Re: Diversity - good or bad ?

On 1/11/25 2:02 AM, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:48:20 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
 

    However there's still most of the olde-tyme core distros.
    The RHEL branch, Debian, Arch, Slack. Those seem to be holding up.
    FreeBSD and OpenBSD also and don't forget GenToo.

 And SUSE...  I don't remember if any other distros did the same but I have
a box set which included the installation media and a set of printed
manuals. I can't remember if it was Best Buy. They were preceded by a
company that folded. Anyway you could buy the set like any other
software.
 It was the last gasp of the traditional software purchase with printed
documentation prior to 'download the iso, burn it to a DVD, and good
luck.'

   I bought original SUSE off the shelf also - green
   box. I'd messed around with RH and SlackWare before
   but they were really crude. SUSE was just NICE.
   There was also a low-cost version of Oracle that'd
   run with it on the same shelf.
   Alas original SUSE went all commercial - appears
   under different names too.
   OpenSUSE captured the goodness of the original
   very well. Used it for desktops, used it for
   servers. Of late it's kinda become messed up,
   they dropped a lot of older utilities - some
   of which I'd writ software around and/or parsed
   their output. That's when I got mad at 'em and
   went straight Deb. Then Deb got funky, WAY too
   much like Ubuntu. IMHO Ubuntu should have shifted
   more back towards Deb.
   So, for now, Manjaro and some Fedora. No one has yet
   made a clean Just Works port of Fedora for the
   Pi-5 alas ... something's WEIRD about that unit.
   They should drop it and make a "Pi4-Ultra" instead
   with a peppier version of that chip.
   Tried to make a VM of DragonFly the other day.
   Wouldn't boot properly, dunno why yet. The
   'live' version would start OK in VBox and
   allegedly install, but you couldn't boot the
   resultant installation - it remained fixated
   on the live ISO being there. I've used it
   a little in the past and it ain't bad at all
   so I'll try again. My FreeBSD VM works Ok.
   Oh ... never found good advice on this ... is
   it possible to somehow clone a VBox installation
   and jam it in as a HDD install ? VMs are good
   for experimentation - but once you get the
   experiment RIGHT you don't wanna throw it away.
   Anyway, 'diversity' ... good to a POINT, so long
   as it doesn't overly-fracture developer teams.