While browsing various useless articles on Digg.com I happen to stumble on a interesting, opinionated article by software developer and podcaster, Bryan Lunduke and his opinion on the perfect Linux distribution.
What impressed me the most about this article is that Bryan’s “I dont give a fuck” attiude to is feature and package selections in constructing his “perfect” distribution.
For example, in the section regarding software development environment he has the following to say:
So what’s the most accessible and feature rich IDE available currently for Gnome applications? And which one gives developers direct access to the widest array of frameworks from which to build great applications?
MonoDevelop.
I know. I know. “Mono is bad cuz of teh Microsoft.” If you genuinely believe that then you are not likely an actual (professional) software developer and should probably spend your time worrying about something else.
MonoDevelop is a great tool. There. It’s decided.
The general theme of the article is combining software that has been known (as well as what seems to be author bias) into a solid OS regardless of whether it will start up a turf war, in the case of the development software which is built around using Microsoft-based development code in comparison to more Linux-friendly development languages.
Bryan also suggests using Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR which is closed-source software and is a taboo in the open-source community. But for me, the sparks a stroke of respect for the writer as he has the user in mind rather than try and force open-source software that is a “good alternative” but we all know still just doesn’t reach par.
When it comes to the simple things like a web browser or office suite it seems straight forward to Bryan:
Web Browser
Firefox. It’s there. People know it.
Office Suite
This is also a tough one. The new KOffice is really nice. But OpenOffice works, and works well. So that’s what we’ll use.
It’s not surprising though that the OS based on the still popular Ubuntu instead of more base distros like slackware, fedora, or even debian (although debian was originally considered).
Although I like this article and do have my own opinions on the “best” Linux distribution, it is laughable about how defensive the rest of the Linux community gets regarding what makes the best OS. This is more or less a “hey, just so you know, this is what I think”, but does introduce so up-coming software packages and invokes conversation.
Visit the full article here.
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