Each one, make one - the distro debate

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 29 January 2008 06:30

Opinion and Analysis

Strangely, the best known and most widely used distribution, Ubuntu, had no-one to plug its good points. The same went for Novell's SuSE Linux too though one member of the audience admitted to being a user.

While most of the speakers felt that the increasing number of distributions was a minus point as far as Linux goes, Smart differed, pointing out that he had been able to learn Linux thoroughly only because he had gone the Gentoo route where one installs everything manually.

And he added that his learning had been complete when he rolled his own distribution and put out a live CD. He said it was easy to fix a Linux system with this kind of experience.

Oxer's idea is to get a dialogue going between different distribtuions to the extent that each and every distribution does not reinvent the wheel and waste development time.

Rather, the idea is for distributions to try and share common things so that progress can be that much faster. And judging by what went on this morning, this may serve as the starting point for a wider discussion.