November 5th, 2014

Linux Distros & the ‘Except When We Don’t’ Syndrome

When my colleague Ken Starks wrote on FOSS Force the other day about his gripe with Linux Mint’s handling of updates, I was a little amused because I had just dealt with this issue during the recent Bash crisis. I run Mint Maya with Xfce and I expected to find the Bash fix in Synaptic, but it wasn’t there. When I eventually found the update manager, I actually quite liked the set up. Having system updates easily available seemed to make sense and I liked the design. Like many things in tech, it turns out that the design was a little accidental, the result of a conflict necessitating the removal of the system update functions from Synaptic. But it works. I kind of like it.

It also seems to fit with one of the underlying philosophies of the distro. Mint is famous for being a desktop that anybody can use. Updates on the dash is a concept which a new-to-Linux Windows’ user can understand, maybe even without having to go to the forums for help — and a piece of cake for experienced free software users. In my case, the only problem I had is that I misunderstood the severity numbering scheme, figuring one to be most severe instead of the least, but I easily managed to patch and update my system.

I was impressed — which is why I was amused by Ken’s consternation.

Amused because I can see his point. This set-up means more work for him when building his special Reglue edition for his kids. Indeed, that presents a problem for him. I’m also amused because this clearly illustrates how a host of cliches can be applied to the Linux world, like “you can’t please everybody,” “one person’s meat is another person’s poison,” or perhaps more apt, “you say tomato, I say tomahto.” Oh yeah, this also speaks to another cliche: we want our cake and eat it too.

It turns out that we like cookie cutter distros, except when we don’t. We like a newly adopted distro to work exactly the way the one we were using before worked, except when we don’t. We want to be able to move back and forth between Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Debian with ease, without having to learn slightly new ways of doing things on each distro, except when we don’t.

This thinking seems to be a little fuzzy to me.

Each distro is, in fact, a separate Linux based operating system. Usually, a distro is designed to meet specific needs of a particular set of users. RHEL, SUSE and CentOS are designed primarily for use by businesses on servers. Mint, Ubuntu, Mageia and the like are designed for those who need productivity on the desktop and who would rather the operating system just take care of itself — probably the biggest set of users of desktop Linux. The class of distro that includes Slackware and Gentoo are for those who need to customize their systems to exactly fit their needs.

Some distros feed on change, even if that change is a back-to-the-future sort of thing — Mint, for example, developing Cinnamon to suit long time GNOME users who were unhappy with GNOME 3. Or Bodhi building on Ubuntu to showcase the Enlightenment desktop. Or, going back to the turn of the century, Mandrake designing a graphical installer and graphical configuration tools with the goal of making Linux as easy to use for the non-geek as Windows.

The later was a change which more than a few Linux geeks of the era found to be appalling. Where’s the glory in learning how to do obscure things like edit configuration files when they can be easily done by those uninitiated into the tech mysteries with a simple click of a mouse?

So we want our distros be different, to suit our individual needs, except when we don’t. That’s gotta be a tough one for developers.

As for me, I don’t care. I have no skin in this game. If I like a distro that does things a little differently, I’ll figure out how to get ‘er done with the new-to-me configuration. If it’s too much trouble, I’ll decide that this distro isn’t for me and move on.

As for the system update issue with Linux Mint — that’s a non-issue as far as I’m concerned. I like it the way it is now, but I’m not married to it. If the folks at Mint decide to change it back to the more traditional set-up, where updates are done exclusively through Synaptic, I’ll be fine with that too.

Of course, it’s easy for me to be flexible. I’m not needing to respin a distro for the very important task of enhancing the education of school children.

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