Selection criteria

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 09:13:44AM -0400, Phillip Mills wrote:
> I hope this doesn't generate any kind of "my distribution can beat up 
> your distribution" argument, but I'm interested in knowing what 
> selection criteria people used when deciding to put Linux on a system.  
> In part I wonder whether there's any agreement that requirement X leads 
> to solution Y, and in part I'd like to examine whether a new Linux user 
> should be steered one way or another depending on what they need to get 
> out of it.
> 
> (If you've had reasons to put different distributions on different 
> systems, that's really interesting!)
> 
> For example, a couple of years ago when I decided to add a Linux system 
> to my home collection it went this way:
> 1) Since the only net access the system would have would be for me to 
> dial out with one of my Macs and then use that as a gateway, I was 
> willing to pay for a comprehensive set of CDs.
> 2) Among the ones that were on the shelves in stores I knew, I selected 
> the one with the most up-to-date kernel and developer tools.
> On that day, the winner was SuSE 8.1 Pro.
> 
> (OTOH, about 8 years ago, my approach where I worked was to download 
> whatever minimal system I could find, because the only requirement was 
> to match the zero dollars in the software budget.)
> 
> I suspect others have used more analysis and broader requirements.  (?)

Well my first Linux distribution was the one I found in a usenet archive
at CRS Online (BBS from the early 90s in Toronto), where I went: "Neat,
a free unix clone for my PC.  let me try that." and proceeded to
download one floppy per day for 2 weeks until I had enough to start the
install.  That was SLS 1.03.

When I started university in fall of 94, part way through the term, the
computer science club got in a set of Linus CDs which they were selling
for $10, so I got one.  It had slackware 2.3 (I think), redhat 2.0,
yggdrasil, and a number of tiney distributions.  The redhat one mentioned
this new packagae management tool called RPM and how much simpler it
made adding and removing packages and dealing with dependancies, so I
thought that would be worth trying.  I also tried slackware, but it had
the same stupid installer SLS had used, which while it worked, left a
lot to be desired in terms of not making me do all the repetive work
that could be done for me. :)

Later I picked up redhat 4 CD powertools sets at the computer book store
close to the university, and did that up to about 5.2 for most of the
versions and it wasn't too bad.  I occationally tried a few other
distributions if I got a hold of them, but most were broken in some way,
or just seemed to clumsy or too different from what I was getting used
to with redhat.  However when I was runnign 6.0 on a workterm, I started
getting rather annoyed at frequent crashes in bind, trouble with the
mail server, and various other things that just weren't so reliable.  I
found bugs in packages and build scripts, sent a few bug reports (I even
knew someone working at redhat at the time) and it seemed they weren't
very interested in fixing things until the next release in 6 months, if
ever.  I ad already played with debian 2.0 at the time, which looked
promising but the install was a disaster zone, and nearly imposible to
complete successfully (the dependancy tracking worked, but the tools
seemed a bit braindead about how to install things in the right order to
solve those dependancies).  With the annoyances of redhat 6.0, I
downloaded and installed 2.1 on my own system before heading back to
university for my last year, upgraded it to unstable, and kept using
that at university while 2.2 was finalized.  2.1 installed much better
than 2.0, and the upgrade to unstable was simple and just worked.  I
kept reading the docs and learning lots about how the package system was
working, started figuring out the policy documentation and the
philosophy debian used, which fit very well with how I thought computer
systems should be setup and run in general (I hate sloppy things, and
things that could be better, but aren't made so, and doing the same
thing twice when it could be scripted, and hence having multiple people
doing something when one person could do it better once and for all,
like configuring and compiling a program.)

So now I run Debian 3.1 (or what will soon be 3.1) on most machines, and
unstable on my home desktop (because I like helping finding the bugs and
solving them), and find it very enjoyable.  I would not recomend it to
someone that doesn't have internet access since it really is much
simpler to use when you can just install something over the internet.  I
did however run with a 14.4 modem for quite a while and did updates
overnight some years ago, and even did it with a 56k less tahn a year
ago, and could easily keep up with the changes in unstable for the
packages I have installed.  It is nicer with DSL or cable of course, but
you can do without it as long as you don't mind connecting to the
internet and starting a package download every few days.  If you run the
stable release, updates for security and bugs are very infrequent and
not really a problem for dialup users.

Well that's how I have picked my distribution.  Other people have
different needs and hence different opinions.

Lennart Sorensen
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