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List:       busybox
Subject:    Re: was error in latest build, svn 15200: Enable getopt long
From:       Rob Landley <rob () landley ! net>
Date:       2006-05-30 5:17:50
Message-ID: 200605300117.50989.rob () landley ! net
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On Sunday 28 May 2006 10:38 pm, Thompson Harmon [US], Stanley W. wrote:
> Rob,
>
>    I have this strange feeling that you are not a Fedora user like me.
> My group is about to switch from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 5.  Thus,
> this is a great time to switch distros.  Which distro do you recommend
> and why?  Please advise.
>
> Thanks,
> Stan

All I can tell you is my personal experience, which isn't the same as a 
recommendation but which matches that of a number of other people I know.  
(This has nothing to do with Busybox, which needs to be able to run on any 
current Linux variant.)

<rant>

I was a loyal Red Hat user from about 5.2 through Fedora Core 1.  I ran it on 
servers, desktops, and laptops.  They had to work to lose me, but they 
managed.  The most annoying thing was that when the call went out for a big 
company to stand up and defend things like decss so Linux could participate 
in the desktop space, Red Hat yanked mp3 playback support and bogged off to 
the server market.  They quit the field, withdrew from the desktop market 
entirely.  (You may remember Sun making a similar decision in the mid 90's; 
after all, who needs developer workstations?  This is the direction the new 
management went in, the people brought into the company by the IPO who 
replaced Robert Young.)

I finally left Fedora behind when Fedora Core 2 wouldn't install a brand new 
Via Samuel (a $99 x86 Linux box brand new from Fry's that came with a distro 
that didn't have gcc in it, so I wiped it with one that did).  This was after 
this:
http://lwn.net/Articles/83360/

But before they announced that Fedora is never going to be more than a warmed 
over Red Hat Rawhide:
http://lwn.net/Articles/178518/

I'm looking for a distro that can go after nontechnical end users.  If it 
can't, it doesn't _MATTER_.  When Red Hat stopped going after nontechnical 
end users (outside the server space), it ceased to matter.  It's that simple.

As for replacements for Red Hat, I spent over a year looking around.  Pickings 
were thin.  SuSE's following Red Hat away from nontechnical end user 
desktops.  Debian is deeply irrelevant (long paralyzed by ugly politics and 
now replaced as the cutting edge experimental development platform by Gentoo, 
which is nice but when I looked was harder to install than Linux From Scratch 
and thus not going after nontechnical end users either).  Knoppix is nice 
from CD and -><- this close to what I want, but it sucks from the hard drive.  
(Off of CD it's too slow.  Installing to hard drive is difficult and 
unreliable, and then trying to install additional packages ate the system so 
badly i had to reinstall.  It does what it does beautifully, but it never 
managed to grow beyond that niche while I was paying attention, and seems to 
have peaked since other people picked up on the live CD idea.)  Patrick 
Volkerding was sick when I was looking around so Slackware had fallen way 
behind the times.  Mandrake's been distracted by being on the verge of 
bankruptcy forever, and recently Mandrivia managed to FUD itself by firing 
Mandrake's founder (horribly stupid PR move).  There's others I'm not even 
remembering right now.  Lindows let microsoft off the hook for money when 
they became Linspire, and like Xandros they seem to be trying to apply the 
shareware/crippleware model to Linux.  (Here's a trial copy, pay us to 
upgrade it to something useable!  If having a freely downloadable version of 
the full distro wasn't important then Red Hat Enterprise would be relevant 
outside of big pointy hair ISO9000 deployments who see "RPM" in the LSB and 
thus buy Red Hat to be standards compliant.)

I was pretty bummed out about the state of the Linux desktop market until Stu 
sent me an Ubuntu CD a year and a half ago, which sucked pretty badly at the 
time but which was _trying_ to go after nontechnical end users (something 
nobody else seemed to be doing), and the direction was good.  It was a brand 
new distro so I gave it a little time to get over its teething troubles, and 
it's blossomed fairly well.  Breezy Badger's actually usable on the desktop.  
It's not even close to perfect yet (the next release will have the first 
actual server version of the distro, for example), but it's better than 
anything else on the market I've found.  The organization behind it's 
financially solvent enough to avoid that kind of drama and uncertainty (the 
Ubuntu foundation's operating budget is the interest from a $10 million grant 
from Mark Shuttleworth, a dot-com billionare and ex-debian developer), and 
their technical decisions are at least coherent and understandable (which is 
not to say I always agree with them, but they're not _stupid_ either).

If you want my suggestion, I'd look at the next ubuntu (the one that's in beta 
right now; wait until the actual release comes out).  Take that with a grain 
of salt, of course. :)

</rant>

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.
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