[ale] Last nights meeting.. Control

[Jay Lozier]

On 02/22/2013 09:39 AM, Mike Harrison wrote:
>
> It was a pleasure making it to a physical meatspace ALE meeting last 
> nght.. and while recapping what I learned from ya'll back at the 
> office in Chattanooga, I realize what everyone was seeking from their 
> distro of choice was:  Control.
>
> The degree varied.. I install mostly from binary repo's, others went 
> more for direct from source... Even Jim talked of controlling large 
> numbers of systems well wil Redhat.
>
> But the theme hits me as: Control.
>
> As opposed to the other OS's and some Linux distro's where they make 
> more and more of the decisions for you and take more and more control 
> away.
>
> We are all a bunch of control freaks. ;)
>
I was not there but my observation is that Linux distros provide a 
sliding scale of control to the user and all provide more control than 
others unnamed. Users can select the level of control they want based on 
their knowledge and needs. The proverbial grandmother using Ubuntu 
probably is not that interested in the control Ubuntu allows but likes 
the stability and relative ease of use. Others prefer distros like Arch 
and Slackware because they want more control and are willing to learn 
more to use that control.

My wife, who uses Mint/Ubuntu, finds Linux easy to use and much less 
aggravating than one excessively common OS. And I find I am spending 
much less time fixing weird OS problems than with the overly common OS 
that shall be unnamed. She is not interested in the control per se but 
being able to use the computer.

The range of Linux distros allow one to find a distro that more closely 
matches what you want from a distro/OS and also customize it more to 
your tastes. The great strength of Linux is its diversity; users truly 
have more options.

-- 
Jay Lozier
jslozier at gmail.com