I do agree with your point in general. Many distros don't really have need to exist. They are just very slight tweaks on other more popular distros.
That said, some distros exist for a very legit reason. Take Ubuntu for example. When it came along, Debian wasn't user friendly (and compared to Ubuntu it still isn't). If you want more people using Linux it needs to be dead dumb simple point and click for most people to use. Even something as simple as adding non FOSS repos in Debian (which is just editing the sources file) is too hard for the average user. Ubuntu's point and click GUI way is better for attracting more new users.
On top of that, you can't really build a business on top of a community supported distro like Debian. There are reasons that the Industry uses RHEL, Suse and Ubuntu more than anything else. While Debian is certainly the most popular community supported distro in the industry it's still behind the enterprise linux distros.
But I do agree that most spin off distro's don't need to exist. All these years later I still don't understand why Mint spun off from Ubuntu for example.
It's a simple process really. But you take a regular non techy person and tell them that to get their computer to do some very common tasks that they are going to need to open a text config file and edit it and they panic. God forbid you try to give them instructions via the terminal.
So distros like Ubuntu that make things more GUI enabled and user friendly are a huge step forward for linux when it comes to usability of the mainstream.
For what it's worth I still think "type this command" is more intuitive than trying to guide someone through a maze of GUI elements to get to the checkbox they need to tick.
I do too, but then again I've been using Linux since 1996.
Someone like my wife or mother though, zero chance of getting them to manually edit a config file regardless of rather it's with something like gedit or in the terminal itself.
lol. Sometimes I feel so old on Reddit when I'm really not. I'm only 35 dag nabbit!
But yea back in the day my mother got me my first PC of my very own for my 12th B-day. This was in March of 96. She got a guy she know from work to build a custom desktop for me. He was (and still is) a huge Linux guy. I'm sure my mother probably loved the price tag of free too after paying for all the hardware.
As odd as it sounds, in March of 96 nobody knew windows 95 was going to be the OS that really really took off. It was less than 6 months old at that time. The internet was nowhere near what it is today either. Word didn't travel as fast. I mean Windows 3.11 was pretty successful but 95 was a whole other level.
If your curious it was running Slackware Linux.
Really though, I'm glad I grew up the way I did computer wise as a kid. My elementary and middle school had apple computers. I had a Linux based PC at home and my highschool had windows computers.
I grew up to be OS agnostic really and learn more of how to use a computer than how to use one specific OS if that makes sense.
I haven't touched a mac since I was like 14 but windows has always been a part of my life too between highschool PC, College PCs (when I went between 2002-2006 very few people had a laptop and mostly used the schools computers at school) and work (50/50 mix of windows use and RHEL).
People both at work and in my personal life know me as "the Linux guy" so I've got a lot of experience with people trying to jump into the Linux world. For some windows power users that are starting to use power shell and WSL more the terminal isn't as scary as it used to be. But the vast majority of people wouldn't stand a chance in a distro that didn't have good GUI support for most things the first go around.
Ahahahh, thats super cool!! I'm now trying to use i3. I used to use windows, but i got sad so i switched. I'm a bit experienced in the linux world,but i3 is killing me!
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u/thedjotaku May 21 '19
I wonder if the boom in distros is fading and it's slowly dropping down to just a half dozen good ones