Re: Why Slackware Sucks (fwd)

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

The other one I mentioned...

----- Forwarded message -----

From: Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>
Message-Id: <199710132310.SAA04947@osiris.silug.org>
Subject: Re: Why Slackware Sucks
In-Reply-To: <199710132225.RAA04810@osiris.silug.org> from Steven Pritchard at "Oct 13, 97 05:25:16 pm"
To: silug-discuss@silug.org
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 1997 18:10:49 -0500 (CDT)
Reply-To: silug-discuss@silug.org
Organization: Southern Illinois Linux Users Group


Because someone asked, and in the interest of fairness, I now
present...

                    "Why Red Hat Sucks Too"

For the most part, I like Red Hat, but a lot of little things bug me,
especially with the install.  Most of those things are stuff the
average user won't see, especially if you install from either an ATAPI
CD-ROM or via NFS (and you have a fairly standard network card).

The biggest thing that pisses me off is they don't seem to test their
install on anything other than pretty vanilla hardware.  I couldn't
even get RH 4.2 (the latest version) to install on a machine with an
Adaptec 1522 SCSI card, which is probably one of the most common SCSI
cards on the planet.  After you do finally get installed, silly stuff
like backspace in X doesn't work right.  For things like that, the
fixes are usually simple, but why should the user have to fix those
things?

Other bitches include the fact that they won't move to a new version
of something like Apache when it comes out for some damn reason
(they're still on 1.1.x), even though it is faster, more stable, more
secure, etc., but they'll throw in something like PAM that is (or at
least was) nowhere near prime-time quality.

On a similar note, they have never bothered to spend much time
optimizing the way things compile/install, i.e. they've never shipped
a version of perl that builds a shared libperl.so, even though that
has been possible since 5.002, would make the installation of many
other packages that require it possible, would make the memory (and
possibly disk) requirements of perl lower, etc., etc., etc.  (For that
matter, they're still on 5.003 instead of 5.004, which has been out
for months.  There are also several other packages that they don't
bother to keep up-to-date with.)

There's more, but I'm sure you've all heard enough for now...  :-)

Steve
-- 
steve@lanscape.net          | System Administrator
(217)698-1694               | LANscape
Steven Pritchard            | http://www.lanscape.net/

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