hitmark's Journal: general purpose linux distro?

do that beast exist? or is it a evolutionary dead end?

sure you can use the same basic distro for a workstation install or a server install. but thats for office use where you have a dedicated admin that you can turn to. a user in a office enviroment have to reason install stuff on their own.

but on the home desktop box this is a diffrent story. 99% of the time the admin is the user and will therefor spend a lot of time trying to set the box up and installing software.

and the last point is where i worry. the thing is that 99% of the problems i see come from people that want to install stuff after they have gotten the box properly set up.

sure they can use the distros install system and wait for the vendors package server or some contrib server to get hold of it. but often this can take time, at times very much time. so what then? install from source? maybe, but its not as easy as it sounds (go away you longbearded assembly reading code-wizards, i know your rant) for someone that may find a electronic version of solitaire a challange.

so maybe they should not install, but thats the office admin speaking. and from my experience they look down on anyone that dont have root (some even look down on anyone they have to share root with).

but remeber that at home the user most often is the admin.

so is there a distro out there that is desktop simple but allso server safe? im starting to think its a engineers dream.

so to all you that look down on the gobolinux distro, have you stopped and taken a look at what its attempting? its not trying to make the next workstation or server distro. they are working on a distro that they themselfs want to use on their desktops, one that give them minimal amounts of trouble when wanting to install something.

one thing that they could maybe do better tho would be to combo in the rootless system that was the basis for the distro. this so that a user can install a app into their home folder for personal use and maybe into a shared folder that dont need root access. oh, wait. just pop the user into the right group and get sudo going, my bad ;)

and why im not doing the easy thing and telling them to go mac os x (even more so after apple have gone intel)?

1) its not a linux distro, its at best a *nix distro :P

2) even with a intel cpu you will still need a specialy chiped motherboard to get the os going on your hardware. and the only company thats going to sell machines with that motherboard is apple.