Laptop friendly Linux distros

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 01:32:42PM -0400, Jason Spiro wrote:
> So they don't mind it if most prospective users end up using Ubuntu,
> as Distrowatch seems to indicate is happening? Why have two separate
> distros, Debian and Ubuntu, each somewhat different? Why is it bad if
> the Linux community standardizes mostly on one distro (Debian)? Of
> course, to do that, Debian would probably have to focus less on
> portability to so many architectures, and more on
> usability/documentation issues. The lack of portability would be a
> blow to the alternatives-to-i386-amd64-or-sparc-on-the-desktop camp
> but it seems that camp is fairly dead anyway. :)

Many embedded systems use arm or mips or powerpc, and many are basing
their work on debian.  The s390 seems to be a bit of a dead project,
probably caused by a lack of people with access to the required
hardware.  I like being able to run the same system and setup on all my
machines.  We do have a use for at least one distribution that cares
about portability, and well we only have one, which is debian.

> Yes, and there's the uncurse shell script abrotman from IRC #debian
> wrote and put up on his website:
> http://www.linuks.mine.nu/ubuntu/uncurse
> 
> The shell script is supposed to transform an installed Ubuntu system
> into Debian. People on IRC used to sometimes run into problems after
> they tried it. I haven't been on IRC recently, so I don't know the
> latest news.
> 
> But it seems to me such configurations would be unsupported, and that
> it would be unfair request support on such a config without telling
> people you're using it. And what percentage of people on IRC would
> help out people using such a config? :)

Many people would, if they could, but since they don't know that setup,
it may be hard to help.  Of course most questions have the same answer
for both debian and ubuntu (not so for knoppix though), so it isn't
usually a problem.

Len Sorensen
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