Re: [SLUG] serious distro comparisions

From: jeff (jdavis70@tampabay.rr.com)
Date: Sun Sep 28 2003 - 02:25:32 EDT


ethan@ethanzimmerman.com wrote:

>I know everyone has an opinion on this, but I'm looking for detailed info. What
>are the main differences (technical as well as philosophical) between various
>distros?
>
>I know debian is very much an advocate of free software, and very non
>commercial, and I know about apt-get
>
>I know red hat is a company trying to turn a profit, and has been called
>bloated. Can someone elaborate on "bloated". And how can that be ? What code in
>red hat (9 for example) is actually written/modified by red hat. Don't they just
>grab other people's code and slap it in a nice pretty package? If so how can one
>distro be more bloated than another?
>
>I know mandrake was sorta based on red hat. I know little about SuSE and united
>linux, and even less about slackware.
>
>So what really are the difference between distros?
>
>
    The biggest differences that I see are with hardware detection and
what packages each vendor considers the "minimal" install to require.
For example, if I select the minimal installation and take the defaults,
I usually get a more compact installation from RedHat than I do with
Mandrake, although multimedia apps, games, and eye candy are
contributing factors there. Performing a custom or expert mode install
will allow one to trim the size considerably with most distros. Debian
can be trimmed down to practically nothing if you get serious. I haven't
tried it recently, but Slackware used to be a very compact distro. Even
version 7 could be pared down to a little less than 100 MB without the
GUI. Mainly, it comes down to what you actually *need* vs what you want.

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