[ale] Linux Distributions

[Jim Philips]

On Monday 16 May 2005 04:15 pm, mcangeli at bellsouth.net wrote:
> Check out Distrowatch http://distrowatch.com
>
> They list almost all of the distributions, as well as when any of the sites
> do a review....
>
> Oh, and I prefer slackware....

I'm a slacker too. I think the reason there are such religious wars over 
distros is that different people have different needs and personalities. The 
more you are a tinkerer and a "do it my way" kind of person, the more you 
will like Slackware or Gentoo.  Often, I don't want to wait for some distro 
to come up with an official package before I install, so I build from source 
or install an experimental package. When KDE 3.4 came out, the Slackware 
package excluded some feature I really wanted. I immediately ripped out the 
two packages that support that feature and built them from source. Now, the 
feature is back. I could never stand to accept the stuff that Fedora or SuSE 
think I need. And the official Debian releases seem way out of date to me. 
So, if I ever abandon Slackware, Gentoo will be the natural next step.

On the other hand, if you're looking to use distros that you're likely to 
encounter on the job, then Redhat and SuSE are the way to go.