Linuxmusician01 wrote:merlyn wrote:Just out of curiosity : what is your list of approved distributions?
- Debian
- Ubuntu (all flavours)
- Mint
- Fedora
- openSuse
- Raspbian
Any distribution that is made by a serious professional (team). I have no intrest in anything other than that. Neither should y'all.
I don't dig distro's made by somebody alone in a basement who still lives w/ his mother. He'll lose interest in support and development within a year or two. Don't act like y'all do not know what I mean. A little pet-distro project from a student or hobbyist is not meant for serious
day by day use. God forbid that somebody actually wipes Windows from his/her PC to install such a non-distro because we serious Linuxers discussed it in a forum.
I ain't no tester.
.
I do not wish to start a holy war on Linux distros, but I think that I have to comment on this maybe for the benefit of novice users which are less accustomed to the Linux ecosystem, if any come by and read this. Not that I am a Linux guru, but I think that living in Linux world for 15 years gave me some perspective, hopefully.
For one, I do not see why Arch and Gentoo Linux are not in the list. Anyway, I think that the dichotomy between "serious professional distros" and "guy in the basement" is false, and does not represent reality, as it always happen for black and white statements (a part for this last one, I guess).
I think there are too many distros out of there, a plethora of Ubuntu derivatives in particular, that seem pretty pointless to me as well. Many died out in the years, but I can definitely find examples of "one man distros" that managed to be long lived projects, with regular updates and a stable user-base.
One important example would be Slackware: it has been around since 1993. It is the oldest distribution to be maintained and formed the base for many other projects, also commercial projects, among which the first version of SUSELinux (maybe something to add to the list if commercial distros are to be counted).
AVLinux would be another good example of "one man distro" in the Linux audio distros subdomain which receives regular updates and has good documentation.
There are many minor distros, minor in terms of user base and development team size, that are not of the "guy in the basement" type, but attempt implementing cutting edge technology and are being developed by computer science researchers. Hence, by competent teams. One example would be NixOS. Others are developed with strong emphasis to run certain tasks, as Scientific Linux. At first sight, it might look like an out to date RedHat (another one missed in the list above, I would say, if we want to count commercial endeavors). In reality, it is a very sound option to setup and configure computing cluster systems for scientific modelling, experiment control and data post-processing. There is a reason why it is used at CERN, other than being developed by specialists at CERN and other research laboratories.
It is not that I am recommending any of the examples above, especially to novices. In fact I would recommend to novices to stay in Debian-land a solid amount of years. However, I think it is important to state that:
No, it isn't true that all distros out of that list are useless, although their scope might not be that of providing a stable system for day to day use, especially for audio. In short: know what you install and make sure it is what you need and want. No need to pick a side, or compile lists.
No, not all distros that are out of that list are developed by some random guy in a basement. Many have researchers behind and are pushing new technologies, or taking care of fulfilling a certain task.
No, not all one-man projects are useless. Many have been around for years or even decades, have regular updates and an user-base.