Linux distros
July 22, 2008 – 10:35 pmI found a cool schema that I hadn’t seen before on reddit today: the linux distro timeline.
We notice three main roots Debian the community distro, Slackware the one man distro and Red Hat the company developed distro. I guess everyone know them, nothing to see move along.
What’s interesting ? The other roots that are still alive.
- Smoothwall: a firewall
- Engarde: company developed internet services oriented
- Yoper: supposedly the “fastest out-of-the-box distribution”
- Pardus: now an interesting one, a distro which rewrote many tools in python including a package manager and an init system. It is easy to use and KDE based. Also it’s developped in Turkey. Great distro.
- Puppy: a livecd that is so small that the entire operating system and all its applications can be loaded in 256 MB of RAM
- DeLi: a desktop distribution for old PCs
- Sorcerer: a source based distribution like Gentoo
- Gentoo: THE source based distribution, used for its great source based package manage (portage)
- CRUX: a lightweight, i686-optimized distro targeted at experienced users, gave birth to Arch
- Rock Linux: a flexible Linux distribution Build Kit
- Linux from scratch: not really a distro, it’s a book about how to build your own linux distro
- GoboLinux: let’s reorganize the filesystem and place all programs in one folder and keep things simple and logical, nice ideas, lack packages
- dine:bolix: no idea and I’m getting tired of this
- Ark: easy to use desktop distro
What about me ? Well I’m still on the ubuntu that was installed on my dell laptop. I’m planning to install arch linux (in fact I already did it in a virtual machine) which has a really great package manager which makes it really easy to make your own packages. Also I like its minimalistic approach and the idea of not patching the upstream more than necessary, and debian and therefor ubuntu love patches. But dell puts all in one partition, so I can’t install a new distro without backuping all my data and formating my hard disk. So for the time being I’m staying on my nice and working ubuntu.