Talk:Comparison of Linux distributions/Archive 3

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Archive 5

In-Progress Language Tables

The main article shouldn't have any completely blank rows. That looks bad, so that's fill it out here first. Superm401 - Talk 01:10, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Just a comment: this table ignores Africa, India, and the Middle East --- maybe include one language for each? Or maybe the table should be populated based on the number of speakers of a language worldwide... Chris Pickett 01:42, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

oh...of course we should base it on population, how stupid of me. Mike92591 20:23, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I can't tell if that's sarcasm; if it was, can you explain a little? Chris Pickett 22:11, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I wasn't being sarcastic. I really do fell like a retard. Any way, good idea. Mike92591 00:00, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Ok cool. My previous edits in the page histroy were just redoing the work here: List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers and here: Ethnologue_list_of_most_spoken_languages. Chris Pickett 01:54, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Looks good! Chris Pickett 21:31, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

I was curious about the absence of support for Hindi and found out about IndLinux; it supports a few others as well. Chris Pickett 21:01, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Column headings: grsecurity - includes PaX and RSBAC?

I moved these 3 header comments from the Security features section here to the talk page. Let's comment on them before changing the article header.

	grsecurity (grsecurity page says grsecurity includes PaX and RSBAC. Yet those are in separate columns here. Something seems to be wrong somewhere.)	PaX (part of grsecurity?)	RSBAC (part of grsecurity?)

--Unixguy 11:17, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Unsourced articles on linux distributions

I have been engaged in a discussion concerning the deletion of the OpenPsion article at this link here. I post this request for comment to this page because it seems to me a larger issue concerning poorly sourced articles on linux distributions has come up. Going strictly by notability criteria, most/many of these articles are unsourced or poorly sourced, hence are, or can be, slated for deletion. The poor sourcing of linux distributions seems to me something of the nature of the beast - uncommercial, informal development leads to lack of proper sourcing material for Wikipedia articles. Perhaps some of you all may wade into how to resolve the issue; I suspect a policy change to notability criteria may be required. At the OpenPsion deletion discussion page I've suggested merging the several stub articles concerning linux on PDAs into a larger, more unified article (which would still be mostly unsourced, alas). Again comments welcome; thanks for listening... Bdushaw 21:39, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

See [Chealer contributions] Many of the short articles on linux distributions are being nominated for deletion. We should perhaps have a comprehensive discussion about that. Bdushaw 23:31, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

Architecture support section biased?

It looks like it was designed specifically to make anything that's not Gentoo look bad. Paulgear 11:37, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Dude. It's a table. It lists all the hardware architectures linux runs on. How is that biased? Dirtyepic 16:06, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

Maybe other distros should stop being lazy and port to more hardware. SpanKY 16:14, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

Hey, Paul, if you're aware of some error in the table, why not just correct it? And if you don't know of any error, maybe you should take your thought processes in for a checkup. -- 71.102.194.130 09:05, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

FSF relevance?

On the grid-cells entitled FSF-Free.

Linux distributions have nothing at all to do with the FSF. The FSF is notoriously political; and, I believe this is an attempt at demonizing distributions as "non-free," and should therefore be stricken from the article. The FSF has no position in sanctioning other distributions, not just because a distribution can be created without their guidance or influence, but because they have alternate motives in their own distribution, some of which they sponsor, BLAG Linux and GNU, gNewSense, Ututo et al.

The FSF has become so minor, that any mention of them and "non-sanctioned" or the like should be eschewed from the articles in the style of the modern Linux community. At the very least, the word "Free" should be removed, even Richard Stallman the president of the FSF asks the term be defined before using it out of context.

I move for either a section about the FSF-Free ideology, and a new stub be created; or, this removed entirely as it lacks significance to the topic. EvanCarroll

It's still a little meaningful but it should be moved. Mike92591 01:22, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

What are you talking about? It's an important characteristic if a distribution contains solely free software. By the way: demonizing the ideology of the FSF is an ideology, too. Eschewing the Free Software Foundation and related persons would be POV pushing. --mms 22:42, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

LFS

Linux From Scratch is maybe not considered a proper distribution because it doesn't come as a disk-bundle or closed download. However, having a growing development community and a version-managed book with links to the package version downloads, it should get an extra entry to the lists or at least an "other distros"' section.

A distribution is still a distribution of software even if there is no disk-bundle or closed download. --mms 22:55, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Some of the misinformation is extraordinary

Like all the distributions which, it is claimed, don't include English. Notably, all of the distros that have explicit lists are marked "yes". So apparently, when editors don't know that something is true, they are claiming that it is false. But leaving it blank, as is done in the filesystem support table, isn't any better. Those cells need to say "to be determined", or the table should be ripped out until a correct one can be inserted. And given that whoever created the table doesn't even know that ext2 and ext3 are the same filesystem, hopes of a correct table are slim. -- 71.102.194.130 09:17, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

"{{?}}" and "{{no}}" are often effectively the same but, if it bothers you then fix it. Mike92591 03:16, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Blue Cat Linux

How on earth can it be distributed under a proprietary license? I thought the GPL protected against this. Maybe I'm just confused. --N Shar 01:17, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

You don't say why you thought such a groundless thing. Have you even read the GPL? It explicitly places no restrictions on the distribution of other programs packaged with the GPLed code. -- 71.102.194.130 08:45, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

The GPL has far more restrictions then that. Anyway, it's probably because the the strongest license in the distro is a proprietary license making the distro proprietary. You allowed to include proprietary in a distro but obviously only to a degree.Mike92591 17:45, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Has anyone here read the GPL? N Shar is partially right, the GPL'd parts of the distro cannot be restricted (as per the other anon contributor.) There are no possible equivications about that. The only parts that can be more severly restricted are the non-gpl bits which are probably the minority of the distro) and of course creates a complete bloody mess. Perhaps you need a different term to be used?

Repeat header of the table

Hi, I find the comparison extremely useful... but hard to read because the header of the long tables is only on top of it. Would be better if it (the header) was repeated after some rows. (sorry my bad english ;-) Jenciso 04:20, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Yellow Dog Linux

The Yellow Dog Linux distribution is aimed at a non-Intel architecture, specifically, the Power Architecture typified by pre-Intel Apple Macintosh computers and others based on the PowerPC CPU.

Should this distro be included on the list? --Eliyahu S ^Talk 12:46, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

It already is included. --Unixguy 20:06, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

I see it in the "Architecture support" section. I guess it was just foolish of me to also expect it to be listed in the General, Legal, Technical, File system support, Features, or Security features tables. But sarcasm aside, I think that distros listed in any of the other tables should also appear in the General table at the top. --Eliyahu S ^Talk 21:17, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Legal section - GPL

Most of the distributions in the Legal section are listed as "GPL", but that's probably just junk. I'm pretty sure they all include stuff that isn't exactly GPL, such as stuff licensed under the BSD or MIT licenses, which exists in the GNU C Library and the X Window System, respectively. --Joy [shallot] 22:29, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

You are quite right. I guess the GNU GPL is mentioned because it is regarded as the strictest license of the provided ones. --mms 22:44, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, it's the "preferred license", whatever that means. I removed it for being unclear/wrong and useless.--Chealer 06:31, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

File system support draft

(table removed)

A table like this is pointless and misleading. Virtually every distro supports virtually every filesystem by including the appropriate modules and tools. The specific table above is beyond ignorant, especially the ridiculous cases of ext3 without ext2 -- anyone who isn't totally clueless about Linux knows that the same code supports both; ext2 is just ext3 with journaling turned off. -- 71.102.194.130 08:57, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Not by default. Also, ext2 is not ext3 with journaling turned off. Mike92591 03:03, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Should there be a default column or should we just use *s? Mike92591 22:45, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

I removed the table. This was completely unsourced, largely incomplete, almost unmaintainable and essentially useless. Important filesystems are supported everywhere. Those that aren't supported everywhere are poorly important. The note about Gentoo was partially wrong but had a point; i.e. the support largely depends on the Linux version, which is mentioned earlier, but it didn't apply only to Gentoo. We don't even include this information in distro articles.--Chealer 20:52, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Ease of use

Is saying "easy to use" in the descriptions really maintaining NPOV? Shouldn't it be something like "designed for ease of use"? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jonnty (talk • contribs) 17:50, 26 January 2007 (UTC).

That is a valid point. I'll change it. Mike92591 18:12, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

I think the same applies for debian "very stable and secure"; if this is not a comment, I'm the pope.

'just added "intended to be" Jean-Philippe 203.144.85.127 16:11, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

I dis agree those are easy to define. Mike92591 22:52, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Cleaning up Default online update tool / Default package manager

"online update tool" and "package manager" are vague. In Debian, dpkg would be the package manager and APT the online update tool, but APT is more than an online update tool. Also, it's hard to argue that Synaptic Package Manager isn't a package manager. Which means we get "APT" as "Default online update tool" and "dpkg, Synaptic" as "Default package manager". This doesn't make much sense, since APT is higher-level than dpkg and lower-level than Synaptic. And we have 2 package managers as "Default package manager". There is the same problem with many other distros. Does someone have a solution idea? Otherwise, I'm tempted to merge both columns into a "Default package management tools". --Chealer 20:29, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Done --Chealer 06:53, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Legal

I'm removing the 2 last columns of the Legal section:

• Effective license is completely unsourced, full of question marks when not empty, often reads "proprietary" or "free", which aren't licenses. For those reading "GNU GPL", it's still unclear what "effective license" means. If someone wants to put it back, this should be fixed first.Chealer 05:35, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

  Don't lie, "free" was only in there 3 times. Proprietary and free are kinds of licenses. Don't pretend to know what other people think. Deleting something just because it's unfinished is counterproductive. Mike92591 20:23, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

  I'm not lying. There were 20 entries with a value in that column, more than half were either "proprietary" or "free", which I do consider "often". I didn't delete it just because it was unfinished, but because I doubt it would ever be finished.--Chealer 14:48, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

  I guess you meant reads as in shows or something. Anyway, can you explain why you think it will never be finished? Mike92591 20:31, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

  Yes. The meaning is far from being clear. People need to understand what should go there to be able to fill it.--Chealer 18:35, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

  Your right, it is kinda unclear. BTW, sorry for the slow response I had some stuff to do.Mike92591 14:22, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

• Short description is mostly empty, completely unsourced and subjective. In some cases, it adds information about the cost, but we should find an alternative rather than adding a column for these rare cases.Chealer 05:35, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

  Short description has potential to be subjective but, it also has the potential to be objective. So if you think somethings wrong then fix it. How about suggesting alternatives instead of just saying we should have them? Mike92591 20:23, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

  It doesn't have the potential to be objective. It's a freeform text; even if it was right, determining what's worth mentioning is subjective. I didn't mean that we should have an alternative, I meant that if we want to address the rare cases where it would be interesting to add information about the cost, we should find an alternative way of doing it than adding a column.--Chealer 14:48, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

  That's not true, you can objectively determine what's worth mentioning besides, that would apply to all of Wikipedia. "we should find an alternative" and "we should have an alternative" are equivalent in this case. You're not giving me an alternative. Mike92591 20:31, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

  Not all of comparisons on Wikipedia pretend to be based on objective criteria. You're right; the part you're missing is "if we want to address the rare cases where it would be interesting to add information about the cost".--Chealer 18:35, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

  I'm not really sure how a comparison can pretend...Mike92591 14:22, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

"Based Distribution"

What does that mean? If it means "based on", that's what it should say. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.229.45.200 (talk) 05:00, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Tables broken in Safari

In Safari on Mac Ox X (I haven't tried other browsers) clicking on the icons in the column headers just reorders items based on the first (alphebetical) list of names of the distros. The expected behavior is to order the entries based on the column type. And some of the tables are even buggier -- clicking on the icons just duplicates the headers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.229.45.200 (talk) 05:29, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

This is a known bug in the sortable table code. It only affects MacOS (and not Safari on Windows, for example), and is being worked on. The best place to ask about problems like this is in the Village Pump (Technical). Technobadger 09:14, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Seems also, the sortation is wrong. Sorting after Kernel, 2.4.21 was in the middle and not at the beginning....

External links

Some time ago I added a link to an external website that compares different Linux (and BSD) distros in more detail (http://polishlinux.org/choose/comparison). It has been removed, I guess. Do you think it is a bad resource (I think the opposite) or just not proper for an external link on this page (for some reason)? They now have a wiki where everyone can edit the distros as well (http://wiki.polishlinux.org/).

I didn't think that it was bad. I'll just put it back.Mike92591 22:29, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

I removed this link:

• Comparison of Linux Distibutions - A detailed comparison complete with statistics on market share.

-- it seemed to me as a commercial of a hosting company (even though the linked article is a white paper), correct me if you think this should stay. 89.171.3.90 14:26, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

I think there are still some mewssing-arounds with the external links. ReviewLinux has been added (no idea what for, site like many others) and the esecuredata.com paper has been re-added. Polishlinux's distribution comparison (previously approved) has been removed though. I'll revert the changes -- hope it's allright with everyone. 160.83.32.14 (talk) 10:41, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Table merge

I merged the two tables in Comparison of Linux distributions, since nearly all the entries in column 2 of the Comparison of Linux distributions#Legal table were marked as "free", which sometimes appears to mean zero-cost in that table, and other times appears to mean free software. Most entries in column "Additional information" are empty. It makes the page a lot larger to have a whole extra table. Here's what the result looked like, before it was reverted. Would editors agree that it makes sense to merge that table into one of the existing ones, rather than retain two separate free-standing columns which vary very little by row? Thanks, Technobadger (talk) 20:54, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Cost of Xandros

I'm removing information about the minimal cost of Xandros. The website has references to a Open Circulation edition, for example in the Comparison Matrix. However there is no download link for that, so I don't know if it exists.--Chealer (talk) 05:12, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Language support section removed

I've removed the Language support section last present in [1]. Putting a "Yes" on partially supported languages is misleading, and having no indication of how partial the support is makes the table virtually useless. It would be possible to reintroduce this section with a scaled evaluation of how each language is supported, but I can't imagine someone finding a practical and objective way to do that.--Chealer 05:54, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

That's rather unfortunate as I made extensive use of that table back when it was part of the article, and now I needed it again. I guess I'll just rely on the information in the previous revision of the article. 71.244.41.63 (talk) 08:26, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Number of packages: source or binary?

Should "Number of packages" column in "Features" table contain binary or source packages? This is important: there are ~7500 source packages in ALT Linux and ~13600 binary packages, and numbers are similar for other distributions. At least for Debian binary packages are mentioned in table, and at least for ALT Linux source packages are counted. --MikhailGusarov (talk) 19:57, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Freely

Freely available implies free as in freedom, which isn't true for all of these distributions (as a whole). Can I change these to gratis, or just free? Superm401 - Talk 09:33, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

These have been changed to just 'free'.Superm401 - Talk 01:07, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Re: section "Cost" - This is just confusing. The section is titled 'cost' (which most often refers to money) and launches into talking about which distros are 'free'. But at the end of the section it says "'free' refers to software freedom". This seems to be a contradiction and is confusing. If the section is talking about freedom, then the title should be "Freedom" or some such, and the para about software freedom should be placed at the top of the section as a note. If the section is about monentary cost, the para about software freedom should be removed or clearly seperated as a relevant aside. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.252.169.51 (talk) 12:36, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm going to replace "free" with "without cost" in this section; using "free" to mean "doesn't cost anything" up until the last paragraph, and then noting that "free" usually means something else, is misleading. Not wrong, per se, but the alternative is moving the "normal definition of free" para to the beginning and then noting "However, below 'free' has its conventional, 'without cost' meaning," which seems like overkill. Rwald (talk) 05:08, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Cost section

The "Cost" section info should be folded into a new column on the main table. Suggest a heading like "Is free" (y/n) rather than listing dollar/euro amounts. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.219.235.164 (talk) 13:53, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Bootup-Scripts

I think that, especially for server-admins, it might be interesting, if a certain distribution uses BSD- or System V-style bootup scripts. Maybe that might be added somewhere (e.g. the technical info table). Since I only know that LFS lets the admin choose, Ubuntu and Gentoo use System V and Slackware uses BSD-style bootup, I don't know enough to start a column. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.78.166.35 (talk) 07:57, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Shipping free CD

Ubuntu, through their commercial associate Canonical ships CDs at no cost. Do other distros provide the same service? __meco (talk) 20:46, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Not as far as I know -- Jorge Peixoto (talk) 23:36, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Size?

Just calling the new feature column "size" is extremely ambiguous...Size of what? Small/large/default/vulcan Installation? (Un)compressed ISO? Also, I really don't see size (in any form) being much of a defining feature except for Damn Small Linux since size is their main characteristic; however it is not in most other distributions. -- Striker 06:24, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I figured that packages column is use to show the size so I thought I should change it to size but express it in bytes rather then number of packages. I couldn't find very many sizes so I just added a column and put what I found.Mike92591 22:49, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

That still makes no sense. What size are you talking about? Are you talking about the package (tar, tgz, tbz, rpm?) or the installed size? Are you talking about total size of the media? What if the media is compressed? You haven't clarified at all what you're comparing, so that pretty much makes the column useless or at the very least most, completely out of place. -- Striker 19:50, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

I meant the total size of the media both compressed and uncompressed (I originally thought it should be the total size of the OS after a default installation but figured that may not be useful). If you think it's that bad just remove it I just thought it was a clearer way of showing the size.Mike92591 20:53, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

That's the dumbest thing I've ever read on Wikipedia. The number of packages available from a distro has absolutely nothing to do with the size of anything. Not only did you remove a column of useful information and insert a column of unrelated relatively useless information, but you didn't even have that information available. Please don't go around removing things you don't understand. If your explanation for why you've done something starts with "I figured", odds are you shouldn't be doing it. -- 71.102.194.130 04:57, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

What happened here? I think (installed) size can be an important factor, as Linux is often used to support older hardware, and that may include systems with smaller hard drives. It's also frequently used in dual-boot configurations and some people may want to economize the Linux footprint if they don't use it as a primary OS. On one hand you have Damn Small Linux which is 50mb and then you have Ubuntu which recommends an 8GB install. I'm sure there's a healthy range of sizes in between that would be useful to know. Indeed, I think a general hardware requirements table would be helpful. I'll start one with the major distros and see how it goes from there. Ham Pastrami (talk) 18:36, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

GUI installation procedure NPOV

The section "GUI installation procedure" uses green for GUI and red for no GUI (presumably text or command based). In some cultures at least green implies "good" and red implies "bad" or danger. Or green can be used to indicate "included" and red for "missing" -- again the assumption that a GUI is better.

Although less experienced users often prefer GUIs, there are strong technical advantages to character mode interfaces. Thus it becomes a choice of expertise and personal preference, not better or worse. Suggestion: instead of saying GUI Yes/No, say install mode GUI, text, or user has a choice. Then use NPOV colors (for example, light blue vs. purple) or no colors at all. 129.219.55.204 20:41, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

I think this is an issue with the template not the article. Regardless, There's no such thing as NPOV colors. All colors and color combinations imply a relative thought. Mack the Turtle 01:45, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

The guy who started this section wrote: "Or green can be used to indicate "included" and red for "missing"." (end of quotation) Exactly, you said it. That's what the article does, pretty appropriately mind you. Either your (linux) computer has GUI included, or it hasn't, which means it is missing a graphical interface. But if your computer has GUI, that does not mean it lacks command-line. It's not as if the two were mutually exclusive. Besides, that a computer has GUI does not make it any less text-command based than if it was lacking it. Heck, most often it is a shell script located in /etc/init.d/ that starts the graphical manager.

Just to show how to use green/red as included/missing might not be as withdrawn from NPOV as was claimed. As someone who prefers to work on command-line (when appropriate), I also prefer to do so in a pseudo-terminal wrapped in a graphical environment. Though I must say, I am pretty admirative, it probably takes a lot of technical expertise to read wikipedia pages with Lynx in a tty. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.55.159.163 (talk) 20:10, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Outdated information

Go to the Technical section and sort by gcc version. You will see many distros listed as having pre-historic gcc versions; checking on distrowatch indicates that these distros are far more up-to-date than this article suggests. -- Jorge Peixoto (talk) 22:31, 15 October 2008 (UTC)