I was hanging out in ##linux on Freenode this morning, willing to help anyone out who needed it, and I came smack into the middle of an argument about why Gentoo is the best distribution in the world, and Debian is the worst. As the conversation progressed, it was clear that the one running Gentoo had never touched a Debian system, or was even half-way familiar with its structure. He was claiming that Debian mucks up the vanilla source code, breaks things, and Debian is now a business. It became immediately clear that his knowledge of GNU/Linux has been entirely limited to Gentoo, and he was suffering a bit from fanboy-ism. This person continued with is anti-Debian pro-Gentoo rhetoric until he was banned from the channel.
Grow up! People, please! For the love of everything good and holy, we're in this together. Gentoo, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Slackware, Ubuntu, whatever. We're all part of the same ecosystem that keeps us loving what we do. We've "drank the Kool-Aid" so-to-speak. We all know what it's like to free our Microsoft bonds and run a Free system. It's fun. It's invigorating. It gives us bad grades in college, because we don't do our homework and hack instead (I don't speak from personal experience. Maybe. :)) So, why the hate? I understand the occasional teasing and poking fun. In fact, even a quality argument about different aspects of distributions of software is appropriate. But when the argument turns emotional and personal, and attacks are made, generalizations brought out, and all-in-all a pissing contest, then I don't understand it. Why?
Ubuntu is my personal choice of distribution with Debian coming in second. I'd run Fedora third, with CentOS fourth. openSUSE would come in fifth probably with Slackware and the free BSDs not far behind. I don't know much about many distributions, such as Gentoo or Foresight, but I'm willing to give them a try. Keeping myself open to trying new distros, coupled with learning what makes them tick, gives me the upper hand. Taking on a fanboy attitude, claiming my distro is the best, get me nowhere. Putting down other distributions get me nowhere. Generalizations get me nowhere.
Just a rant I had to get off my chest. That is all.
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