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preferred linux distro for workstation usage?



On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 1:14 AM, Derek Martin <invalid-yPs96gJSFQo51KKgMmcfiw at public.gmane.org>wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 08:25:39PM -0400, Ryan Pugatch wrote:
> > I am curious which distro everyone prefers to use on their
> > workstations (desktops and laptops).
>
> At work I use Ubuntu, but I'm not very happy about it.  I prefer
> Fedora, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I prefer
> something that's not derived from Debian.  This isn't really meant to
> be a "hate on Debian" rant -- Debian is mostly fine, but they often
> decide to be different from the entire rest of the Unix world,
> creating some odd corner of policy based on some dogma that has no
> basis in reality, that invariably screws me over royally every time I
> try to use it.
>
> My favorite example of this was when they made the 'which' command a
> bash script invoked as /bin/bash.  This was particularly amusing,
> because I had what turned out to be a fairly deadly combination in my
> login files, which I've been toting around from job to job and Unix
> system to Unix system for about 16 years now:  My .profile set $ENV to
> my .bashrc file, and my .bashrc file used the which command to
> determine where, if at all, certain binaries existed.  The end result
> was equivalent to a fork bomb that took down the server I was logging
> into (because my .bashrc invoked 'which', which being a /bin/bash
> script sourced my $ENV file i.e. my .bashrc file...  Yay.
>
> The latest example of this is that they insist that gzip data is not a
> MIME type, but instead it is an "encoding" (whatever that means -- the
> MIME standards have no such compatible concept).  As a result they
> refuse to include MIME types for gzip (and several other compressed
> archive file types), which sometimes almost randomly causes programs
> to mishandle gzip files, sometimes attemtping to display them as text,
> sometimes unzipping them before letting me choose what to do with
> them... etc.  This of course is easily fixable... unless of course you
> maintain thousands of machines (or even a handful) which for one
> reason or another get installed very frequently.  Then it becomes
> somewhat of a headache.
>
> Lots of people love Ubuntu, and even I see that it does a lot of nice
> things... it just happens that debian-based idiosyncracies invariably
> clash with my own idiosyncracies, with a frequency and magnitude that
> has forged a lasting prejudice.
>
> > I've been a Fedora user for a while.. in fact, I tend to set up a
> > pretty minimal Fedora install with Fluxbox on my workstations.
>
> In my former life as a system administrator, I have always found that
> Red-Hat-based systems have a management philosophy that more closely
> resembles a commercial Unix, and they tend to muck with stuff less to
> suit their own ideas about what's Good and Right -- at least in my
> experience.  For my money, that makes it better.
>
> Now, if we could just get those Gnome guys to stop trying to make
> Gnome be Windows...  =8^)
>
> --
> Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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>

You're not the only one who dislikes Debian and it's children.  I've given
it plenty of chances to prove that it's worthy of my attention, but I can't
stand the whole deb/apt stuff.  As much as people complain about RH's RPM
Hell, I've had little problem's with RPM's and since YUM has come along and
numerous repositories such as Dag, EPEL, etc that only makes it so much
simpler to get the packages I need.  I've been using RedHat since around
version 3 and I'm a die-hard loyal RedHat person.

That said, I use Fedora on my desktop, CentOS on my servers (except a few
test servers) and I also recently moved my main laptop to be a MacBook Pro.
Still use my Fedora desktop quite a bit though.

-matt






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