On Sat, 8 Apr 2000, J.W. Scott wrote:
> If you're wanting to stick to a RH derivative I'd suggest trying out
> Mandrake. (http://www.linux-mandrake.com/)
>
> Personally, I'm switching to hand-rolled next week:
> http://www.linuxfromscratch.com
>
It's certainly true that every distribution seems to have its own
problems, as far as I can tell, but then I've only worked extensively with
slackware, redhat, suse, mandrake, and debian, so I can't really make this
statement with full knowlege.
<rant>
One of the biggest annoyances to me is this insistence upon random
customizations which don't add anything to the usability of the
distribution. Every single one I've tried - with the possible exception
of slackware - is guilty of this. Add to it automated package management
tools which install these customizations in the background without telling
you what's going on, and you end up with a linux system that is really
hard to troubleshoot or modify because there are spaghetti-like
configuration files scattered all over /etc.
Take the init system, for example. The basic System V init system has all
the flexibility you could ever want for setting up precisely controlled
system run levels. So why do all the major distributions feel the need to
dink with it? Is an
rc.run_this_before_running_rc.foo_but_only_after_rc.bar really
necessary? No, but it's easier to foist your own brilliant creation upon
an unsuspecting audience than to have the discipline to figure out how to
use the existing framework which has already been in place for
years. This is the weak side of the bazaar model: every wannabe Richard
Stallman with a text processor can wreck havoc at will. The reason the
linux kernel doesn't suffer from this kind of chaos is that it's not a
bazaar at all, but rather a benevolent dictatorship.
</rant>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Send administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
