Re: [Lilux-help] Distro is not as important as we all think

Yes of course, it is only a fraction. If you would calculate it in Megabytes, I would say that all the tings you mentioned take up a order of magnitude less space than let's say KDE alone. There is also many more work in terms of man/year behind projects like Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, etc. than behind the entire Gentoo project. I know that choosing a distro is important. I have already written much about the pros and crons of different distros in the last posts. I only wanted to highlight that it is by far not the only thing to think about. For example Pascal Steichen also proposed to cover then KDE / Gnome issue. mplayer and xine was just an example. A Windows LISP programmer migrating to Linux will far be more interested in choosing the right LISP environment (GNU Lisp or another implementation) than the distro. Believe me. A mathemetician will be more likeley to be interested by the differences of Maple and Mathematica than the distro. Same with databases: Migrating from AIX with Oracle to Linux with Oracle is far easier then migrating from AIX with Oracle to AIX with DB2. Especially if you have much PL/SQL code. You are right. I have no clue about Gentoo. I had already decided to give it a try two weeks ago, but found no time. I *will* give it a try in a month when I will have much more time. Your explanations are good. Gentoo seems to have far less disadvantages than I thought. I should not have judge it. But I still have the opinion, that people who are following this mailinglist and who have a hard time to choose a distro should begin with experimenting. Patrick Useldinger has already read things about distros and he has already tried FreeBSD. If you reach a dead point, you should take *any* distro. Asking the mailinglist may not bring a solution, because everybody recommends his favorite distro, which is understandable. Every distro has pros and cons. But no major distro is really a bad choice! You can even take SuSE to build a firewall, I only must spend a bit more time uninstalling unneeded things and to get the permissions right. You can harden all Linux distros, it is just easier to do it with some distros. You seem to have difficulties to understand that there are people who *care* about whats under the hood, but still have a hard time to choose. Otherwise, it would be very simple for them, they would just choose the distro with the prettiest logo and name!!! Yes, I always order the CDs. But this is only to support the distro. I have *no* contractual guarantee (like you). Maybe. It doesn't matter if you paid for it. You are right at this point. But you still have no control over it. I still think that it is important to be not too dependend of the network connection. Maybe you move to a new appartment without possibilities to have DSL or Cable. Maybe SCO manages to shutdown the Gentoo and Slackware servers by court (and having special contracts with RedHat). I have already seen this. There have been nice Aqua like themes on www.themes.org. These have been removed overnight (because of Apple). Glad were those who still had a local copy! You have explained that it *is* possible with Gentoo to store the software archives locally. Good. I am wrong in judging Gentoo. Nobody can take you away what you have stored locally. Some people might now think that I exagerate. Imagine you have stored important files in a specific format (be it xfig, abiword, ...). Imagine you reinstall your system without this app, because you don't need it. After a year you must access this files and find that this app has been shut down because of software patents. People who have installed everything over the network and who have no CDs of older versions then have a problem. The advantage of OSS is that you have the source and nobody can take it away. With network based installations people lose an important aspect of OSS. Maybe. But I explicitly told that people should try in a former post. Yes its my opinion. Without apps, the distro is worthless. Never forget that the Linux kernel has been written to run bash, gcc, uemacs, etc and later X Window. Without all these apps, the kernel would not have been created and there would be no distros. Patrick Kaell