[plug] boot into shell (a tad offtopic to question)

[Mark B]

Greetings,

> > The solution to that is to pick one distribution.  Be a debian user,
> > or a Red Hat user, or something else.  Don't worry about what the
> > other distributions do.
>
> It's a pretty bad solution, really, in that you can't really help folks
> out who use other distros, nor easily use them yourself if you need to.


    Even for newbies to linux, having a wide range of distributions with
each having their own standards can be a nightmare, since each distribution
tends to have their own standard way of doing things, generally undocumented
or hidden away in man pages.  Developers can't be expected to develop
software to suite every major distrobutions vendor, becides isn't that the
distrobution maintainers job?

    Time for administrating different distros makes it a hassle also, what
if a security announcement was made that a critical service was vulnerable
(we all remember bind 8.2.2-p5, sshd 1.2.27 and openssl yes?) , you can't
just simply log into each machine and upgrade, you need to hunt down all the
advisories issued from the distrobutions, find out where to download them,
patch, test, and troubleshoot.  I understand that sticking with one
distrobution would be an answer to this, but that isn't really an answer for
everyone.

    I just don't understand why everyone wants to reinvent the wheel on
things that have proven to work (apart from boredom), it makes it a pain for
developers/administrators to make sure config locations follow standards to
that distrobution and so forth. I guess that encountering these issues are
to be expected, and should be expected, however that should stay with Linux
enthusiests who enjoy encountering these problems.

    This is why I think that Linux will never become a normal household
Desktop machine, as I doubt developers would want to create and support a
system where nothing is standardized, it would be a catastrophy.

    I have been forced to use RedHat linux in the workplace *shivers*, only
because it offers corporate support, and if a patch isn't available and I am
forced to turn off a service before/after it gets compremised, I am not
liable.

Anyway that is my two cents,

Mark Blah,
http://www.dnstheplanet.com/