[Pc_Support] Generic Linux question ....

[Whaxiac Patrick]

On Sunday 11 December 2005 15:31, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> .... Several years back (late '90's) I had the impression that SuSE was
> somewhat disdained by some geeks for their practice of making
> alterations to kernel (& possibly other) code in their distro. I *think*
> that most of the other 'big boys' (RH, Mandrake, maybe others) now do
> this as well. They are mostly back-porting newer stuff from newer
> kernels, as I understand it, but their kernels are nonetheless not
> identical & possibly incompatible with other binary packages because of
> these alterations. It is also considered unwise to try to use "vanilla"
> kernels from kernel.org with these distros because of possible/likely
> incompatibilities. Does anyone have a quick synopsis or a link on who
> does what to their kernels, distro-by-distro ? TIA :-).
There are some 420 monitored, reviewed, OSes, at Distrowatch.
Then, there are some 301 LiveCDs monitored, reviewed, at LiveCDlist.

There are about 30 of them, that are proprietary to the state of what you 
describe, AFAIK.  Some Proprietary versions that I have tried out: LinSpire, 
Libranet, BearOps, Suse, Red Hat, Mandrake don't make the grade for my 
personal preferences of what can be updated, upgraded, quickly and with 
little conflict.

In my many trials, since 1997, I have noted that the most problems I ever had 
were with the proprietary distributions.  Too few inputs, single point of 
control of the choices of the apps, and thus, the functionality.  

But, I don't know of a standard or maintained, list of all the changes.  I try 
to use OSes that accept the official kernel from kernel.org.  Tons less 
headaches... and, I desire to never be 'locked-in' to some upgrade 
subscription plan that enriches the coffers of a proprietor, while not 
actually contributing a lot of money to the total effort by all the people.

So, I have prchase a lot of retail boxed sets from all of the above, plus, 
done direct donations to some contributers, my personal goal is to stay open 
source, in it's true sense.  

Hope that all gives you a bit of insight about part of the concept.    

Proprietary vendors seems to do weirdness to give out some eye candy, to hype 
and market their products, but, seem to have natural limits upon the number 
of contributors (usually on the payroll- so, limited in number). whereas the 
free distros seem to either be excellent, have many contributors, or, fail 
due to lack of support.   

Sort of a natural law of survival.   
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