There's a reason this post doesn't allow comments, I dont want to start an OS flamewar.
Well, as many of you know I haven't used linux in an official capacity since circa 1996. Well NOW ITS 2005! And Since I broke up with my girlfriend in early December '04, I've been puttering around with DSL since, well, I dont have steady sex anymore, and the girls I'm dating I'm not really interested in getting too serious with...which leaves me lots of time to get to know my puppy, and DSL better! So one thing I've noticed, is that while 5 months ago you wouldn't have caught me alive (or dead, for obvious reasons) running linux, i really enjoy working with/hacking/drinking with DSL. I can't seem to grasp any of the other mainstream non-livecd versions though...but thats nay what this post is about anyway...
I've noticed that there are a gazillion linux distributions these days. I'm thankful that DSL isn't fragmented like a lot of these projects seem to be. Sure, we have Hikarunix, Christian LiveCD Linux, and Feather...but they're not big cheese. I have a Redhat Machine, a Gentoo machine, and a Mandrake machine at 3 seperate locations that I admin, and they're all quite different. I can quite safely say that I hate them all. I'm really not a fan of Linux distributions in General. I'm an avid BSD administrator, well over 50 boxen strong...but I've fallen in love with our little DSL. I take it with me wherever I go, on USB stick, I have several CDs burned and I just leave them places where I know i'll want to use them. Apartment has a few. Parents house has 0.9 and 0.8.4. I left one at school for easy access If i felt like doing whatever I wanted on the schools machines. I run DSL on my laptop via livecd (i miss being able to VNC though, since my trackpad doesn't work in X - pm me on the forums 'tronik' if you have similar problem or know how to fix ;p)
Getting off topic, but getting back on -- all these Linux Distributions are a joke. The last time I used Linux in a production environment (other than the 3 machines I'm in charge of) was 1996. 1996. Why should I come back to using Linux in a production environment? Not a lot has changed with the linux userbase. I'll go into that later, but the BSD userbase is by far in my opinion more seasoned...but probably a lot more stale. ;) I always laughed when people were so Anti-MS...I was always Anti-Linux (THAT DOES NOT MEAN PRO-MS. I'm a BSD user.) Anyway, the kernel has obviously come a long way, what, with a new release about every 6 hours you're lucky if you get a few days of uptime without having to upgrade your kernel. (that is an exxageration, my linnux machines have uptimes of well over 3 months..) I'm being pretty critical...but I'm trying to make a point...I'll get to it.
With all of these damn distributions, which one do you use? They're constantly fragmenting, changing, and imploding, exploding, diploding, plodploding...Not just the distros, but the liveCDs. Today was the FIRST time i'd ever read Distrowatch...and I clicked 'news' and it amazed me about all the 'new' livecd's that have just come out...Wow...Thats a lot. I realize it might be a lot of work to put these together but I think its a waste of time for everythign to be so fragmented. I guess its odd for me because, I originally come from BSDOS, then NetBSD. Where we had a grudge per se against OpenBSD...but NetBSD seemed like a bunch of nerds all stuffed in a closet trying to get it to work on their washing machine and dryer (and it does), and then in 1999 I settled on using FreeBSD. Even lately the FreeBSD project has splintered (dragonflybsd)..pshaw...Why for I say? While I can understand the technical reasoning behind it...(to preserve the freebsd 4.x bsd tree), I dunno why things have to splinter like they do. Everyone wants to be different. I think Linux biggest weakness is the fact that everyone wants to make their own distribution. I guess what I'm saying is, its not unlike going to a pizza store. All pizzas are the same, they just have different toppings. There are probably hundreds of types of pizza. Its good to have that much variety, but when I think pizza and what kind of pizza most people want, they usually want pepperoni or cheese pizza. Not Pineapple Ham Pizza or Chicken Ranch Alfredo with Vegetable pizza. I guess im just remembering back when it was Slackware or Redhat...and the only obvious answer was Slackware.
This is mostly a frustration post...I don't really care what other people have to say about it...but I think the Linux community as a whole is going to smother itself in distribution sauce, and no ones going to know what the frack kind of Pizza to buy since there are 8,000 different types. Plus 3,000 different types of LiveCD for each 8,000 different types of distribution.
I'll Stick with Pepperoni or Cheese...or Damn Small.