[geeks] Mac definitions

[Michael Parson]

On Fri, 8 Jul 2011, Jonathan Groll wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Jul 2011 16:49:54 -0400, Joshua Boyd <jdboyd at jdboyd.net> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jul 07, 2011 at 02:54:59PM -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:
>>
>>> think of it as the Linux distribution for people who secretly (or
>>> not so secretly) would really rather be running Windows.
>>
>> If I would rather be running Windows, I know where to find it.
>>
>> In the mean time, Ubuntu is the finest[0] ready to run, general
>> purpose, desktop or server, Linux system out there (at least, as of
>> 11.04, if you switch back to the classic desktop for desktops and do
>> server installs for servers).
>>
>> Going forward, they aren't infallible and there are some troubling
>> signs.  If Unity doesn't come together quickly, then perhaps it will
>> be time to consider switching to Mint or Fedora.
>>
>> [0] Obviously, IMO.
>
> Couldn't have put it better. I can understand where some of the Ubuntu
> hatred is coming from a UI point-of-view (Unity has caused a lot of
> disunity), but I don't get the dissing of DEBIAN.
>
> Especially for folks who are happy without a GUI, in my seriously
> biased worldview the Debian environment is a very very good general
> purpose server/desktop, esepcially if one needs to work with the most
> modern F/OSS packages.

My dislike of Ubuntu stems not as much from the Windowsishness of it
all, but the fact that they do things like rename binaries.  I don't
know how wide-spread it is, but the example that upset me was when
a co-worker needed some help getting apache to do something, don't
remember what it was, but after not being able to find the running httpd
binary, we find that the running binary is named apache.  The config
files aren't in /etc/httpd, they're in /etc/apache.  No where else have
I seen this (except, maybe on Windows), everyone else leaves the name of
the program alone, the difference is usually the install prefix, maybe
an appending of a version number, but not a flat-out rename.

Sure, could haev solved this by running from source, but that starts to
get away from why you're running a distribution, isn't it?

Nit-picky and petty?  Maybe, but it told me that I don't know what other
bits have been mucked with.  When things start to get like that, your
experience becomes too centric on their way of doing things rather than
a general Unix way of doing things.

Aside from personal dislikes, I have a perfectly suitable business
justification. Most of the commercially supported software is going to
support being run on RHEL and maybe SuSe.  These are the distributions
that are going to be installed at customer locations that I have to
support, so, those are the release I focus my attention on.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org
Austin, TX
KF5LGQ