SciFi posted on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 20:16:07 +0000 as excerpted: > Essentially, I've been wanting to "jump ship" for a very long time > (years).
Interesting. I knew you as the Mac guy who knew code, while I only knew some things /about/ code, at the C/C++ level anyway. And of course I knew your very nice xface, especially since that discussion and patch sometime back that corrected pan's previous face color-inversion. =:^) But I didn't know about your wish to jump-ship. That it is taking you so long reminds me of my own journey, back around the turn of the century. After running the IE/OE4 betas (really where I discovered USENET, with my first real experience on the IE/OE4 beta newsgroups, tho I'd read about it before) and having fun with the new desktop extensions they included, I was in line at midnight for Windows 98, but that was about the zenith of my time with MS, and the afternoon went rather faster than the morning had. Shortly after that (some time in '99) I began looking into Linux, but it took me two years to actually be ready to make the switch. In I think early '99 or so I bought a Mandrake (5.1/Venice, perhaps, going from the table in the Mandriva wikipedia entry?) at I think Fry's Electronics and loaded it. It worked, but I didn't know enough of what I was doing to be comfortable with it, and I've always hated rebooting, so it pretty much just sat there. IIRC, I upgraded mobo and CPU and the version I had quit working, so I eventually upgraded to I believe 6.1/Helios, probably in early to mid 2000. But still it sat mostly unused. However, by sometime in 1999 I had started confirming Linux drivers for all the hardware I bought, and by 2000, was carefully considering software purchases as I thought about switching. Around late 2000, as the betas of Office XP developed eXPrivacy anti-features, it was becoming very apparent that MS was following a different road than I and I began getting more serious, asking questions on the newsgroups, etc. Sounds like you're at about that stage ATM. With the release of Office eXPrivacy and the betas of Windows eXPrivacy developing the same anti-features, in early 2001, I began actively planning the switch. Pretty much as soon as I did, I realized the problem, that I didn't know enough about Linux to really /do/ anything with it. Years earlier, one of my best early computer decisions (after I had my own, anyway) had been buying the book "Using DOS 6.2", which taught me an ENORMOUS amount about computer basics. But I had bought a number of other books after that, both in the Using... series and not, and been VERY disappointed, as they really weren't all that useful at all (about as useful as the Windows Help system, which I had taken to calling NoHelp, because that's what it so often was) and had been a waste of money. So what I realized I needed to teach me Linux was a book as useful as Using DOS 6.2 had been, but I didn't have a lot of money or time (the eXPrivacy release was fast approaching) to go experimenting and sorting thru all the dreck, first. Without that, I doubted I'd get very far in Linux, as I simply didn't know enough about what I was doing to feel comfortable or useful in it. But MS wasn't leaving me much choice, I was running out of time, and by this point I was getting desperate. So I asked in the newsgroup for my ISP, which at the time had a VERY nice sized group of Unix/Linux/BSD folks (the ISP turned bad not long after, unfortunately, and people were leaving by the time I did a year and a half later), including one with direct commit rights to one of the BSDs (IDR which, was pretty fuzzy to me at that point), himself. Two books were recommended by more than one person replying, Running Linux, and Linux in a Nutshell, both from O'Reilly publishing. Running Linux is in a tutorial/textbook style with simple stuff at the front and more complex toward the back. Linux in a Nutshell is, as described in a blurb on that edition's back cover, "Like a stack of manpages but simpler to read and easier to carry around", or something to that effect. Both of them cover mostly the command-line, tho there were chapters on configuring X and on KDE and Gnome in Running. And they both cover the generic Linux tools, save for the section on package managers, not some distro-specific stuff. So it's a good foundation. They were both in their third edition at the time, and I bought them both, reading the Running book nearly cover to cover. Thinking to ask and get those recommendations, then buying those books, was perhaps the best computer related purchase I ever made, and I still recommend them, I think in sixth edition last I checked, today. I even bought a newer version of Linux in a Nutshell, after using the first until it was quite worn out, and continued to use parts of the second (especially the bash appendix) until it disappeared some months ago. I'm sure they saved me at LEAST three months of full-time-equivalent work coming up to speed on Linux! You're advanced enough and know FLOSS well enough they won't be the help to you that they were to me, but I don't know if you're really comfortable on the *ix command line or not. If not, I'd certainly consider buying Linux in a Nutshell, at least, as it should help. Running Windows I'd recommend to folks who have no clue about Linux file permissions (user/group/world, read/write/execute, setuid/setgid/sticky- bit), etc, but I expect you're beyond that. I installed from the Mandrake 8.1 ISOs I had just downloaded and burned (no 8.1 disks to buy yet, only the ISOs to download), the same week Windows eXPrivacy was publicly released. Even with those books i took three months to really get operational in Linux and quit having to boot to Windows for this or that, because I was a Windows poweruser and at least VB programmer, and I had certain expectations for my Linux install that were either going to be met, or I was going to know the reason why they couldn't be. Among those expectations, I had a triple-monitor setup that worked fine in W98, and I expected it to work fine in Linux as well. Fortunately or unfortunately, back when I had been verifying Linux drivers for any hardware upgrades, I had purchased an nVidia card, not realizing the difference between Linux drivers and freedomware Linux drivers. I learned that pretty fast when I switched! I ended up learning how to hand-edit my xorg.conf (then xf86config) as the automated tools couldn't deal with the multi-monitors. I learned how to download, configure, build and install my own kernel, and how to rebuild the nVidia driver to match it, because only the nVidia proprietary driver could handle the two outputs I was using on the card. I didn't have the money for a new video card at that point, and I suffered with what I had for some time, but you can bet that when I DID upgrade video card again, I made **SURE** I chose a card with reasonable freedomware drivers, a Radeon as it happened, and I'm still buying Radeon's today (tho there were a few years when I didn't upgrade video at all, as there simply weren't any decent upgrades with good freedomware drivers), for the same reason. Another expectation was that I could configure the boot manager (LILO, I eventually switched to GRUB but LILO was the standard x86 boot loader back then) to boot to either Windows, which I had left alone on its own drive, or Linux, installed to a brand new, much bigger drive. That required learning how to hand-configure LILO, and not just the simple stuff, either, but some more fancy stuff to switch the drives around so Windows would think it was on the primary drive. It took me about two months to get the hardware level all working the way I wanted, before I even STARTED looking at the app alternatives I wanted. However by the time I did, KDE was already growing on me, and I settled on it, with Konqueror for the browser, and kmail for the mail client. The last major app I needed was the news client. I eventually settled on pan, but it took a bit to find it. The kde news client, knode, just didn't do what I wanted/needed. By this time, another month had passed, so it was about three months before I got situated in Linux, but I had quite the learning curve as I had learned to manually configure and build the kernel, to manually configure X, and to manually configure LILO, in that period, to get the system up and running the way I wanted. During that three months, I was rebooting to Windows to do stuff I hadn't figure out my Linux alternative for, yet. The first two months, it was pretty much everything software, since I was dealing with hardware issues. Then as I chose browser and mail, I switched them to Linux, but I was still having to boot to Windows to do news, and to ask my ISP's newsgroup people about questions I had, and there were quite a few. (I had trouble with the kernel config at one point, I recall, because the config tool I was using, a Mandrake or KDE took IIRC, wasn't saving the config properly or some such. I ended up using make menuconfig, the same thing I still use today.) But, by the end of the three months, when I'd finished converting to pan for news, I was not only as comfortable in Linux as in Windows, the earlier "what do I actually do on Linux" thing was already inverting on me, and I'd boot to Windows to get something ready to delete or to ask a question on the newsgroup, then just sit there after doing that specific task, wondering what to actually /do/ on Windows, now that I had booted it and finished the specific task I had setout to do! It was at THAT point that I realized my switch was a done deal; there wasn't any turning back now! Ironically, a couple months later, I read some post from somebody calling themselves a Red Hat Linux developer, who, it was quite evident, had never even built his own kernel! Bah, humbug, I remember thinking to myself! Even *I* knew how to do that! I'd been on the platform less than six months and wouldn't DREAM of calling myself a developer if I hadn't ever even compiled a KERNEL! Oh, well... > In fact, the people I've conversed with, have all agreed with > me. But I thought I would pay the yearly fee to join ADC (Apple > Development Center, http://developer.apple.com/) to see what I could do > to help. > > (In case the reader does not know, I am medically disabled / retired, > with 38+years work on record. I have "professional" experience in the > system-level programming for a big huge shop which uses machines made by > a famous three-letter international company. I do this open-source > stuff because I believe in it whole-heartedly. Plus, in my "twilight > years", it helps keep my mind sharp.) I didn't know that much about it, but had known you as a decent coder... What had me sort of puzzled was your interest in pan and FLOSS in general, being on a Mac and for all I knew satisfied with it in general. Now I'm finding out more of the story. > I only have one single machine here, which also is used for making tons > of OTA TV recordings. I don't get much down-time to boot-up any other > system. I didn't really have /that/ problem. I just hated the down-time required for rebooting, plus I didn't know what to /do/ in Linux, a problem those books and the specific hardware config tasks I set out to do when I first switched solved very well for me. But I understand not really having time or wanting to reboot to "the other one", for sure, and it was realizing that and figuring out how to overcome it for me, that was the key to my own switch. > I /should/ get another machine. But the thought of "jumping ship" is > plaguing my choices: Do I get another Mac, or do I *really* jump-ship > and get an AMD-based system, with a *real* open-source system (Linux, > *BSD, etc.). If I truly want to jump-ship, I do not want another > Intel-based system, and I can see how other chipsets are no-longer > viable (e.g. PowerPC, my fav). I've never really had the room or desire for a second machine. Of course, if the one was my VCR/DVR, that would change things. FWIW, I had two good quality 4-head stereo VHS VCRs at one point (to watch the previous evening's shows while recording the current evening's shows), about 20 years ago now, before I got heavily into computers. But as I got into computers and as my frustration with the idiot commercials that with that technology could only be 30-second ff-zapped grew in parallel, I spent less and less time with the TV, until in a mobo upgrade back before the turn of the century, I realized that the last time the TV card that allowed the monitor to be both TV and computer monitor had been turned on, was as a functionality check two years before, after the PREVIOUS mobo upgrade. At that point I decided it was safe to remove the thing, and I've not had a TV since. But having had the two VCRs back then, I know how big a deal it can be to be able to record the shows so they don't get missed. And then there's /watching/ them. Today, yes, I'd have a second machine (actually a third as I have a netbook, now, running Gentoo, like my big machine, but since the big one's 64-bit and the netbook's 32-bit, they can't run the same binaries and I build the netbook's stuff in a chroot on the main machine, then ssh it over), if the one was the DVR. > Either way, even if I stick with my current Mac, I am going to be forced > to recompile every single project, so they'll run under Lion, or so > they'll run on another machine/system/platform. > > And most if not all of the OSX "packagers" are not ready for Lion -- it > can take a very long time (at least a year I'd say, based on earlier OSX > versions experience) to get patches up-stream'd into the projects repos > everywhere, to be able to compile "out of the box" (src tarballs) > without further specialized patching. (I really do detest these > "packagers" esp'ly for Macs.) > > So, that's where I am at, right now, trying to figure-out what to do. > Do I jump ship, and if so, to what? What I did back when I switched was put Linux on a new drive, keeping the old one for Windows. But your situation is different due to the DVR thing you have going, and machines are cheaper and more powerful today. Thus, I'd say, either leave the existing machine running OSX and doing the recordings, and buy a new machine for Linux, or buy a new machine for OSX and put Linux on the old one. Personally, I'd do the new one as Linux, leaving the old as "legacy" both in OS and in hardware, much as I did with just the drives in my case. Because I knew where my future was and that the legacy was just that for me, legacy. I think making that decision helped me make it so as well, as I began thinking of the old one as legacy right away. If you make the new machine a Mac, and put Linux on the old one, you're probably more likely to end up with an attitude that matches. So if you /want/ your future to be Linux (or one of the FLOSS BSDs, for that matter), make it the new machine and act like you believe it WILL be your future, and you'll be more likely to make the switch and have it "stick". OTOH, if you want to keep OSX as your OS of choice, make that decision, make it the new machine, and put Linux on the old one. But from my experience, I can safely say, that's about what you'll then get, too. You'll think of Linux as legacy and won't do much with it, and will end up emphasizing OSX on your new machine. Or at least that's the way it would happen if it were me and I tried it. As to what you jump to, that's a far bigger and more loaded question. Honestly, I've not spent much time learning about the BSDs because I really believe more in copy-left licensing. However, it's quite possible that if you DO know the OSX command line reasonably well, you'll be more immediately comfortable on FreeBSD or DragonflyBSD, as their kernels and command line programs are likely to be closer to OSX than Linux will be. OTOH, Linux has far more momentum and current development going on, and supports a far larger ecosystem. In a number of critical areas, including X with KMS (kernel mode setting), the u* set of utilities (udev/ udisk/upower, etc), and just coming up, systemd, the BSDs have fallen or are falling seriously behind and are in danger of becoming irrelevant to current state-of-the-art developments, to the point where it's now affecting compatibility. There are certainly advantages to running the BSDs, but if you don't want to be in the technological backwaters forever fighting to keep up, the fact is, the bsds probably aren't where you ought to be looking, because that's a very real challenge they face, and it appears to be getting worse, not better. Maybe that's a challenge you'd like to help tackle, tho, in which case... If you decide to go Linux, then which one? One of the things to realize at this point is that in many ways, each of the BSDs is more accurately compared to a distribution, than to Linux in general. People from the BSD camp are often befuddled by all the distributions, all Linux. But it's easier for them if they think of each Linux distribution as like a different one of the BSDs, as that's a more practically accurate way to treat the distros, than as variants of the same same kernel/BSD, since there's really no BSD analogy to Linux distro. After realizing that, the next basic you want to nail down, is how much control you want over your own destiny, and whether building everything from source using scripts (much like IIRC it's FreeBSD that has the ports collection), to get the extra control it allows, or settling for having the distro make most decisions but in turn getting prebuilt binaries, is better for you. Along a line from the whole group of binary distros on the one end, to Linux from Scratch (LFS) on the other, Gentoo (what I run) is about in the middle between a normal binary distro and LFS, where you build everything using make, but following instructions. Gentoo builds everything, letting you choose many of the compile-time options and thus run-time dependencies using USE flags, but does so with scripts that automate much of the process. So it takes a long time to build, but once you get things setup the way you want, you pretty much let it do its thing, and you can do other things while it does. But Gentoo isn't for everyone, and they/we don't pretend that it is. It does try to provide good documentation, but there's less handholding than some of the other distros, and they/we expect Gentoo users to be willing to properly manage the system, taking care to read warnings when they appear about specific upgrades and act on them accordingly, etc. For those who prefer the distro make those sorts of decisions so that it hopefully "just works" for the user, Gentoo is the wrong choice, and we're very happy to refer you to another distribution where you're likely to be far happier. Just as Gentoo is about half way between normal binary distro and LFS, Arch Linux is about half way between Gentoo and a normal binary distro. The core is binary, but many of the non-core packages are built from source using user-supplied scripts. AFAIK it's about half way between Gentoo and a normal binary distro in comfigurability as well, more configurable than a binary distro, but less configurable, tho that means less hassle too, if you don't want to spend the necessary time to actually understand all those config options). Then there's all the binary distros... Another aspect where a decision up front will help you make the right choice is rolling vs. periodic upgrades, and how often you want those periodic upgrades to happen, with the size of upgrade and length of time between upgrades being strongly related. Most traditional distributions come out with releases every six months to three years. The community distros tend to have a shorter release cycle (6-8 months) and normally only support current plus one back, so you pretty much have to upgrade every year (two release cycles) or go into unsupported. LTS, long-term-support release, meanwhile, tend to be what the corporate types use, with upgrade cycles of a year and a half or so and support out 3 years minimum, out to 7 or even 10 years. These tend to be where the paid support is available, tho there are free (gratis) options as well. Of course, upgrading these LTS systems is a serious project, but the timing is far easier for the corporate verification systems to handle. On the other end of the scale is the rolling upgrades I mentioned earlier. These are getting more popular especially with desktop users, as they tend to be more upto date, and avoid the "everything changed at once and there's a problem, where do I look" issue of periodic updates, because individual package updates happen as they are tested and ready. A six-month-cycle distro will often have packages released three months earlier at ship, due to pre-ship testing and integration, making them nine months old when the next release comes out. A rolling release might take two months to test and mark stable, or maybe four if bugs show up in testing, but 2-4 months from upstream package release is FAR faster than the 3-9 months of even 6-month periodic releases, with the LTS stale^h^hble releases being MUCH older than that. Also as mentioned, since individual packages are constantly being updated, when a problem does come up, tracing it down and fixing it is generally much easier because the search space is only a few packages, not the entire just updated release. Gentoo and Arch are both rolling-update. There's also a number of mainstream binary distros that are rolling-update, tho most are periodic. As you can probably deduce by now, a few basic decisions at the outset begin to narrow your search space for your ideal distro match dramatically. The ones I've emphasized to this point have been toward the customized, from-source, rolling-update end, but that's what I'm most familiar with. That end tends to be less mainstream, however, and thus offer far more limited choices. If you decide that a more centralized choices made for you, binary approach, is closer to what you want, then there are three other decisions that can help narrow down the binary mainstream. The first of these is default desktop environment (assuming you want X and a graphical environment at all, that is, but it sounds like you do). With the from-source distros this isn't such a big deal as you make many of the compile-time optional support and thus run-time-dependency choices yourself, but if you're going with a binary distro, these choices are made for you, and they tend to enable optional support in all packages for their default desktop, but only selected optional support for other desktops, so you probably want a distro that chooses as its default desktop the desktop that you will make your own default as well. The big desktop choices are gnome and kde. xfce, lxde, and enlightenment are a bit lighter on the resources but not as full-featured or as popular. Then there's the real light ones, *box, icewm, etc, and at the extreme end are ion and similar tiling window-managers, designed for easy keyboard-only use and almost graphical command-line in function. Then there's Ubuntu's new unity interface on top of Gnome. I'm a kde user so my views are obviously tilted toward it, but the general approach toward configurability differs markedly between it and the other two big ones (gnome and unity). KDE's general attitude is more toward the make it customizable end, and they expose a lot of config options. This is great for those that like to tweak things but can cause those who just want it to work to get scared at all the available options. Gnome, OTOH, tends toward a "there's only one right way" approach, exposing far less configuration directly, tho a lot is available by editing the config files manually or thru a config tool that reminds many of the MS registry editor. Meanwhile, while kde went thru a big and very disruptive upgrade to its 4.0 about three years ago, the dust from that has for the most part settled by now (4.6 current, minor 4.x releases every six months, bugfix 4.x.y releases monthly), while gnome is fresh into a major upgrade of just a few months ago, with first release of the new version still coming out on many distros, and it's stirring a LOT of controversy. kde4 does have nice 3D effects, but falls back gracefully to 2D if 3D/composite isn't available or the user prefers to do without the flashy stuff. The desktop itself, called plasma, defaults to a widget (called a plasmoid since it's a plasma widget =:^) mode (which supports both Apple's widgets and Google widgets, BTW, if you have any you'd like to keep that aren't Apple-specific-featured). There are however a number of alternate modes including a traditional single desktop folderview, a search&launch view that with its big icons and simple layout is reminiscent of mobile touch- screens, a scrolling newspaper view that puts the widgets in columns like a newspaper (again, nice on a smaller screen netbook, tablet, or other mobile devuce), and newer grid and grouping layouts that I've not really played with. The previous gnome2 was looking a bit dated, but was very mature and stable. It was originally a 2D interface, tho the compiz 3D effects window manager had proven very popular in the last few years. Also, a lot of the original strictness of the "our way is the right way" approach had faded and it had gotten rather more customizable over the years. The new gnome-3 interface is 3D only (there's a fall back similar to the old gnome2, but it's severely emasculated when it works, and often won't work at all), and again strips much of the additional config functionality, with the result being gnome3 as its authors intended, but not as many people would prefer it. It's also very 3D and composite effect oriented and thus rather far from the traditional comfort zone of many current gnome2 users, many of which are departing for other desktops, either kde or xfce/lxde. Meanwhile, one of the most popular "Linux for ordinary people" distros has been Ubuntu, sponsored and founded by a millionaire named Mark Shuttleworth. Originally based on gnome2, Mark evidently decided he didn't like gnome3's styling and announced a new gnome front-end called unity. Unity was originally targeted at the smaller screen of netbooks, tablets and touchscreen phones, but the vision there is a unified interface across all devices, and thus it now appears on the desktop as well. Unity is based on the gnome backend, but is a very different front- end. Ubuntu is the only one with it as default, but some other distros ship a version of it as an option. Unlike gnome3, it has a reasonable 2D fallback mode, should that be necessary or desired. Ubuntu/unity went its own way with its defaults, which upset a lot of users (remember it was gnome based, and gnome isn't exactly known for its configurability, this is a crowd that doesn't like to spend time switching from the defaults), but for those that are willing to configure them, many of these defaults can be changed, so I believe it falls between kde and gnome3 on the configurability scale, probably pretty close to gnome2. Gnome, meanwhile is built on gtk (much like kde is built on qt), which also forms the basis for both xfce and lxde, as they're gtk2 based. As mentioned earlier, they're also rather lighter on resources, but corresponding less full featured. You probably well know this already, but just in case, I should mention that as long as the distribution you choose includes the packages or if you compile from source, you can run programs based on one desktop, in the other ones, just fine. With that background, we can now list the binary distros and their default desktops. Ubuntu as mentioned uses unity. Fedora and its corporate sponsor use gnome. OpenSuse, which was owned by Novell, who just sold itself to Attachemate, is quite well known for its kde desktop tho it tries to treat kde and gnome reasonably equally. There are ubuntu based sub-distros for kde (kubuntu) and xfce (xbuntu). The struggling Mandriva is pretty good kde but some of its distro tools are gtk based, thus closer to the gnome side, I believe, so it's sort of neutral. The Mandriva fork, Mageia (formed by some of the folks Mandriva laid off) is really too new for me to know much about, but it should be much like Mandriva at this point as the fork is pretty recent. There's a new Linux, Bodhi, based on Enlightenment, which I haven't discussed much as I don't know much about it, but it's comparable to xfce and lxde in weight while being based on different technology. Enlightenment has reasonable 3D effects but works in 2D as well. Bodhi is kind of new and small at this point, being the work of one man, mostly, but you should be able to use the package repositories of the distro it's based on (which I can't recall at this point, Debian, maybe?) for other packages. Debian is a very large and mature community based distribution known for its large package repository. Many child distros including Ubuntu are based on it. I don't believe it favors any one desktop, but has packages for all of them I've mentioned (but possibly ion, which isn't fully free and has licensing issues), plus more. Debian is also known for its sometimes way longer than intended release development cycles and it's sometimes rather heated internal politics, including on just what constitutes "free" software, since it doesn't ship non-free in its main repository. (It's also known for its package format, but that's covered below.) Mint is a small but growing in popularity distro, originally based on Ubuntu, but now rebased or rebasing (I don't know if it's complete yet) on Ubuntu's Debian upstream. Originally popular primarily because it was small enough and its devs apparently out of the mainstream enough that it was able to ship some of the unfree packages like flash and mp3 codecs that Ubuntu didn't, so it "just worked" out of the box where Ubuntu users had to download something else from somewhere else (and both are aimed at the "it just works crowd", it's now getting many Ubuntu refugees leaving due to the switch to Unity, while Mint is sticking with Gnome2, thus it's switch to Debian as its direct upstream. It's worth mentioning that this Debian derived Mint is one of only a handful of rolling-update based binary distros. I /think/ I saw that there's an OpenSuse rolling-update version now as well, tho its main version remains periodic release based, 8-month cycle, I believe. The second factor for primarily binary distro choices that can help you decide the perfect distro is packaging format. The binary Linux distro world has two primary formats, rpm, originated by Red Hat (rpm stands for redhat package manager), and deb, originated by Debian. These have more or less the same features from a user standpoint now, tho deb led in the early years, but the binary distro world remains split between them due to there being so many debian based distros on the one hand, while rpm has the LSB, Linux Standards Base, going for it on the other, rpm being the package format blessed by the LSB. (LSB, while a useful standard defining many common aspects of a compliant distribution, such as a standard filesystem layout thru the fhs, file hierarchy standard, is from a user perspective of most used to those interested in running non-free binary-only applications, since it's generally only these that really depend on the LSB in the first place, as source-based packages tend to be flexible enough to allow defining this sort of thing at compile time and thus per distro or per individual installation. Other than as a standard to which such binary-only packages can be built, the LSB doesn't tend to matter that much to ordinary distro users, tho it does matter a bit more to application and library devs and even more to distros, since they must keep it in mind for their work.) There's a few others isolated distros using their own binary package formats, but they don't tend to be mainline. So package format isn't really a deciding factor on its own, except that the binary distro ecosystem is divided pretty much in half, with the debian based and thus deb distros on the one side, and the lsb and thus rpm based distros on the other. So whichever way you go, it's going to define where you can shop for alternative packages and your view of the FLOSS world thru the package format prism. The third binary-distro-focused factor is language and localization (l10n, l, 10 letters, n). While many/most distros ship a pretty wide l10n assortment, where the distro is based can play a big part in how well they can support you in your own language or others in which you may be fluent. Mandriva is popular in France as that's where Mandrake was originally based, tho it's pulling out to mostly Brazil (original home of Connectiva, which Mandrake merged with to form Mandriva), now, I believe. Mageia is formed of mostly the cut-loose French devs, I believe, so it should continue to be popular in French speaking countries, while the Connectiva base of Mandriva makes them popular in Latin America. SuSE was originally based in Germany, and is headed back to its German roots now that Novell sold to Attachemate which is splitting off SuSE into its own nearly independently run department, once again, so it's very popular with Germans. There's a number of Chinese and other oriental based distros that I know little about (Red Flag Linux, official Mainland Chinese, the Taiwanese Linpus Linux, Fedora based, that originally shipped on my netbook, others...), for that side of the world. But most distros tend to be English developed and primarily English supported. That's certainly the case with Debian (tho it has a large international developer base, English is the standard) and Red Hat and Fedora as they are US based. On the non-binary side, Gentoo at least has contingents from other nations, but like Debian, the primary development and communications channels are in English. Arch seems to be English at least primarily, but it may have a secondary that a number of its devs speak. Based on all that, you should be able to narrow down your choices quite a bit, first to Linux or one of the BSDs, then if Linux, binary or from- source and thus how configurable you want, which if you want from source gives only a few choices just as the BSDs give you only a few choices. If you go binaries, then you can narrow it down by rolling-update vs periodic release, with rolling update only giving you a few binary choices, and if you go periodic release, you can narrow it down by release period and level of support. If you need more factors, default desktop, choice of package format, and choice of language, can help. By the time you're done, you should have narrowed down your choice reasonably effectively and can then choose from only a small handful based on more specific factors. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
