lproven | [Geek] More Linux weirdness

quercus asked me what I was on about before.

I tried to answer. It turned into this.

Last week, there were two credible commercial Linuxes.

Firstly, Red Hat, which had the best-regarded, most widely-used, free/cheap distro, which people used for nothing then bought for the updates and occasionally upgraded to big support contracts. It was a bit Spartan, a bit retro in places, a bit clunky in others, a bit bizarre in some - for example, it favoured this weird one-off GUI that no-one else took seriously, which was written in C 'cos its programmers don't grok this modern object-oriented C++ stuff, oh, and some of them took a dislike to some random Norwegian company's license agreement once, years ago.

Secondly, UnitedLinux, which means SuSE, which means a big sprawling mess of a distro, but with bloody good admin tools, excellent functionality and driver support and so on. A monster, a Gormenghast of a distro with far-off forgotten bits crumbling silently into abyssal river valleys with no-one to see, but capable and powerful and with good support around the world. SuSE flog it in Europe, ~~Caldera~~ SCO do used to in the USA, Connectiva do in South America, TurboLinux do in East Asia.

Oh, and in 3rd place, and who notices 3rd place, there was Mandrake, a fork of RedHat with KDE. Except later Red Hat got KDE anyway, and after only a few years and about 3 major releases, they started actually taking it fairly seriously. So Mandrake focussed their efforts on getting all modern and desktop-friendly without going too consumer-simple, and the result was a bloody good desktop distro which pissed all over Red Hat in that arena. Has sod-all presence on servers though.

Nothing else matters commercially. There are about half a dozen Windows desktop replacements – Xandros, Lindows, Lycoris, two, yes, two SuSE variants, and so on, but they’re minor. For now.

In the “money? We sneer at money!” department:

There's Debian: clunky as hell, "admin tools, we don' need no steenkin' admin tools, edit the config file you luser", “installation programs should be HARD, for MEN, because only MEN use Linux”. But, oh yes, didn’t we mention, we've got the only Unix software installation system that isn't broken. Worship us, for we are ’leet.

And Slackware. Which wasn't designed by a half-insane Swede with an obsession for minimalism, but should have been. Installer, schminstaller. Hardware detection? Open the lid, man! System V init? When I were young, we made do with one script, just one, and we were happy, we were proud. Package manager? Tarballs were good enough for my granddad, they’re good enough for you.

If you sneer at Debian users for being proles, keep a Dremel under your pillow, have more lights in your case than your home and know your CPU’s running temperature better than your body’s, you run Gentoo. You compile the whole damn thing from source every time, ’cos that way it’s optimised for your |_337 boxen, dude. Package manager? Who cares, I’m gonna recompile it anyway. Gimme a source manager.

In summary.

You want to pay a company? If you’re American, buy Red Hat. If not, you get SuSE. Otherwise, pay a strange man with a weight problem and bad hair and he’ll make it work for you. Ghod help you if he ever leaves, though.

Today, it all changed.

Red Hat killed its freebie distro and put it to “care in the community”. And we all know how well that works, don’t we? The community already has Debian and Slackware and lots of other free toys to play with and may not want this one. It certainly doesn’t want to pay $800-$2,500 for what it got for nothing a couple of years ago.

In the green, er, I mean, the OTHER red corner, a big dying American company with a history of acquiring cool technology and pissing it against the wall, again and again and again, from Unix itself to WordPerfect through half a dozen development architectures, has bought a small cool German company which does things very much its own way.

I talked to Novell last week. It’s idea of leveraging Linux is to port the service layers of Netware onto “the Linux kernel”, as big complex closed-source chunks that only run on Red Hat or SuSE (and today on live webcast the CEO admitted they’re going to de-emphasize Red Hat. Well duh). They’re going to do file/print, security, directory, XML, stuff like that. Completely ignoring any existing Linux toolsets and writing whole new ones to replace them, and they’re going to be Novell closed source stuff to boot.

Oh, and SuSE is KDE-based through and through. Novell just bought the biggest external GNOME developer outside of Red Hat itself.

Commercial Linux now means Red Hat, for $LOTS, or Novell, who may not quite know what they’ve got. But will probably charge $LOTS for it as well.

SuSE will probably go GNOME and turn into something very like Red Hat.

Mandrake may have just been saved by the ref.

And the users/creators of Debian and Slackware and Gentoo will barely notice, which is a pity, as it’s the best news that’s happened to them this century.

I think. Probably. Maybe.

Interesting, though.