Why do you like your chosen distribution?
Hi all, 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. Just curious, Karen
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. The multitude of choices are admittedly overwhelming, but they're for
Karen Lewellen via talk wrote on 2025-01-07 13:37: people *inside* the ecosystem to get what they want from their computer. Those outside the ecosystem do have difficulty finding a starting point, but they just are not used to having any options what-so-ever. As for why there are so many, a few reasons. * Computers are complicated, so there are many ways of interacting with them. * Some people just want to experiment and make their own * ... At the root of all the varieties are basically only a few to consider: Debian / Ubuntu RedHat / Fedora Arch and niche distros like: Gentoo Slackware And those are just the bases upon which one selects a desktop environment, all of which differ on an even greater scale. I've surely missed something, but I think the first 3 distro families cover > 90% of Linux installations and are really all a newcomer needs to evaluate.
what motivates you to prefer your distribution of choice?
I choose KDE because it's the most customizable and powerful desktop environment, and Ubuntu because of it being what I learned first and it hitting the right balance of reasonably up-to-date but stable. Hence, KDEneon, the only rational (& correct) choice. /That ought to incite some responses...
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
Hi Len, Granted my curiosity around folks Linux interest has nothing to do with my personal situation or adaptive technology. Still, since you added it, I will share that while there is, in theory, a Linux driver for a dectalk PC card, there is more than one dectalk PC card, there is not a reliable, as in works consistently, screen reader package for Linux. dectalk synthesis itself is under copyright protection, so creating such a thing, software wise particularly, remains the stuff of legal mayhem and complexity. Your comments on Ubuntu made me laugh. Largely because Dreamhost, www.dreamhost.com uses it as the floor for all their shared hosting services..and does not update often as a result. Thanks, Karen On Tue, 7 Jan 2025, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
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
Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote on 2025-01-07 14:45:
Ubuntu is debian with more frequenty releases
This is true, and sometimes it's good to remain a bit more current than Debian stable.
and more breakage [...] Upgrades sometimes break. That's not been my experience, I find very, *very* little breakage.
Although, phrased as "more breakage" might mean Debian *never* breaks? Admittedly, I do hold off on updating a bit so any kinks are worked out, but the only breakage I can recall was when KDEneon goofed on the otherwise excellent roll-out of Plasma6 where one of their releases broke due to human error. Pretty embarrassing for a distro that's "KDE devs' KDE distro", for sure. Not an Ubuntu issue though.
(fixed release schedules will never work)
I like them, they do cause some last-minute updates to be left out, and probably some to be rushed, but it is nice to know that the LTS releases (Long Term Support - all that I'll touch) release every two years, in April. No mental calculations on "when was this released, how old is it?"
On Tue, Jan 07, 2025 at 07:06:35PM -0800, Ron / BCLUG via talk wrote:
Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote on 2025-01-07 14:45:
Ubuntu is debian with more frequenty releases
This is true, and sometimes it's good to remain a bit more current than Debian stable.
and more breakage [...] Upgrades sometimes break. That's not been my experience, I find very, *very* little breakage.
Although, phrased as "more breakage" might mean Debian *never* breaks?
I have seen more ubuntu stable release upgrades break than I have had running Debian unstable.
Admittedly, I do hold off on updating a bit so any kinks are worked out, but the only breakage I can recall was when KDEneon goofed on the otherwise excellent roll-out of Plasma6 where one of their releases broke due to human error.
Pretty embarrassing for a distro that's "KDE devs' KDE distro", for sure. Not an Ubuntu issue though.
(fixed release schedules will never work)
I like them, they do cause some last-minute updates to be left out, and probably some to be rushed, but it is nice to know that the LTS releases (Long Term Support - all that I'll touch) release every two years, in April.
Well as far as I understood it some big screw up caused the latest LTS to be delayed by something like 4 months? My understanding was someone made a change to the dependency resolver in apt, and they had to revert it back to what Debian uses to make it work again so they could actually get a release out that didn't break the upgrade.
No mental calculations on "when was this released, how old is it?"
-- Len Sorensen
On 2025-01-07 16:37, Karen Lewellen via talk wrote:
Hi all, 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?
At (former) work, I used Ubuntu in WSL or Hyper-V, because everyone else used Ubuntu. At home, I use Slackware/KDE. I started with it and can't be bothered to change to Kubuntu. I used to be locked to KDE KOrganizer, but I'm using Thunderbird now. So, I can switch, but can't justify the hassle.
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.
All those distros are bragging rights and resume fillers. There may be a distro for particular needs, but it usually doesn't last, because market is too small, author grows up, and/or something better comes up.
Just curious, Karen
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Short answer: Don't agonize. It doesn't matter. Just pick one and go with it. If it doesn't work you just try again. This is very common in linux. You do NOT need to make a final decision at the outset. advice for novice: You should start with *_Linux Mint_* unless there is a reason not to. It's good! Long answer: Anyone can make a distro so lots of people made distros. Some of them have VERY minimal differences between them and are basically vanity projects. Or they are the same as a larger one but offer to install a default set of packages thought to be useful to a certain userbase. IMHO these are not helpful. Sometimes you need a certain distro because you have a weird computer or specific needs. You'll figure it out quick if you try to install the wrong one. So don't worry about it. There are only a few *primary* distros and all the others are variants of them. The primary distros are based around the package (app/program) distribution system. Think of it like they have different (but overlapping) App Stores. Main ones: - Debian/Ubuntu: MANY of the distros you hear about are in this category. Ubuntu is a subset of Debian. - Pacman: Arch, EndeavorOS, Manjaro, SteamOS - RPM: Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE - For too much more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions - If you don't know what distro you want, you should try one of the most popular ones. The more users a distro has, the more likely it will play well with your hardware, and it will be easier to solve any problems. A novice user should *avoid* esoteric, specialized distros if possible unless they really want "a learning experience". And by that I mean PROBLEMS. - Out of the most popular distros, there are political/philosophical differences between them. Some distros (e.g. ubuntu and arch) prioritize being convenient for the user, while others (e.g. debian and fedora) prioritize having Libre policies. You can tune a distro that is designed one way a bit the other way so it isn't set in stone. - There are differences in how often you must/can update. Range between daily/weekly to monthly and yearly. Generally speaking, more frequent updates are associated with higher availability of new software and risk of stability problems. Some distros have different versions you can choose on this basis. For novice user, I would suggest a medium/long term update cycle. - Certain distros come preloaded with certain graphic styles (Desktop Environments, or DEs). You can actually pretty much install any DE on any distro but it might be a bit more work. So for a novice user, sometimes the default DE is a consideration. Some distros offer versions with different DEs. I personally like XFCE4 but I think KDE is probably the most popular one, and I have a good impression of them from what I've seen so I think they've deserved it. Here's the distros I am running these days 1. Laptop: Arch-based. I have tried to migrate away from this because it is VERY BAD Libre. the package manager includes many fully proprietary softwares!! and there is no way to filter or even *see* the license info without investigating each individual package on the web.I do not like the politics/philosophy. BUT it has every FLOSS package/application natively-available and up to date which no other distro can offer. (I will be happy if anyone can prove me wrong!!!) 2. Server/desktop: plain Debian: Because I don't want to do weekly manual updates, need something more long term stable. And I *want* to be using more Libre stuff. Lately I am having alot of dependency issues tho. (Anybody know what is a good distro to work with the "arrs" packages? Librely?) 3. TV box: LibreELEC (debian based) - new/WIP 4. Phone: LineageOS - the best android ROM that works on the phone I was able to get. Would prefer CalyxOS. 5. Netbook: Debian-based smaller distro that was focused on light weight systems. Beyond that there is deeper level shit but literally anyone else can explain it better than I could. On Tue, Jan 7, 2025, at 9:37 PM, Karen Lewellen via talk wrote:
Hi all, 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. Just curious, Karen
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On Wed, Jan 08, 2025 at 08:01:54AM +0000, bitmap via talk wrote:
2. Server/desktop: plain Debian: Because I don't want to do weekly manual updates, need something more long term stable. And I *want* to be using more Libre stuff. Lately I am having alot of dependency issues tho. (Anybody know what is a good distro to work with the "arrs" packages? Librely?)
What does "arrs" mean in this case? Google thinks American Roentgen Ray Society but that seems unlikely. A bit more searching seems to indicate it might be a rather dumb way to refer to bazarr, sonarr, radarr, lidarr, readarr, etc in a a way that is totally meaningless to other people. At least those sound potentially like they could be linux related. I read the installation instructions for Debian provided for bazarr. Looks bad. Essentially giving instructions on how to break your system's python. Briliant. Some software developers really are awful. No care for the consequences of what they do as long as their pet project runs. Any other thing it means that I didn't find? -- Len Sorensen
On Tue, 7 Jan 2025 16:37:09 -0500 (EST) Karen Lewellen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Hi all, 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. Just curious, Karen
Karen, I am a Fedora guy. I started with Slackware back in 1994, then I tried Red Hat. Fedora is Red Hat's home distribution. It works. I am used to it, and I have learned how to install it and make it do exactly what I want. I was playing with other distributions, and I wrote up some notes on how to install stuff and make it work, http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson/Linux.html. -- Howard Gibson hgibson@eol.ca http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
participants (6)
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bitmap -
Howard Gibson -
Karen Lewellen -
Lennart Sorensen -
Ron / BCLUG -
William Park