Newbie friendly *nices, what's in it for geeks

It just struck me as odd, why some hard core geeks use Ubuntu and/or MacOS X.

Now Geoff made a point about getitng tired of waiting for packages to compile in some based distros. OK but why Ubuntu and not straight Debian?

Similarly MacOS X. Most of the Apple Mac and Mac OS X's attractions are based on being easy to use for people with little IT knowledge. This is not the tpical description of computer geeks is it. I suppose there's access to a wider range of commerical apps and/or peripherals but if that's the case then why not dual-boot or VM windows?

Debian although very stable means alot of the packages are a little dated and dont have the most upto date features. Ubuntu has more upto date packages but maybe at the cost of some loss in stability. Of course if you compiled from source in Debian you can still have the most upto date package.

Real hard core geeks make their own distros. Those that want something more than windows can offer use an easily managed *nix.

I use ubuntu and OS X because it allows me to get on with my work whilst allowing maximum configurability. Spending extra time crafting my own distro is a possibility but I just don't have the time to do that.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

I would only recommend it as a learning exercise rather than it being used for production systems.

I agree with Geoff LFS is a really fun way of learning the in's and out's of Linux, just watch out when you get to the GUI bit, I choose KDE and it took ages to compile! ;)

Jo: are we talking weeks or months on the KDE thing? ;)

FYI: LFS is the worst idea evAr if you are doing it on a P2 233MHz machine (although that WAS 5-6years ago so you probably wouldn't even consider it now)

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developers developers developers

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Ah not that bad!! lol

I agree with Midget though, you can't do LFS on a slow machine, you'll end up going mad, and start rocking...

I faff about with computers all day. If I have to faff about with them at home, it has to be an interesting project. Compiling stuff to get a 0.2% increase in $foo gets old quickly.

For work & home, I need something that works, has sensible failure modes and sensible defaults. If I want to I can alter everything to suit, but I don't have to.

For me, that's Ubuntu with windows running in a VM.

I deal with dodgy windows OS's all day.

why wouldn't i wanna use something better at home?

At home I have a Kbuntu machine running on my older PC and Vista on my newer games PC. (Occasionally I'll buy a new games machine swap things round). I use a KVM switch (A belkin with sound and mic pass-thru) to switch between them.

At work my desktop PC runs Kbuntu. I run VMWare on it with several VM's for different things. I usually have a couple for doing MSI development (I'm doing a Firefox 2 MSI at the moment for instance) and I have one that's got all the Windows Server Admin tools on for doing GPO/AD management.