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Whaxiac Patrick wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid200512121015.10033.pberry2@cfl.rr.com" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On Sunday 11 December 2005 15:31, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">.... 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 :-).
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->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.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
I *QUITE* agree w/ all of your observations. I am using SuSE at the
moment (8.2 on a 933 MHz PIII, 9.2 on a 2.4 GHz P4) & like it OK,
but have noticed problems w/ other packages not being available or not
working unless specifically compiled for SuSE, thus the question. I
knew about distrowatch, will look at livecdlist, thanks.<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
William A. Mahaffey III
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Remember, ignorance is bliss, but
willful ignorance is LIBERALISM !!!!
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