A Brief Historical Background (Or, Why Linux?)

My father is a computer engineer, so I grew up around several different predominately PC-based computers and have witnessed every stage in the development of Windows. We had a few different Macs sitting around the house as well, which were neat because they were different and easy to use, but all the cool games could only be played on the PCs. I have a vague memory of seeing a weird computer in my father’s office that started up with “OK” written in green on every line, but couldn’t make it work at the time ;-)

I was listening to the most recent Distrowatch OGGcast http://distrowatch.com/podcast/dww20070910.mp3
and the host brought up an interesting question, why does Ubuntu win all of the polls? Well here are my reasons why the next top competitors aren't on top.

Suse (SLED and OpenSUSE): No one trusts Novell. People tend to switch to Linux to get away from Microsoft, so why use a partner's distro?!?

Mandriva: I think Mandrivia is just crap, they focus way too much on the "club" (the tossers that actually pay for it) and don't focus enough on community building.

Debian: scary server OS

Following the recent launch of Fedora 7, I spoke to Max Spevack, Fedora Project Leader, about how Fedora and Red Hat work together, and what lies ahead.

Glyn Moody: What's the nature of the relationship between Fedora and Red Hat?

I’ve come to the realisation that yum and up2date completely and utter suck. Why is it yum has spent the last 20mins downloading rpm headers from the dag repository? Why is it up2date can’t search properly? why does yum return search results in an unreadable way? why do both of them, at the mere hint of something going wrong, spurt out a big python backtrace that is very little use to very many people. Why are these tools SO BAD? How difficult IS THE PROBLEM? Debian have got it right with apt. Headers are downloaded in 30 seconds, search supports regular expressions! There is even an RPM ENABLED version of apt. Why wasn’t this used in Fedora? Why up2date with it’s crappy secretive SSL and XML and SOAP and crapness.