lagerratrobe
Unregistered
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Posted: Dec. 30 2005,20:17 |
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| Quote | I must have missed something...
Honestly, with no insult towards the developers, can DSL compete with straight Debian or (K)unbuntu? It's pretty much a miracle as it is. A Linux distro that is only 50Mb! Kudos to the developers! |
Depending on what your needs are for a day-to-day system, yes I think DSL can compete pretty effectively with most of the major distros in a HD install. I use it at work everyday to analyze and work with GIS map data, on a machine that's been retired for almost 5 years. Aside from the difficulties I've encountered in compiling source code, most of the Linux binaries and Debian apt-get packages that I've installed have worked fine. The source that I haven't been able to compile is mostly fluff, and not missed at work at all. I tend to agree with the DSL dev community that most of the large Linux distros today come with far more applications than are needed.
When you consider the speed with which the system deploys, and the fact that X, USB, sound, and most network functions are available 5 to 10 minutes after launch (in a worst-case scenario where one has to actually do some setup tweaking), I actually consider DSL to be a step ahead of Debian and other full distros in many ways.
Yes, DSL works fantastically well as a rescue system, I've used it 3 times already in this fashion since discovering it. It also works better than Cygwin as a means of using Posix tools temporarily on a Windows machine, since it seamlessly mounts NTFS and has a richer toolset out-of-the box than Cygwin. But it seems to me that saying the distro is "supposed" to be used this way is unnecessarily limiting.
| Quote | | DSL as a liveCD, embedded, frugal or applicance type application is a more interesting and far less crowded space. |
This may be so for you as a developper, but from the number of posts that exist in this forum that come from people using DSL in HD installs, I also suspect the distro is the seed of a true Linux revolution. One where anyone can get a good Linux OS running in a traditional HD installation without needing huge distro-specific bibles to get the soundcard to work, or an MTA setup, or stuff lke that.
*THAT* was the intent behind my post originally. To point out that as a HD installation used to replace other traditional Linux distros, it fell short due to the source compilation limitations. I don't understand the response I've gotten from roberts on this matter. It seems to me that he discounts HD installs as being old-school, ridiculous ways of using the distro. Funny thing is that nowhere in this post, or in any others, have I said that liveCD installs are lame, or that having a small embedded linux distro to use on dedicated appliances is a bad thing. <shrug> I find this attitude puzzling, especially given that the HD install option exists, AND the large number of people who seem to use it in this fashion.
Maybe a survey of how people use the distro would be informative?
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