[NTLUG:Discuss] DistroWatch 10 Most Popular Linux Distros

[Ted Gould]

On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 13:41 -0500, Chris Cox wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 12:47 -0500, Ted Gould wrote:
> > On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 11:52 -0500, Chris Cox wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 11:40 -0500, Gilbert Morrow wrote:
> > > > Have been a Distrowatch fan for a long time , in fact several years .AS I
> > > > have said over and over , Ubuntu is over rated , of course coming from a
> > > > Corel Linux user and then Red Hat .
> > > 
> > > Ubuntu has a "rabid" community though.  I will say that they're often
> > > "wrong" about certain things from technical point of view... but they
> > > are there and their web site is awesome.
> > 
> > To be curious, what's wrong from a technical point of view?
> 
> It could be a Debian thing... but, for example, the Synaptic
> package manager (and I here apt-get does this as well) downloads,
> installs and STARTS services (yes... STARTS them without
> me making config changes before they are stated).  Oh... I'm
> sure it's probably configurable somewhere, but that SHOULD
> not be the default for packages.

Yes, that would be a Debian packaging thing.  I guess I'm a little
confused at your point here.  You want to install packages but not have
them run?  It would seem that the same case would happen on any
distribution that allowed for packages to install and be set to run on
startup.  There is no guarantee that you're happy with the settings when
you reboot.

> All in all, they're trying to duplicate the "friendliness"
> of Windows.  And that's just SOOOO wrong.  People who think
> Linux distros are "hard"... just don't understand the
> complexity of being on a shared network.... Windows makes
> 1001 assumptions... and has a myriad of security issues.
> We don't need to emulate them.

Could you give some examples of Ubuntu security flaws that are created
through this "duplication of Windows"?  I'm not aware of any.  In fact,
I can largely only think of security enhancements.  The hiding of the
root user.  Apparmor by default.  No external services enabled by
default.

Sure, shared networks are complex, but there's no reason to pass that
complexity on to users.  That's an issue for developers and engineers.

		--Ted