Gentoo Linux:
You live in the CS computer labs and you want everything you install to be compiled with GCC’s -O2 flag. It will take 14 hours to install and another 4 days to figure out why your sound card isn’t working. (Hint: It’s cuz you forgot to compile it at install time, genius.)
RedHat:
Your boss told you to install it.
Slackware:
Pssshaw! Package management systems are for the weak. You don’t care that you can hose your glibc libraries six ways to Sunday or that it takes 2 days to install MythTV (and its dependencies) from source, you’re a Real Man(tm)!
Ubuntu:
You’re so Web 2.0 that it hurts. Now that it’s okay to bash Apple (cuz, dammit, they delayed 10.5 for the iPhone!??!?!), you need to rock a new OS to maintain your alpha-geek status. So you install what all your cool blogger friends have been hyping… and OMG, it has a Terminal just like OS X!
So what flavor does His Wurstness run? Any thoughts on Arch Linux?
#1: Slackware.
#2: Arch Linux seems cute. It claims to be lightweight, which probably means you have a small hard-drive and I pity you. Also, it doesn’t seem to have a very widely used package system (Pacman, wtf?!), so it may be harder to find ArchLinux packages for whatever you want to install. The remedy? Install from source… and you’re back to what Slackware has to offer.
Heh. If you’re going to be running Gentoo, might as well go all out with the -O3 -msse3 -mfpmath=sse -march=exact_cpu_model_here -fexpensive-optimizations -finsane-optimizations -foptimizations-that-really-dont-work-but-i-want-them-anyway
Then there’s good old Debian. Rock stable like the North American craton. Releases are scheduled on geologic time, too. Good for lazy server admins.
cool new word: foptimize!
@yiming for nerding out on compile flags and geology. Also, I would like to celebrate the fact that the post that has garnered the most comments in months is . . . about linux distros.