the bblog

distro paranoia

So, it turns out that Paul Frields, project leader for Fedora Linux used to develop spyware for the FBI.

Well golly, I use Fedora.

Oh come on. The FBI doesn't care about linux users.

You're right, I'm sure the FBI has absolutely no interest in a group of technical experts whose work underlie critical national infrastructure and who refuse to use commerical software due to ideological reasons.

These people are beyond suspicion, while senators and charities are not.

Uh huh. Sure.

So I'm looking for a new distro. The limitations is that it has to be linux-based, and come with a package manager. What are my choices?

• Ubuntu. PRO: Easily the most popular linux distro. CON: It's Ubuntu.
• Debian. PRO: Ubuntu, but with less lameness. CON: Extremely ideological. Getting the NVidia drivers and mp3 support working will require effort. On the one hand, I had to do the same with Fedora. On the other, it's fucking 2009. I shouldn't have to do that anymore.
• Gentoo. PRO: Nerdy. Compiling everything results in a faster, more optimized system, and also prevents attackers from shipping compromised binaries. CON: I'm not going to be reading the source code, either, so compiling everything isn't actually any more secure. Also, while the end result may be faster, I'll still be compiling everything on a 900mhz machine. Also also, it's gentoo, the distro of choice for people upgrading from ubuntu.
• SuSE. PRO: I've actually used suse before, way back in middle school. Presumably the installer's better now. CON: Primarily a german-language distro. Documentation in english may be spotty.
• Mandriva. PRO: It's a linux distro? CON: I've never used it, nor heard much of anything about it. Apparently it's popular enough to have a package manager.
• Slackware. PRO: Pretty cool bros only. CON: I'm not all that cool of a bro. Plus, I like wussy window managers like GNOME and KDE, and the other slackware users might make fun of me for using them. Also, package selection may be weak or out of date, since the slackware maintainers are too busy telling kids to get off of their lawn to update their repositories.

Exciting!