On Tue, Jan 07, 2025 at 04:37:09PM -0500, Karen Lewellen via talk wrote:
Hoping your holidays were magical. My question comes from a discussion on a Linux and disabilities list. New person frankly bewildered by why there are so many Linux distributions at all, along side the benefits of say a specific kind of desktop over another. Got me wondering in general what motivates you to prefer your distribution of choice? That too, with my actually wondering indeed why there are so many Linux distributions, how all those editions helps someone outside the operating system make a choice.
In my case, my first distribution was SLS 1.03, because I saw it in the usenet archives on a BBS I was a member off back in 1992. So when one sees "free unix for PC", one of course downloads it... at 2400 baud... over the course of about 2 weeks to get enough of the floppy images to do a base install. It installed, it worked, it was pretty neat. Seeing an x86 machine multitask was neat, since DOS of course didn't. My Amiga did, and it always had made x86 machines seem rather simplistic, even if they were faster. I then moved onto slackware after that, because SLS didn't move to ELF support, which was the obvious place linux was going. Slackware was a fork of SLS that did update some stuff like the libc and hence supported the new binary format and shared libraries that provided support for. That was of course the last major change to things slackware ever did. And I am not kidding. Other than adding some packages, and updating versions of things, slackware has not done a thing. Same crappy package manager as SLS for 30+ years. I then discovered Redhat on a CD I bought in 1994 (I managed to ignore yggdrasil, probably because I don't think it supported IDE cdrom drives, and that was what I had). Much better package management and the idea of packages having dependencies. So I stuck with that for a couple of years. Eventually I got fed up with how buggy much of the software was, and even with knowing some employees at Redhat, there seemed to be no way to get anything fixed. So I tried Debian. 2.0 was very very very painful. The package management tool (dselect) was not very smart yet and tried to resolve dependency issues by installing a dozen or so packages at a time, and if things worked, did some more, and if not stopped and then you could ask it to try to finish the ones it had unpacked by doing their configuration steps, and then you could try another dozen or so of the requested packages. Circular dependencies seemed to exist in some cases, and somethings seemed impossible to install. 2.1 went much better, having added apt as a replacement for dselect (and dselect in fact had moved to using apt to do the work as a backwards compatibility for people that were used to dselect). It installed perfectly. It worked. It upgraded in place to 2.2 (something redhat couldn't do for years, it required booting the installer and upgrading that way instead). So with something with a great packaging system, more packages than probably any other distribution, and things that just work, releases that are not too frequent (every couple of years or so, although I guess I tend to just run the development code so it doesn't really matter), it is what I have stuck with for the last 25 or so years. Ubuntu is debian with more frequenty releases and more breakage (fixed release schedules will never work). Upgrades sometimes break. Mint is Debian or Ubuntu with some polish on top. Often quite nice for people that don't want to have to mess around with things much. Things like Arch and Gentoo and such that seem to aim at tweaking and building things yourself never interested me. I consider them a waste of resources. Compiling on one machine is not going to give a different result than compiling on another machine with the same architecture. It's pointless. You do not learn more from having to figure out why things don't compile anymore than you would by looking at the source package from one of the distributions that do package management well but provide binaries. You generally learn more in fact since they show how to do things properly. I know some of the distributions also do have some support for speach synthesis, including in their installer, although I have never tried it, and have no idea how good or bad their software speech engines sound. I am sure they don't sound the same as your old DEC hardware. Interestingly, I see linux has a driver to use the Dectalk PC card. -- Len Sorensen