Distro non-wars... was Re: [plug] Red Hat

[Denis Brown]

Dear PLUG list members,

There's been some discussion regards RedHat and swapping to other distros.
My purpose is not to add fuel to the flames but to gain some clear insight
into what's being discussed.   It seems to me, not having worked with
anything other than Debian and an hour or so on RedHat but done a fair
bit of reading over the years, that they're pretty much all "created
equal" under the hood, so to speak.   In other words and to state the
obvious, they all have a kernel, they all have file system utilities, they
all offer a range of services (daemons for ftp, ssh/telnet) they all offer
some form of graphical user interface (Xfree plus a desktop or two or
three), choice of web server, mail agents and so on.

Installation and maintenance/update tools, be they .debs or rpms or
similar in other distros, vary in their (perceived?) ease of use - and I
have to admit that the RH installation I did was simple by comparison to
Debian.  But then, after exposure to Debian and Linux generally I had a
fair understanding of what was going to be asked so maybe mine is not a
definitive judgement (of "simplicity").

There seems to be a couple (at least) of different file system hierarchies
out there and a recent brush with Irix made me even more aware of that,
thank you!   Out-of-the-box security would be another area of difference
between distributions.   Desktops and window managers are another fruitful
source of variability.

But when all is said and done, could I not take a native "RedHat"
installation and by dint of swapping one desktop for another, one set of
wallpaper for another, tweaking the security, turning off (or adding)
services, etc, etc turn it into a Debian installation as far as look and
feel is concerned.  Or into a SuSE, Mandrake, <insert favourite flavour
here>?   And vice versa?   Sure, the package management scheme would not
be (easily?) changeable but other than that, and a few logos here and
there, would anyone be able to tell the difference?

What's the point of this?  I'm simply trying to understand what Jon said a
couple of posts ago,something about Novell's developers "using RedHat or
SuSE" for their development model - sorry if I misphrased that, Jon.
Others in past threads have also eluded to specific distributions being
preferred because of similar "constraints" from other software.   Pardon
my naivety, but is this really a limitation?   Aren't we really talking
about "hooks" into the OS such as library revision levels, which need not
be the province of a specific OS vendor or flavour?   Ergo it should not
matter which distro a developer "prefers" - they should all be capable of
working??????

Here hopefully begineth my lesson!
Cheers,
Denis



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