Integral type of Linux distros?
Here's a thread nobody's going to answer to
Fast and loose opinions to get the ball rolling:
Debian - Beta. Seems to have a manifesto for everything.
Gentoo - Alpha. Very organised, but with less philosophy than Debian.
Arch - Delta. Community distro, started by some person, run by other people. Highly customisable, less community segregation into "developers" and "lusers".
Gentoo lets you customize under the hood for virtually everything; however, I've always found USE flags too cumbersome. Portage doesn't hold a candle to the elegant simplicity of the ports system available in FreeBSD.Originally Posted by A Grain of a Song of Sand
Here's a thread nobody's going to answer to
Fast and loose opinions to get the ball rolling:
Debian - Beta. Seems to have a manifesto for everything.
Gentoo - Alpha. Very organised, but with less philosophy than Debian.
Arch - Delta. Community distro, started by some person, run by other people. Highly customisable, less community segregation into "developers" and "lusers".
For the last little while I've been using Mint (because I'm a traitor) and finding it mind-numbingly convenient.
IMO
Last edited by xerx; 06-30-2013 at 10:07 PM.
I fully agree with Debian. I would add here these OSS projects: FreeBSD, X.org, GNOME, Apache. The annoying thing about them is that, although often modular, their pieces are interdependent, offering one only "all or nothing" options.
Delta is an activist quadra, too. GNU is the best example.
I disagree with Arch as Delta. At its core it is Alpha, what is certain about it - and any distro that requires knowledge and customization under the hood - is that they are not Te/Fi. I know a lot of Te people hating Slackware, Arch and Gentoo with a passion. All they want is a black box, something you just install and works, you need to get close to its core only when something is not working. I know an ILI - the guy that introduced me to Linux - who, after using Gentoo for years, he ended up with Ubuntu. xD He was attracted to Gentoo because that would make one a linux wizz, he used it for fun and to learn, but he was not valuing it.
Arch was designed by just one man, then no long after it began becoming popular he abandoned it. It had really no social ideology behind it, all of it was technical: simplicity, minimal changes to the original software, no default customization, control over features and settings, etc. (the Arch way) Initially, its people were not caring about the community although it was not dismissed (AUR). Just its late popularity attracted and promoted a lot of minions in the community, especially Aristocratics. They wrote a holy canon out of those ideas and many posers now boast that alleged meritoshitocracy.Anyway, I think it still is pretty much Alpha, Arch is ruled by a core of developers who work on it for themselves without feeling it is their duty to satisfy the end-user, they dismiss anyone who make claims or ask for rights.
I think the Delta distros are the most user-friendly, just they don't have principles behind them, ending-up like a mix of anything convenient. They virtually never create something from scratch, they just borrow things form others; technically creative only when forced to, for example when external decisions limits their options - see Linux Mint's "Cinnamon" GNOME fork.
Linux Mint is alpha, focus on aesthetics, elegance, comfort. It rejects a lot of moral prohibitions such as no proprietary software or some activist OSS things.
These are
things.
Alpha's aren't know for strict principles, but they are focused on creating a good user experience as well as a balance of features and capabilities.
Alpha is not known for technical or engineering uniqueness or customization, but tends towards practical(but often novel) implementations of existing technologies. There is a desire for code correctness and ease of use but it's not that strict either. Alpha's focus is research and exploring new territory, not optimization and technical rehashing of old territory.
The focus of Alpha NT is heavy research and Alpha SF's is fun, peace, entertainment, and such.
Imo Gentoo is delta. Gentoo exemplifies imo the desire for technological uniqueness as it's compile per platform and optimized locally, it's the locavore of the OS world. Ubuntu imo is more Gamma, it's meant to be a dominant market force for linux.
Arch today is aristocratic, closed community with only room for it's own users and creators. However imo the person that made the package management tool for Arch is probably alpha. Judd Vinet and all he did is one thing, the distro mechanism to the targeted end users he had which are admins didn't have a lot of problems updating. He didn't really make a new distribution, he made a package manager.
For whatever it counts, I've been running Lubuntu for years, which is a variant of Ubuntu with L X D E as a desktop environment instead of GNOME. More stripped down and runs faster. Tried Debian but the shit wouldn't install, so I ain't got any plans on doing that ever again. Looked into Fedora, but what I read on it made me think it would be too big of a pain in the ass to be worth it, same with most anything else in the Linux world. Lubuntu rules; I saw my $200 laptop run faster than my old buddy's $2k state-of-the-art thing with Windows 7 on it, I never have a stupid Windows thing force the computer to restart due to updates, I get all sorts of free shit from Synaptic Package Manager, no dumb noises out of the computer when I start it up, no viruses ever, no antiviruses ever.
As for music, Ardour's an awesome program, and it's Linux only; there's a lot of LADSPA plugins in the Synaptic Package Manager if you just wander around in there and pull out what you want, and there's more in there than I usually even need to use, so I mostly just fire up Audacity and get to it.
p . . . a . . . n . . . d . . . o . . . r . . . a
trad metalz | (more coming)
That among a few other core components make a distribution, actually. Everything specific to Arch follows its principles: package manager, the packages themselves, filesystem, configuration.
The community is by no means close but indeed it has no room for everyone because there is a strong connection between Arch's specifications and its target users - its own type of user and none other - hence this unintended "exclusivism". The user is supposed to understand its underlying workings in order to find it proper, Arch cannot make compromises, it cannot satisfy enyone out there, it may not adopt featuritis by definition. Its target users have not gathered for an offer, they are refugees. It is not just hubris, it is self-preservation. The true Arch user does not want his system bloated with features, customization and over-automation, because this complexity circumvents him using it properly, it takes away the reason for using Arch in the first place.
One issue I have with Gentoo compared to Arch is the level of automation. I'm finding my system increasingly difficult to maintain, whereas with Arch, I set it up once, and it never had problems again (except with Pulse, which is giving me grief here in Gentoo as well). Also, if someone decides to change the way their config files work, as happened with Bumblebee recently, Gentoo's package manager can make a mess of things if you're clumsy with it.
I was also going to say that I find ebuilds strange and obscure compared to PKGBUILDs, but I took a look at both formats and realise the issue is just that I haven't bothered to climb the learning curve for either
I see Gentoo as being more arcane and exclusivist than Arch, if only because Gentoo seemingly divides the community with Arch placing the system more in the user's hands. Additionally, Gentoo does very little to make you comfortable, forcing you into contact with things like find and chroot, where Arch needs much less Linux literacy.
Perhaps because I have a stereotype of Delta as the "hobby quadra", all this leads me to considering Arch a very Delta distro.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
