A June ’14 Distro Categorization

A note about slackware – it’s the oldest surviving linux distro out there – beating Debian by a few months. The category title makes it sound like it’s part of the’new’ group, and listing it first enhances the impression that it’s new.

Some thoughts:

GNU/Linux distros are often categorized based on Package Management.

A. Ubuntu is a Debian-based distro, with *.deb based packages.
B. Antergos is an Arch Linux derivative, that makes it pretty easy to install a working Arch. In fact, from the Arch Wiki, a list of Arch-based distros follows. Note that Arch is loosely considered as a Gentoo derivative. If coe includes the Arch User Repository, they are both upstream source code based, with scripts organizing the building of each package from upstream source, from downloading to compiling to installation and configuring.

=== ARCH Based Distros =========
===========
1 Specialty Distributions

1.1 alphaOS
1.2 Antergos
1.3 ArchAssault
1.4 ArchBang
1.5 ArchBSD
1.6 ArchEX
1.7 Arch Linux ARM
1.8 archboot
1.9 BBQLinux
1.10 BlackArch Linux
1.11 Bluestar Linux
1.12 Bridge Linux
1.13 CDN Linux
1.14 Chakra
1.15 DidJiX
1.16 LinHES
1.17 Manjaro Linux
1.18 Mesk Linux
1.19 Parabola GNU/Linux

2 Meta Distributions

2.1 archiso

3 Arch Influenced Distros

3.1 Alpine Linux
3.2 Frugalware
3.3 KaOS
=============

C. RPM Based. Red Hat and Fedora are an important enough group, and have several derivatives: CentOS, Scientific Linux, Oracle. These are often considered as Fedora Based, and Red Hat Enterprize Linux based.

D. Slackware was another binary based distribution, and as mentioned above, is probably the oldest extant distro. It requires considerably more hands-on fiddling than Debian, one of the reasons for my personal adoption of Debian, early on, after initially using Slackware.

E. Where is KNOPPIX? This is one of the most important of all distros, as it was the first live CD distro, and the first one, to my knowledge, that developed scripts to automagically detect hardware and adapt the live (and installed) system for the hardware. My long experimentation with Debian came to an end when I discovered I didn’t need to tweak, for example, displays, and perhaps (to a lesser extent) printers. Ubuntu owes a tremendous debt to Mr. Knopper.

F. I have never used BSD/FreeBSD, etc.

G. The totally free distros deserve mention.

goossbears, your post was mentioned in http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/203432/

As it says on the front page, views of an individual do not necessarily represent the views of the group. If there are errors or omissions, let’s get a better list somewhere else “done right” from your own perspective.

We would love to have other guest bloggers step up! 🙂

Let’s put aside the blatant Ubuntu-centric focus of this list for a moment, to say nothing of the list’s subtext of Ubuntu’s mistaken importance in the wider FOSS world.

Problems with the list? OK, how about these:

1.) Ubuntu-based distros are fine, but they are not the only ones, to say nothing of a wide range of excellent distros which have far and away contributed more than Ubuntu to the wider FOSS paradigm, so why are they relegated to second-class status in a catch-all category called, laughably, “Popular non-Ubuntu and non-Debian Distros.” Seriously? How about a listing for Red Hat-based distros and/or a listing of Slackware-based distro?

2.) Think that having a list of both Red Hat-based and Slackware-based distros would be hard to complie? Nope. Take a look at this: http://futurist.se/gldt/wp-content/uploads/12.10/gldt1210.png – had the poster of the original list consulted this graphic, the list would be clearly more comprehensive. Also, simple search on Distrowatch would give you a list of distros and their bases.

3. To relegate Slackware — the oldest continuous distro — to the dustbin of “An extensive mixture of less popular, newly-created, and niche/special-purpose Distros” is remarkably ludicrous. Again, Slackware has a wide range of distros that are based on it, like Salix, Slax, Zenwalk to name only three in the Distrowatch top 100. Same with Scientific Linux, which is one of the most important distros in the FOSS galaxy, working on high-powered computers like those at CERN.

4.) You state at the top that “Note – BerkeleyLUG blog posts are written by BerkeleyLUG members of various backgrounds, levels of experience etc… The views and opinions in each blog post do not represent the views of the group as a whole or the founders.” That’s fine, but seriously: Shouldn’t Berkeley LUG at least vet some of the material its members post for accuracy and/or objectivity to the wider FOSS paradigm rather than, say, aimed at promoting a particular distro?

TY for your individual comments&opinions on my distro “popularity family” categories above.

For those of you who’ve happened to notice strike-thru’s on the above DistroWatch.com links over the last few days, apparently this DW site outage came about by “a problem with the domain registrar (which is a separate company from our hosting provider) which caused the domain to lapse.”
See http://www.zdnet.com/linuxs-distrowatch-site-stumbles-7000031266/ for the current writeup of this incident.

I feel that thanking people for valid criticism without responding is worse than not responding at all. It seems the strike through problems were temporary.