Re:Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.
by mcantor on Thursday July 02, 2009 @02:57PM
(#684933)
I strongly agree... I think the OP of this threads' contention is not in the same spirit as Mr. Atwood's. I think this Coding Horror post was lamenting the existence / necessity of the "pricing tiers" common in commercial software.
Linux distributions, and even versions of Ubuntu itself, are not organized in a "tier" layout, where Tier N has X more features than Tier N - 1, or Tier N's features have X more capacity.
Linux distros and Ubuntu versions, on the other hand, are organized horizontally: They don't have better features (per se), but different features.
Say you are tired of KDE in Kubuntu, you just "apt-get install gnome-desktop". You are tired of Apache, then "apt-get install lighttpd". Defaults are not limitations.
And seriously, most people pick one distribution and stick with it. I'm using Debian for everything ... work servers, laptop, home station. OK, to be honest the home station has Ubuntu on it, but that's still 95% Debian.
And, if there's a feature missing (like hardware limitations), you are most likely to fix it with a kernel upgrade, or with a patch someone on the mailing list gives you for free.