On Wed, 15 Apr 2020 at 10:30, Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming <ceo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2020-04-15 20:20, Frederic Muller wrote:
> On 4/15/20 7:09 PM, Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming wrote:
>>
>> Where can I find a good and reliable ranking of all the Linux distros
>> in the world then?
>>
>> What are the top 5?
> There is no such thing. It really depends on what you want to do, what
> you are familiar with, the support you expect and so on.
>
> And even with the same requirements different people will use different
> distro.
Different distros exist because someone didn't find what they wanted in
existing distros. The downside of this is that different distros provide
different packages, so you may want some software that hasn't been
packaged, or the only package is for a very old version.
There is the Linux Standard Base (LSB), a cooperative effort by several distributions
coordinated by the Linux Foundation, that attempted to provide binary
compatibility across distributions.
There are a number of open source applications that are sufficiently
complex that building them takes a significant effort (examples include
TeX Live, R, and NASA's ocean remote sensing package). This
worked well for a while, but has broken down. A couple problem areas
are internationalization, Oracle's change in the licensing for Java, the
advent of Wayland, and dealing with multiple versions of libraries to
support systems using large numbers of CPU cores and GPU's for
processing. The NASA package provides it's own versions of many
libraries because distro's build the same library version using different
options (multiprocessing, compression, array indexing with 32-bit or
64-bit ints, etc).
Initially, LSB was based on RPM packaging with some constraints to
support automated conversion to .deb packages. I found this really
helpful for a year or two before it broke.
> Best is probably to test-drive then for a while and see what works best
> for you.
>
> Fred
There are simply far too many choices for Linux distros.
I find it helpful to look at the support forums and wiki's. Arch Linux
often has the best documentation. Ubuntu forums have been
dominated by questions from new users and people who recommend
"sudo ..." whenever "..." doesn't do what the user wanted, but there
are significant projects that are developed on Ubuntu and ported to
other distros. Debian avoids many of the "overly popular" issues
with Ubuntu, and most Ubuntu packages come from Debian anyway.
George N. White III
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