10 Linux distros to watch in 2014

I remember that time fondly. Mandrake Linux, Redhat, Ubuntu wasn't even in sight. Compiling everything in Gentoo. Compiled my own kernels often. Hunted for drivers just to make audio work.

I think I enjoyed it because it was a breath of fresh air after being hit in the head by Microsoft repeatedly. I don't dislike Microsoft anymore as much but that is because I have gotten away from using its products (mostly). But at that time, it felt really exciting getting a Linux prompt on a home PC when commercial Unix clones would sell for thousands of dollars. It was like having your own Shuttle in the backyard to play with.

Now it just became a nuisance. I want my stuff to work. "Do I have to open the terminal again to configure the network? Argh...". Maybe that is a good sign, Ubuntu got me spoiled. Or again, maybe I just got older and lost interest.

In the olden days it was all about the install. The difference between a good or bad distro was did the installer have a graphical image on boot, or text mode. No journalist commentary on OS features or actual usage, the sole quality of an entire OS was just the installer. According to the journalists no one ever does anything with linux that install it over and over while admiring the installer.

Now its all about the window manager, with a small side dish of large corporation gossip. Nothing is ever heard anymore about the beauty of the installer. Something that remains the same is no one ever discusses the OS underneath the window manager. According to the journalists no one actually does anything with linux other than admire weird and counterintuitive desktop managers while occasionally gossiping about how this mega corporation likes alpha blending but that corporation likes multitouch, often without the journalist knowing what it even means.

No one ever talks about the professionals who mostly look at how quickly are security issues patched and pushed, whats the upgrade experience look like, how big is the mirror network, how many devs are working on the OS (as a proxy for how many people could we hire...) and most importantly licensing constraints. I admit I was pretty unprofessional in 1996 when I switched everything to Debian just so I could hand a copy of the DFSG to the software license audit goons and tell them to go away, and like a magic incantation, they surprisingly did, and its worked like a magic scroll of protection for me ever since. Here's a copy of my sources.list (now a days a puppet recipe) showing none of the servers I have control over run anything other than main, here's the DFSG, heres a print out of the GPL and BSD and a bunch of other DFSG licenses, and my signature, now go away. Costs the linux admins like 10 minutes annually and $0 while the windows admins end up spending weeks and six figures each time.