On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 08:25:39PM -0400, Ryan Pugatch wrote:
> I am curious which distro everyone prefers to use on their
> workstations (desktops and laptops).

At work I use Ubuntu, but I'm not very happy about it.  I prefer
Fedora, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I prefer
something that's not derived from Debian.  This isn't really meant to
be a "hate on Debian" rant -- Debian is mostly fine, but they often
decide to be different from the entire rest of the Unix world,
creating some odd corner of policy based on some dogma that has no
basis in reality, that invariably screws me over royally every time I
try to use it.

My favorite example of this was when they made the 'which' command a
bash script invoked as /bin/bash.  This was particularly amusing,
because I had what turned out to be a fairly deadly combination in my
login files, which I've been toting around from job to job and Unix
system to Unix system for about 16 years now:  My .profile set $ENV to
my .bashrc file, and my .bashrc file used the which command to
determine where, if at all, certain binaries existed.  The end result
was equivalent to a fork bomb that took down the server I was logging
into (because my .bashrc invoked 'which', which being a /bin/bash
script sourced my $ENV file i.e. my .bashrc file...  Yay.

The latest example of this is that they insist that gzip data is not a
MIME type, but instead it is an "encoding" (whatever that means -- the
MIME standards have no such compatible concept).  As a result they
refuse to include MIME types for gzip (and several other compressed
archive file types), which sometimes almost randomly causes programs
to mishandle gzip files, sometimes attemtping to display them as text,
sometimes unzipping them before letting me choose what to do with
them... etc.  This of course is easily fixable... unless of course you
maintain thousands of machines (or even a handful) which for one
reason or another get installed very frequently.  Then it becomes
somewhat of a headache.

Lots of people love Ubuntu, and even I see that it does a lot of nice
things... it just happens that debian-based idiosyncracies invariably
clash with my own idiosyncracies, with a frequency and magnitude that
has forged a lasting prejudice.

> I've been a Fedora user for a while.. in fact, I tend to set up a
> pretty minimal Fedora install with Fluxbox on my workstations.

In my former life as a system administrator, I have always found that
Red-Hat-based systems have a management philosophy that more closely
resembles a commercial Unix, and they tend to muck with stuff less to
suit their own ideas about what's Good and Right -- at least in my
experience.  For my money, that makes it better.

Now, if we could just get those Gnome guys to stop trying to make
Gnome be Windows...  =8^)

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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