal screen real estate while still maintaining control. I really think tiling window managers are the way to go on small screens. Forget the mouse, you'll just hurt your wrist trying to balance your netbook in the economy class while still getting to that touchpad that should have been disabled anyway because you accidentally keep moving the mouse pointer or (worse!) clicking because your clothes shift... ;-)

 

John Holden said:

Stephan,

 

A simple means of classifying Linux distributions is by package manager/upstream development.  So a, likely incomplete, list comes to RedHat/Fedora (RPM), SuSE (YaST), Gentoo (Portage), Arch (Pacman), Debian/Ubuntu (Apt).  One could easily expand this list to include LFS, FreeBSD, OpenSuSE, Solaris, etc but for sake of simplicity and discussion I'll leave it at those original five.

 

I've used Gentoo, Ubuntu, and Arch fairly extensively, but it's been years since I touched RedHat or SuSE (never attempted LFS...).

 

Gentoo used to be a wonderful distribution, but (I hope I don't start a flamefest here - just speaking in general terms) its reputation for "ricing" and community disruption has forced many users and developers to look elsewehre.  I always like compiling from source and customizing the box, and installing Gentoo is a worthy project for any Linux enthusiast or professional.

Gentoo advantages: compile from source allows optimizations, manual installation fosters learning/hacking, Portage (package manager) has a huge library of available programs (sometimes compiled directly from CVS/SVN/Git, so you don't have to wait for Debian or RedHat to drag their feet releasing the newest Gnome or whatever).

Gentoo disadvantages: compile from source makes installing software slow, manual installation doesn't automatically come with the nice features you'd expect from Ubuntu/Windows/OS X (such as automatically mounting a thumb drive...doesn't happen until you tell it to happen), aggressive pursuit of bleeding-edge software/patches often unstable (there's a reason RedHat invented Fedora...).

 

Many Gentoo users have moved on to Arch (which I use exclusively). Arch is not quite as "hardcore," providing an Ncurses-based automated installation. That said, the base system is pretty basic, and you'll need to install your WM/sound/etc from the command line.  I don't know (don't care) if there is a GUI for Pacman. Pacman offers precompiled binaries, with capability to compile (I believe RedHat and Debian can also automate the compile -> install process).

 

Arch is really nice if you want something lean and customizable.  Pretty much any distro gives you a choice about your WM, but if you're doing something unusual for yourself it's much easier if you have a simpler distro.  An example might be writing a web server bound to port 80 interfacing to an LED digital sign controlled via RS-232, written in C++.  You can do this in any distro, but the startup scripts for RedHat/Debian are more complicated than those in Gentoo/Arch.  Since you already had to edit /etc/rc.conf to get your sound card working you're slightly ahead of the game.

 

Arch advantages: binary distribution is quicker than source, customizability, installation is easy but getting everything to work is an informative exercise, more stable than Gentoo.

Arch disadvantages: Pacman lacks the breadth of supported packages other distributions have. You can use the Arch User Repository (AUR), and you will, but that's just not quite as cool.

 

The Pacman Rosetta is a good read.

 

I've written considerably more than I had intended, but I hope this is the direction you intended to take discussion towards.

 - wjh

BTW, I am giving Fedora 15 a serious try. I just got too turned off by the latest Ubuntu release and where they're going to take it. I know that I can change anything back but there's a limit to defaults that I am willing to change back. I could deal with the stupid colors that they are using, I swallowed the "move window control icons to the left in the title bar" switch, but now it's clear that they are looking to make the PC interface more like an Android Tablet. The visuals remind me of KDE 3.5, just on the left instead of the bottom, in short, I am pretty turned off by the recent changes.

 

It's too bad because underneath I really liked this distribution. But it highlights the "differences" in the distributions. Even though Fedora 15 is using GNOME3, I feel that this at least keeps in line with what makes a PC just that while preserving just as much screen space. At least my system settings aren't called "Themes & Tweaks" anymore.

 

Sorry for the Rant!

 

Cheers,

Stephan

RSS

Sponsors

web design, web development, localization

© 2024   Created by Daniel Leuck.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service