I saw an interesting round up of a debate described on Linux.com about distros.
Distro
It seems that there was a general consensus around the fact that the term “distro” refers to a specific flavor of Linux, such as a Red Hat, or Slackware, or Debian, or openSUSE, or Ubuntu. So long as its Linux, this camp believes, it qualifies as a distro.
Apparently, Shane Geiger, IT director for the National Council on Economic Education had a different view. He believes FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and now Solaris (now that it is “free software”) are all distro. What does the term “distro” mean to you? What side of the distro fence are you on? What, for that matter, is your favorite distro and why? We want to know.
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1 Comment
My opinion is that Shane is delusional, the term distribution refers to a collection of software which is assembled by a group and distributed, but the four operating systems listed are all independent operating systems, while the Linux-based systems are collected software, most of it the same software, distributed by groups which are often not involved with the creation or maintainence of the software. The BSDs and Solaris all maintain a complete userland and kernel that they do not share with others, though some code is shared between the BSDs.