On Wed, 15 Apr 2020 at 10:30, Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming < c...@teo-en-ming.com> wrote:
> On 2020-04-15 20:20, Frederic Muller wrote: > > On 4/15/20 7:09 PM, Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming wrote: > >> > >> Where can I find a good and reliable ranking of all the Linux distros > >> in the world then? > >> > >> What are the top 5? > > There is no such thing. It really depends on what you want to do, what > > you are familiar with, the support you expect and so on. > > > > And even with the same requirements different people will use different > > distro. > Different distros exist because someone didn't find what they wanted in existing distros. The downside of this is that different distros provide different packages, so you may want some software that hasn't been packaged, or the only package is for a very old version. There is the Linux Standard Base <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base> (LSB), a cooperative effort by several distributions coordinated by the Linux Foundation, that attempted to provide binary compatibility across distributions. There are a number of open source applications that are sufficiently complex that building them takes a significant effort (examples include TeX Live, R, and NASA's ocean remote sensing package). This worked well for a while, but has broken down. A couple problem areas are internationalization, Oracle's change in the licensing for Java, the advent of Wayland, and dealing with multiple versions of libraries to support systems using large numbers of CPU cores and GPU's for processing. The NASA package provides it's own versions of many libraries because distro's build the same library version using different options (multiprocessing, compression, array indexing with 32-bit or 64-bit ints, etc). Initially, LSB was based on RPM packaging with some constraints to support automated conversion to .deb packages. I found this really helpful for a year or two before it broke. > Best is probably to test-drive then for a while and see what works best > > for you. > > > > Fred > > There are simply far too many choices for Linux distros. > I find it helpful to look at the support forums and wiki's. Arch Linux often has the best documentation. Ubuntu forums have been dominated by questions from new users and people who recommend "sudo ..." whenever "..." doesn't do what the user wanted, but there are significant projects that are developed on Ubuntu and ported to other distros. Debian avoids many of the "overly popular" issues with Ubuntu, and most Ubuntu packages come from Debian anyway. -- George N. White III
_______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.org
