Fwd: Etch

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

Kristian Hermansen wrote:
> The real metric should be, "how often do you have to circumvent your
> repositories to get the software you want".  The answer with Ubuntu
> for me is, "almost never".  For Fedora, I already mentioned three
> cases above for which Ubuntu wins here, and my hypothesis grows
> stronger still...

You still didn't answer my question regarding whether you're talking about a
default install, or if tweaking the repo list is allowed.  A cursory google
search lead me to this:
http://www.elijahlofgren.com/linux/ubuntu/#more-software
which seems to indicate that you do in fact need to tweak some things in
Ubuntu before you get access to all those repositories.  This appears to be
reinforced by the fact that the local Ubuntu box I have can't find the
acroread package.

If you allow that, then you can just as easily add a yum repo or two that has
the Adobe Flash player, mp3 libraries, mplayer with all the codecs,
proprietary nvidia/ati drivers, etc.  Sun's Java is sort of a pain, but
hopefully since they GPL'd it there won't be redistribution issues anymore.

My point is that the differences aren't as stark as you make it look.  I'm
sure there /are/ differences in ease of use, etc, but if you know the distro,
they are pretty much in the noise, and which one "wins" is largely a matter of
personal taste and experience w.r.t. knowing where to look for help when
things don't work (or for those one liners that enable non-free repositories).

Matt

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