http://kde-files.org/CONTENT/content-files/44218-linuxdistrotimeline-7.2.png

@Benji

Thanks for using both love and hate as alternatives.

Before anyone starts bashing linux for choices it offers, it's a good thing to remember, that (especially nowadays) there are seweral slightly different AmigaOS distributions aswell (AIAB, Amiga Forever etc.)

I love that there are A gazillion fantastic opensource programs that covers every conceivable need ( if you know where to look ) available at the push of a few button in a terminal.

The extensive kernel development, its always up to date.

Stable as a mountain.

For the record i use Debian.

TBH. if you dont see the advantages of open source, your clearly blind.

Last edited by mike on 16-May-2008 at 03:15 PM.
Last edited by mike on 16-May-2008 at 03:15 PM.

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@Benji

Heh, good chart. It actually has both my first Linux attempt, downloading many floppies for weeks on some slow modem (SLS), to find out how busted the distro was (took some time to get most things working), and a former co-workers distro (Stampede)

The good? (for me)
- There are choices. Don't like one distro, find another.
- API compatibility is there for the most part across them. It's not hard to port apps between distros, usually quite trivial.
- They're still free, although some like RHEL have to be hand-built or purchased (but then there's CentOS)
- I'm not stuck writing code for Windows
- some decent apps, tools and ideas have come about as a direct result of Linux and GNU, or have been pushed forward by it - we owe a LOT of free software due to people writing or porting it to Linux, and ongoing maintenance has continued for much of it. k3b, smb, window managers, you name it.

The annoying?
- different distros and core Linux/GNU don't offer binary compatibility across them, like Solaris does.
- some things are sort of Mickey mouse compared to real Unices - It was a while that Linux didn't have things like sar, vm/iostat, truss (strace and ltrace), etc. Still can't AFAIK have a CPU or RAM die and offline it without a kernel panic (Windows can't do this either, but Solaris etc can. Some f this is hw, but there have been x86 servers that do memory redundancy etc, but without OS support..)

Anyways, *shrug* Very glad Linux exists, even if there are annoyances as well.

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Quote:

@wegster - different distros and core Linux/GNU don't offer binary compatibility across them, like Solaris does.

Ugh? what? Not for different platforms no (ppc, x86) thats what you meant yeah?

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@mike

Quote:

Ugh? what? Not for different platforms no (ppc, x86) thats what you meant yeah?

Well, they don't. You may try to run a binary from Debian under RedHat, and it may or may not run. It may be compiled against different glibc, or library set that's not accessable/with older ABI.

It's not a huge problem for Linux as it's source that counts.

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@mike

Quote:

mike wrote: Quote: @wegster - different distros and core Linux/GNU don't offer binary compatibility across them, like Solaris does. Ugh? what? Not for different platforms no (ppc, x86) thats what you meant yeah?

No that's true, especially for drivers and stuff. It needs to be recompiled on the actual kernel you are going to use it on, even if it's the same CPU. You often can't compile on one distro or kernel version and then run it on another. There is often some inkompatibility. VERY annoying. Solaris is much nicer when it comes to this.

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> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.

The fact that there are 60 reasons (not 5, or 10) to read through - and if I was going to post a comment/question I'd be expected to read and background research every one, otherwise be told to rtfm - really puts me off the whole Linux thing.

I support it in principle, I just don't have the time to learn how to use it.

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@Boot_WB
Very little reading required. Click on the link from the original post and you'll understand.

I see the advantages of open source, I see whats cool about a free open operating system, but the reason i hate linux is simple; its f*****g horrible.

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@xeron
I feel the same. Whilst I have great admiration for the open source movement, I don't really get on with Linux.

It's partly the interface (wouldn't mind giving XFCE a go though), partly the way it handles installing software, and the fact that it is about as slow to boot as Windows is, but the real show stopper (for me) is the dumb file system structure. Gobolinux tries to fix this but really all its doing is hiding the true file structure from your view. On an aesthetic level, why does Linux use that same ugly (IMO) font by default? Some may like it, but its just one of those small gripes that hampers enjoyment of using a computer OS.

Linux developers are doing a great job in freeing up the market, but I'm much more interested in other open source OSs such as AROS, KolibriOS (special mention to MenuetOS even if it isn't truly open source) and Haiku. Can't wait until one of those becomes usable for daily tasks.

@opi

Quote:

opi wrote: @mike Quote: Ugh? what? Not for different platforms no (ppc, x86) thats what you meant yeah? Well, they don't. You may try to run a binary from Debian under RedHat, and it may or may not run. It may be compiled against different glibc, or library set that's not accessable/with older ABI. It's not a huge problem for Linux as it's source that counts.

Not the case for commercial software. It's but one of several reasons commercial games for Linux, and others, either fail (constantly moving target and no binary compatibility), or commercial software doesn't support more than RHEL (and thankfully CentOS indirectly) and a few other distros.

Binary compatibility isn't the same as source compatibility. Source compatibility is 'ok but not perfect' for open source stuff, does little for commercial apps when Linux is a moving target, except for the enterprise versions, which are OK, but not entirely ideal for some desktop users vs Ubunutu/KUbuntu, Gentoo, or others.

So, yes, at least in that respect, although I like Linux and acknowledge there's a LOT of decent open source out there, Solaris > Linux. Grab a binary from a Solaris 8 box, move it to your S10 box, and guess work - chances are very good 'it just works,' an important consideration when you're upgrading infrastructure/servers and want the latest security patches on new hardware, but have legacy apps that must continue to be available, that you don't have source for.

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Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

Linux gave us nothing better than what we have with Unix.

Beyond that, Linux is not as stable or efficient. It also comes with a hodge podge mix of system binaries depending on who decided to put what into the distribution.

I really don't understand why people bought into the empty hype.

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@wegster

Quote:

Not the case for commercial software.

Sure, but most commercial software is static-build. But I know what you're saying.

Problem with Linux is rapid changes that it recives. Untill kernel hackers won't say that they are happy with ABI, we won't have that. And, IIRC, Linus said it's not his priority.

Quote:

Grab a binary from a Solaris 8 box, move it to your S10 box, and guess work - chances are very good 'it just works,' an important consideration when you're upgrading infrastructure/servers and want the latest security patches on new hardware, but have legacy apps that must continue to be available, that you don't have source for.

I know that. Luckly, I don't have to support such apps, so I didn't have to brother.

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@opi

Lol. I know YOU know these things, was mainly just responding to it in case someone else reading it doesn't 'get what is meant'

And yep, it's the 'dynamicness' of it - good for 'fun' and 'interesting stuff' and some real improvements as well, but bad for even thinking about retaining binary compatibility..just a tradeoff, one that doesn't mean anything to some (those upgrading Fedora desktops every 6 months or so to the next version, or windup up with a no longer supported distro version) and matters more to some others (which is why I use ubuntu mostly nowadays for linux desktop, BUT all servers are RHEL or CentOS, for 5 year+ support lifespan)...unfortunately, it also means it's tougher to see commercial apps on the 'more dynamic' distros out there.

There have been some standardization attempts - United Linux, LSB, etc - and I think at some point it will settle out where binary compat may be a real option for 'most' Linux distros, just 'not yet.'

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@logicalheart

Quote:

logicalheart wrote: Linux gave us nothing better than what we have with Unix. Beyond that, Linux is not as stable or efficient. It also comes with a hodge podge mix of system binaries depending on who decided to put what into the distribution. I really don't understand why people bought into the empty hype.

Lol, I expect we're going to argue now. Care to back that one up?
Unix was dying a slow death, as x86 ate into their lower systems for graphics and other work, then even the mid range systems by cost. And yes, those servers sadly were running Windows.

Linux did quite a bit to stem that tide. High school students weren't very likely to have access to 'real Unix systems' prior to it - even Unix workstations were fairly spendy (SGI, Sun, etc), now anyone can run it, for free, not only for servers but for desktop use as well.

GNU software existed, such as gcc, GNU tar, and others, but it really took on entirely new life with the combination of Linux and the Internet coming on 'together' effectively. Thousands of people could read source code for the kernel, or any other part of Linux, and the open source 'movement' has really taken off as a result, nearly everywhere - things like Xen, apache, postgres and MySQL, Eclipse, nagios, k3b, gimp, .. - many of these got their start on Linux, and either would not exist today without Linux, or be nearly as far along and as nice as they are today, without it. Even things like gcc and other open source that existed previously got a huge boost by the combination of Linux and the net.

So, please explain - did nothing for us? We might not be seeing functionality in OS4, AROS, whatever today without the GCC toolchain as well as other GNU tools.

(but yes, the distro annoyances and differences, are certainly annoying)

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Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

I've tried various Linux distros, with varying success, but I've really come to appreciate the BSDs. They're not only descendants of the real UNIX, but they also have a relatively clear file system structure (as opposed to some Linux distros), and manpages are usually included (important for developers; I'm never developing on Ubuntu, because I don't want to install each manpage individually; on Ubuntu they're often single packages). On OpenBSD (and FreeBSD too), manpages are always included. The BSD's don't have visual package managers yet, but command-line package management is easy enough (often as simple as a "pkg_add" command, just like "apt-get" on Debian and Ubuntu; or a port build where you simply type "make build" or "make" in the ports directory, and it automatically downloads, patches and builds everything).

There's nothing like a calm, dozing BSD.

I'm just as pleased with it as I used to be with AIX!

@wegster

Quote:

So, please explain - did nothing for us?

What did Romans did for us? Nothing. Nothing.

Well, health care. And roads. Schools. Aquaducts.

But except health care, roads, schools and aquaducts, what they did for us?

NOTHING!

(if you get it you're sad nerd)

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@Benji

That's a beautiful chart! Thank you for that.

@nrose

It is a beautiful chart, although somewhat incomplete. LWN.net (the premier Linux site, bar none) list 546 Linux distributions, although to be fair some of them are inactive.

http://lwn.net/Distributions/

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