Re: The Truth About Distros and Jim Jones

[7EN]

On 11 Mar 2021 23:18:43 GMT, F Russell <f...@random.info> wrote:

>Some losers want power, and in the world of GNU/Linux the way
>for losers to acquire "power" is by developing a DISTRO.
>
>A distro is nothing more than simple curation and packaging of the
>work of many talented others but the distro maintainer is easily deluded
>into believing that such simple, brainless activities constitute pure power.
>
>Every distro maintainer is like Jim Jones:
>
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jones
>
>What is even worse than the cheap distro despot is the cheap distro
>follower who will swallow, without question, all the decrees and
>dictums of the distro master.

And there's not a damned thing wrong with it.

The pick and blend of apps and utilities and fine settings
in a distro can make one much more appealing than
another, depending on your particular needs of the moment.
Smart "curation" yeilds good products.

A few distro-masters add apps of their own you don't normally
find elsewhere. MX is a fair example, they add a few utilities
you don't normally see, customized for their distro, like one to
make an ISO of your existing configuration from a running MX
system. OpenSUSE has "Yast" - which is a very smart and
helpful system config app cluster that can save you hours of
study and mistakes. Wanna build a RAID-6 array - you can do
it the HARD way (did that recently with Centos), or use Yast's
setup app and get it all going and decently tuned literally in
minutes - and a bunch of other things that normally require
tweaking half a dozen config files *just right* ........

So don't cuss the distro-makers. They package and polish so
YOU can have the perfect experience - for free (ok, except
RedHat :-) The Liniverse is vast, but what do YOU need out
of it, right now ? Distros provide that answer.

And, really, you CAN turn pretty much any distro into any other
if you want. I always load fairly minimial versions without all
the "recommeds" and then build them up to suit the exact
role of the moment. BUT - I want a great "minimal" base to
start with. Both vanilla Debian and OpenSUSE are great
places to start. Arch ... um ..... it makes you work too hard.
Feels almost easier to write your own OS from scratch :-)