On 02:29 Thu 13 Sep , Felix W. wrote:
Why? Nothing keeps you from learning and using the standard command line
toolbox and administration tasks in a GUI centric OS - all the tools are
there, it’s up to you to learn and use them.
Thing is, most people would prefer to use the GUI to the command-line.
Thats just a way of making sure you learned it.
I use Ubuntu on my work laptop nowadays simply because it had the easiest
support for the graphics and wireless card and I prefer to spend any time
fiddling on servers I have to administrate either way. I use this laptop
exactly the same way I used the FreeBSD laptop I had before this - some
window manager with virtual desktops that give me access to a browser,
whatever remote access software I need for work, and a shell. If I need to
restart a service, I run the same scripts I would anywhere else - that
there’s a menu option for that somewhere could be perceived as added bonus
but its existance certainly doesn’t affect me.
I also tend to run commands via a terminal myself. I find it easier and
in some cases much quicker, but there are also people who won’t touch a
command-line because they have never used one before, and it scares them
to some extent.
I also firmly believe that being able to emerge something in Gentoo teaches
you nothing about the actual ./configure && make && make install cycle or
debugging it - those that can do that or learn to do so in Gentoo could very
much do the same in any other distribution. It may be a source based
distribution, but the compilation steps are very different from what is
common between all distributions, and what it triggers in the background. To
me, there’s not much difference between apt-get and emerge, and many things
Gentoo teaches you are Gentoo specific.
Lets not turn this into a distro-war, which it could easily do.
The install proccess for Gentoo is a great learning experiance, and the
fact you have to go in and actually configure a program (such as X),
teachs you a bit more about the system itself.
While I’m not going to argue about the ./configure && make && make
install part, you do aquire some experiance with LD_FLAGS and CFLAGS and
such, which isn’t something you can do with many others, but that is
probably more beside the point for a new person than anything.
That is not to bash Gentoo - one advantage of Gentoo is the excellent
documentation and the outstanding forum (well, it was outstanding last time
I ran Gentoo, which is a few years back).
Its still fairly good, although I’m messing with the mailing list more
than the forum right now anyways.
But I really don’t think that an
individual willing to spend time learning Linux will benefit from one distro
over another as long as that distro has good support for individuals new to
the OS. That’s true for all the major players, though Ubuntu may be the
most newbie friendly.
My main problem with pointing someone to Ubuntu for leaning Linux is
that so much of everything is already done for you. Ubuntu is a good
distro for some cases (new hardware seems to be something it handles
well), but it is so automated and does so much for you I see it as
telling someone to learn YaST to learn how to handle package managers.
You can always move on to something else later and
realise that if all you do is browse websites, read emails, do basic
clerical work and write code, there really isn’t much difference in what
distribution you use.
The end-product will generally be the same, yes. It is all the same
base code, anyways. What you do to get there, though, differs greatly.
Felix
P.S.
The reason I mainly suggested Gentoo, btw, is I though LFS would be a
bit much for someone new to Linux. I’ve always seen Gentoo as a sort of
‘LFS for the lazy’.
)