distrowars [was: Re: [Sderby] Printers and Linux]

[Richard Smedley]

On Fri, 2004-11-19 at 15:59, Dave Coulson wrote:
> Thanks to all who considered my problem. It seems as if upgrading is the 
> best way to recognise my printer, but to what distro. Someone mentioned 
> Gentoo and I had a quick look at the site, but what is the general 
> opinion and how close to the traditional Linux is it. I would hate to 
> have to use lots of packages and scripts which would not be recognised 
> in other distro's. Maybe its better to stick with Slackware and the 
> likes. All opinions welcome!

Hello Dave,

You do realise you've just lit a fuse with a
question meaning ``What is the /true/ GNU/Linux 
distro?'' ?

If you regard GNU as, despite its acronym, a mere
copy of Unix, then there are strong argument for
Slackware. It'll certainly teach you a great deal 
about *nix. However it's not easy to maintain, well
not at upgrade time anyway, so if you wanted to go
this way you'll be better off with FreeBSD.

SuSE's heritage goes back as far as Slackware's, and
it certainly has a strong following, but like Mandrake
it has its own set of tools, so knowledge is not necessarily
transferrable.

Debian GNU/Linux has had strong historical links with
the FSF, so is perhaps the nearest thing to a real GNU,
concernes about non-free and contrib notwithstanding.
Debian is also ditributed in a variety of other
distros - so why not follow the crowd and get Ubuntu:
http://www.shipit.ubuntulinux.org/

You can use Ubuntu's tools, standard Debian GNU tools,
and update it with 11,000 packages from Debian. :-)

Of course if you and your computers have a *lot* of
free time, then Gentoo is certainly worth trying ;)

 - Richard

btw did I forget to mention Fedora, hmm, must be a
reason for that ;^)

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