[plug] Distro Wars

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Thu, 6 May 1999, Greg Mildenhall wrote:
> On Thu, 6 May 1999, Mike Holland wrote:
> > On Thu, 6 May 1999, Christian wrote:
> > > A distribution war, did you say? ;-)
> > Ok. What are the areas to compare? i.e. where does distro matter.
> > 2) Package management
> >   (RH was the leader here.)
> HAHAHA.

OK, so that was silly and unnecessary. After bashing Redhat it occured to
me that I should mention some of their good points, too.

1. Their installation interfaces have always been pretty self-explanatory.
2. They put a lot of effort into their default desktop setup.
3. If you don't want control of configuration, you will enjoy their
   streamlined package installation.
4. Their X-based config stuff is easy to use and fairly complete, but can
   sometimes get in the way of manual config. (net devices are a bit of a
   mess, for instance)
5. They have the healthiest attitude to software freedom of the commercial
   vendors.
6. They contributed a whole lot of code to GNOME, which does rock.
7. They are not shy to assist with standardisation efforts, even though it
   is more to their competitors advantage than their's.
8. They don't let silly little things like security get in the way of
   out-of-the-box ease-of-use. ;)

But I still don't like anything about their package management.

-Greg Mildenhall