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bmartin
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Joined: 11 Apr 2007
Posts: 36
Location: Jersey City, NJ, USA - soon to be San Antonio, TX, USA
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 Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 8:08 pm Post subject: Linux Distro Timeline |
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I found this diagram while screwing around on digg.com at work, which is how I usually spend 80% of my day (18% of it is spent on lunch, posting on forums, and writing email).
I think it's pretty cool (rather than shameful) that Gentoo has branched off significantly fewer times than other distro like Red Hat, Debian, and Slackware. That tells me the maintainers have been doing a good job in creating a distro that hasn't needed too many major refinements.
I've had nothing but success (albeit with a fair amount of effort) in getting my first Gentoo machine up-and-running and I'm enjoying a bit of ricing. I do plan to compile with saner CFLAGS, although I haven't broken anything yet... not a single crash has occurred, but it has only been a week.
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Sadako
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Joined: 05 Aug 2004
Posts: 3792
Location: sleeping in the bathtub
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| Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 8:27 pm Post subject: Re: Linux Distro Timeline |
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Nice find.
| bmartin wrote: | | I think it's pretty cool (rather than shameful) that Gentoo has branched off significantly fewer times than other distro like Red Hat, Debian, and Slackware. That tells me the maintainers have been doing a good job in creating a distro that hasn't needed too many major refinements. |
As much as I love this distro, and I have nothing but gratitude and admiration for all those who work/have worked on it,
it is quite a high maintenance distro, and still something of a niche distro too, and I think that has much to do with it not spawning as many forks as some others.
That, and the fact that any "fork" which still uses emerge and the official portage tree basically is gentoo after an `emerge -e world`.
| bmartin wrote: | | I found this diagram while screwing around on digg.com at work, which is how I usually spend 80% of my day (18% of it is spent on lunch, posting on forums, and writing email). |
I want your job.
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bmartin
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Joined: 11 Apr 2007
Posts: 36
Location: Jersey City, NJ, USA - soon to be San Antonio, TX, USA
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| Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 8:48 pm Post subject: Re: Linux Distro Timeline |
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| Hopeless wrote: | | Nice find. |
Digg is full of 'em. I troll there a bit. That's where I find most of the Gentoo bashers... plus all of my friends who use Linux. They tend to prefer Debian, SUSE, Fedora, etc. They stay away from Ubuntu because "it's for novices."
| Hopeless wrote: | | it is quite a high maintenance distro, and still something of a niche distro too, and I think that has much to do with it not spawning as many forks as some others. |
It's definitely a nice thing, although I haven't had too many things to maintain, I guess. I've gained a lot of performance, although I think it has more to do with USE flags, turning off automatic hardware detection, recompiling my kernel a couple times to get it just right, etc., than it does with my crazy ricing attempts. I don't unroll my loops or anything like that, but I do play with the pointer arithmetic, use -O3, and other nonsense like that. Firefox, Gaim, Open Office, and Wine are my most-used apps; they're very responsive w/ Gentoo/Fluxbox, and my boot time is half of what it was w/ Ubuntu.
| Hopeless wrote: | | I want your job. |
Maybe, maybe not. It's really boring. My job responsibilities are as follows:
- Administering a version control system (Starbase)
- Answering questions from application developers via telephone (mostly J2EE/Websphere)
- Checking out files from said system and using FTP to transfer them between Windows XP and Solaris systems
- Following a set of procedure and policies that dictate how software should be moved between development, quality assurance, model, and production environments
- Sending email to application teams to let them know that their code has been built and deployed onto development and/or production servers
I'm a former developer; I worked in J2SE for 4 years as a part-time job (20 hrs/wk) and J2EE as a full-time job for 5 mos. Unfortunately for me, I'm a very quick programmer and I work for a consulting company that's paid on an hourly basis. It doesn't matter how quickly I work; the pay is the same. There is no room for hard work; in fact, that's why I do this mindless job. It's punishment for excelling at what I do... that's why I'm moving. I love programming. Java's my favorite language... it's not really that useful to a lot of companies, but to huge insurance companies with a lot of web apps, it's invaluable.
I've been thinking about cracking open a book on C, a language which I haven't used for about 4 years, and seeing what I can contribute to Linux. I have about a month left; I should bring one of my books to work and play around with it during the oodles of free time I have, huh?
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mikegpitt
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Joined: 22 May 2004
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| Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 5:31 am Post subject: |
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Dude... If you spend 80% of yoru time on Digg you start start reading Slashdot. I could never really get into Digg, but have been reading Slashdot for about 8 or 9 years.
Cool chart! It's funny that gentoo doesn't have more varients, because Gentoo basically is LFS in a nice automated package. |
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steveL
Watchman
Joined: 13 Sep 2006
Posts: 5153
Location: The Peanut Gallery
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| Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 6:14 am Post subject: Re: Linux Distro Timeline |
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| bmartin wrote: | I think it's pretty cool (rather than shameful) that Gentoo has branched off significantly fewer times than other distro like Red Hat, Debian, and Slackware. That tells me the maintainers have been doing a good job in creating a distro that hasn't needed too many major refinements.
I've had nothing but success (albeit with a fair amount of effort) in getting my first Gentoo machine up-and-running and I'm enjoying a bit of ricing. I do plan to compile with saner CFLAGS, although I haven't broken anything yet... not a single crash has occurred, but it has only been a week. |
Heh, give it time  Great pic btw, very nice overview. I agree it's cool that Gentoo has managed to stay focussed, and think the reason it hasn't split so much is that it gives so much choice that you can use it for pretty much anything, from an embedded router to a cluster-farm.
I'd advise against -O3 btw, as it often gives counter-intuitive results, ie slower apps. I think of it as more of a testing ground for optimisation than a realistic user setting. |
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Master_Of_Disaster
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Joined: 28 Feb 2003
Posts: 610
Location: 15.05072° East, 48.13747° North (aka Mauer), Austria
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bmartin
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Joined: 11 Apr 2007
Posts: 36
Location: Jersey City, NJ, USA - soon to be San Antonio, TX, USA
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| Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 4:03 pm Post subject: |
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| steveL wrote: | | I'd advise against -O3 btw, as it often gives counter-intuitive results, ie slower apps. I think of it as more of a testing ground for optimisation than a realistic user setting. |
Yeah, I've heard that before. It's probably simply causing my builds to take longer.
Wow, that's crazy. The most popular UNIX systems have pretty regular release cycles. I've never felt drawn to anything except Linux, for some reason. I might've been drawn to the Mac OS's if it weren't for the price of the hardware and my earlier experiences with them.
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psyqil
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Joined: 26 May 2003
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| Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 4:32 pm Post subject: |
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| mikegpitt wrote: | | It's funny that gentoo doesn't have more varients, because Gentoo basically is LFS in a nice automated package. |
Stock Gentoo already has every variant you could ever want.  |
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bmartin
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Joined: 11 Apr 2007
Posts: 36
Location: Jersey City, NJ, USA - soon to be San Antonio, TX, USA
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| Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 5:02 pm Post subject: |
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In a sense, yes, it does have everything. I'm going to be setting up a couple more Gentoo computers after I get a place; I'm thinking about installing Sabayon and then setting the USE and compiler flags and recompiling everything, inserting the necessary modules manually instead of using hardware auto-detect, etc. It's probably a little dirtier. I might just do it the Gentoo way instead. I have a while to think about it.
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opentaka
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Joined: 18 Feb 2005
Posts: 840
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 5:16 pm Post subject: |
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nice one. gentoo = straightforward!
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jseymour
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Joined: 23 Jun 2006
Posts: 202
Location: Gainesville Florida
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| Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 5:33 pm Post subject: |
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Very nice diagram thanks for the link.
| Quote: | | it is quite a high maintenance distro, |
Hmm, I have much less problems with gentoo upgrades than I ever had with any other distro I used. Usually on other (binary) distros you have dependency issues galore you have to work through. Portage seems to handle this very nicely.
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bmartin
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Joined: 11 Apr 2007
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Location: Jersey City, NJ, USA - soon to be San Antonio, TX, USA
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| Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 6:14 pm Post subject: |
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Tell me about it. I was updating my brother's computer from Ubuntu Edge to Fiesty yesterday and it aborted after about 3 hours because it couldn't automatically build and install NVIDIA drivers for the new kernel. How disappointing.
With Portage, it takes two commands and everything is up-to-date.
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timeBandit
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Joined: 31 Dec 2004
Posts: 2719
Location: here, there or in transit
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| Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 6:23 pm Post subject: Re: Linux Distro Timeline |
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| bmartin wrote: | | Digg is ... where I find most of the Gentoo bashers... plus all of my friends who use Linux. They tend to prefer Debian, SUSE, Fedora, etc. They stay away from Ubuntu because "it's for novices." |
Sounds like you need smarter (or at least, more experienced) friends. 
Nice link...thanks.
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bmartin
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Joined: 11 Apr 2007
Posts: 36
Location: Jersey City, NJ, USA - soon to be San Antonio, TX, USA
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| Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 8:13 pm Post subject: Re: Linux Distro Timeline |
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| timeBandit wrote: | Sounds like you need smarter (or at least, more experienced) friends.
Nice link...thanks. |
I guess I can honestly say that I no longer "have any friends" because all of them are either still in college or back in my hometown... I've moved on. I think that for them, their reluctance to give Gentoo a fair assessment is more of a comfort/ignorance issue than intelligence, but I could be wrong.
I enjoy watching the Linux user base grow because every additional user makes it more likely that the people who I actually care about switching (i.e. my family) are more likely and more able to switch. My sister and parents constantly have problems with malware and it's much easier to provide tech support for people when they use Linux. A lot of people are surprised to hear that, but as long as they can use Firefox, their email, and word documents, they're happy. My 11-yr-old brother's computer is powered by Ubuntu. All of his Windows games work in WINE (they're mostly card games and simple Direct X games) or emulated games (FCEU, ZSNES, etc... he's familiar with all of those emulators since they have Windows ports), and he loves spinning the Beryl cube around on his GeForce FX 5700.
I have to give Debian a try some day. I just bought my first DVD burner and I hear nothing but good news about that distro. A goal of mine is to try a bunch of them and give my opinion to other people... but I've only tried openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Gentoo so far. Debian and Slackware are high up on my list of distros to try.
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durian
Guru
Joined: 16 Jul 2003
Posts: 312
Location: Rörums Holma
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| Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 9:19 pm Post subject: |
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is the timeline correct? I remeber using Caldera in 93, according to this graph it didn't start until 95. Ygdrassil I remember as well :)
-peter |
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