Review of the 10 most popular distros

[Darrin Chandler]

Mike Garfias wrote:

>Too bad Theo is a putz.  Seriously, I'd use obsd more if it wasn't for the
>attitude.  Yes, I know I'm writing this across and SSH session made possible
>by them.  I have also given them cash in the past.
>
>But, the guy is such a jerk that I can't support them any more.
>
>And I stuck with Debian through Bruce Peren's reign.
>  
>

You're not the only one to feel that way. ;)

Personally, I don't think Theo is that bad. He's uncompromising and 
speaks his mind. I've seen him flame newbies, but I've also seen him 
flame developers in defense of newbies. I've also seen him give gentle 
encouragement. If you've done your homework and post something sensible 
then you won't have much trouble. That said, it's still not as friendly 
a community as Linux people are used to.

And yes, I've been flamed. I got over it and learned to do my homework. 
Why? Because the system documentation is darned good. Just a couple of 
evenings ago I installed openbsd on a Sun Netra with no CD, no floppy, 
no display adapter (it's a 1U server). I've never done net booting 
before, and the sparc64 architecture is new to me. I had to learn about 
net booting and sparc64, and relearn NFS, configure and start 3 new 
services, and more stuff I'm forgetting now. I did all this in one 
evening by reading man pages and searching the mailing list archives, 
and didn't need to ask a single question on the mailing lists.

Does that mean I'm ubergeek? No, it means countless hours have been put 
into documentation, and many more hours going over things on the mailing 
lists. Having read what's been written I didn't need to ask. If I hadn't 
done my homework and posted to the list the first time I got stuck I 
would have been flamed.

It was pretty much the same scene on #perl in the old days. Many of the 
core perlers hung out there, and they'd written tons of nice docs that 
came with every perl install. If you posted a question covered in the 
FAQs you got a pretty nasty RTFM and sometimes got the boot as well. But 
if you had already RTFM and asked a thoughtful question you could get 
pretty in-depth help from some of the best perl guys anywhere.

It's a price I'm willing to pay.

-- 
Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD Users Group
dwchandler at stilyagin.com   |  http://bsd.phoenix.az.us/
http://www.stilyagin.com/  |