[NBLUG/talk] Ubuntu

Chris Palmer chris at eff.org
Tue Nov 29 17:13:51 PST 2005


Rob Orsini writes:

> Stephen, It's very hard to ask that question and not get  a
> "religious" answer. The other thing that clouds the issue is that all
> distros have so much in common.

Quite true. I prefer to approach the problem from a different angle: I
come up with tasks I want to do, then I try to find out how to do them
on various operating systems (the BSDs, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows). For a
given task, I go with the system that has the "best" (by whatever
definition: cost, ease of use, ease of deployment) process for doing
that task. There is no abstract quality of Inherent Goodness; you can
only win by trial and error.

Some tasks are common to all operating systems (e.g. downloading
patches), but each system has its own way of doing them, some of which
are "better" than others. I've got my little shell script for
downloading patches to Debian stable, and it makes me happy. Maybe you
have one for Fedora that makes you happy. As long as the task is
possible to do and is not unduly burdensome, you're pretty much fine.

(That reminds me, I should probably figure out how to make Mac OS X
silently apply all and only security updates...)

When you approach things this way, religion tends to get pushed aside by
that nasty brute, pragmatism. For example, Maybe OpenBSD's firewall rule
syntax is just easier for you to use than Linux'. Maybe Fedora has an
easier auto-update mechanism than Slackware. Maybe Windows Server 2003
is a better platform for .NET deployment than Mono. Is ProTools better
on the Mac or on Windows? Can you get by with Audacity? Whatever. When
empiricism works, it works well.

But people seem to enjoy OS religion, probably because Inherent Goodness
would be so simplifying. And because it provides a great opportunity be
a blowhard, like I am being now. ;)


-- 
http://www.eff.org/about/staff/#chris_palmer

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