PDA

View Full Version : Most influential Linux distribution in history



samjh
November 24th, 2008, 06:51 AM
A historical question: which Linux distribution has been the most influential to the Linux community and the wider FOSS community?

Now, I'm fully aware of the potential for bias toward Ubuntu, but let's try to keep this rational (not that I'm suggesting that Ubuntu is a small fish; I just don't want people compulsively voting for Ubuntu without thinking).

EDIT:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes pre-2003 (ie. before Fedora Core and Red Hat merged) Red Hat.

rakris
November 24th, 2008, 06:56 AM
Debian. Father of Ubuntu

I-75
November 24th, 2008, 06:58 AM
I like Ubuntu, but Red Hat is the most influential. Its been around longer than Ubuntu. It is widely used in servers, it has a lot of respectability. And Red Hat was probably the first Linux distro I ever seen for sale on the store shelves years ago.

samjh
November 24th, 2008, 07:00 AM
I like Ubuntu, but Red Hat is the most influential. Its been around longer than Ubuntu. It is widely used in servers, it has a lot of respectability. And Red Hat was probably the first Linux distro I ever seen for sale on the store shelves years ago.

Although I picked Debian, I have to agree on Red Hat's respectability. The company is only a midget in comparison to IBM, Microsoft, and others, but it has a mighty punch far above its weight division.

Red Hat was what got me into Linux. :)

jyaan
November 24th, 2008, 07:07 AM
Red Hat for the past, Ubuntu for the future.

CholericKoala
November 24th, 2008, 07:08 AM
MINIX for the future. Go microkernels!

Rokurosv
November 24th, 2008, 07:17 AM
Isn't slackware like, the oldest distro around? I think it introduced package management.

doorknob60
November 24th, 2008, 07:17 AM
Ubuntu, I know so many people that switched to Linux just because of Ubuntu (including me). Ubuntu has probably doubled the Linux userbase since ~2004.

rakris
November 24th, 2008, 07:20 AM
Isn't slackware like, the oldest distro around? I think it introduced package management.

:lolflag: Slackware does not believe in package management system. It does provide installpkg for installing tgz files, but does not provide dependency resolution and all stuffs (except 3rd party slapt-get).

And yes. It is oldie than all other fancy distros.

shadylookin
November 24th, 2008, 07:38 AM
In my slightly biased opinion I'd say Ubuntu. I'm guessing Ubuntu alone has added more new users to linux because of it's user friendliness than any other major distro.

If not ubuntu then I'd say Red hat for improving linux's image as a serious corporate OS rather than just a hacker's toy.

toupeiro
November 24th, 2008, 07:44 AM
It would be easy for me to jump right out there and say ubuntu, but if I really think about it a little bit deeper, I can't... At this point, I still give that spot to Redhat, because ubuntu is still really considered a debian branch, and I am going to look at the three big pictures in linux, those being the three main tree's. Debian, Slackware, and Redhat.

I think it'd be close, but debian might now edge out Redhat in the number of spawned distros, but not all of them were true branches of Debian. Debian suffers being the "grandfather distro" a whole lot more than redhat or Slackware. If you look at a linux timeline, and there are several of them out there, You'll see the majority of the foliage on Debian's tree comes off two branches. The KNOPPIX branch and the Ubuntu branch. So, further developments for anything off these branches have a much higher chance of drifting of the course set by its forefathers. :)

Redhat, however, has a lot of long, strong branches thriving off of it, mostly all tied directly back to Redhat Linux itself. Some gone, some stil going strong.

I guess there are differen't ways to look at this. The way I look at it is Redhat was solid foundation enough. If duplication continues to grow off the KNOPPIX Branches and Ubuntu branches, I think eventually they will be come tree's of their own, at which point I think that hurts debian as a distribution, as general direction is decided by the branches, not the original tree.

Rhubarb
November 24th, 2008, 07:46 AM
Tough question.
Red Hat was one of the first linux distros I was aware of.
Slackware and knoppix were pretty good back then too.

But I'd have to give my vote to Ubuntu.
It's the distro where I started introducing other people to, now I've got ~ 30 people using it regularly.

Grant A.
November 24th, 2008, 07:51 AM
Redhat definitely, it is the distro that sparked commercial interest in Linux. On top of that, they always have their banner displaying during the U.S. stock market closing time.

igknighted
November 24th, 2008, 08:06 AM
Voted Mandriva/Mandrake... the first distro to truly bring Linux to the masses

mtinman
November 24th, 2008, 08:07 AM
I have been a Linux user since 1997, I have seen distros come and go, but the ones that stick out in my memory are:

1. Red Hat/ Fedora
2. Debian
3. Suse
4. BSD
5. Knoppix
6: Slackware

The last 7 years I have been using Fedora, but I have always secretly desired a distro that would "work right out of the box", and it seems I may have finally found that in Ubuntu! I hope...

samjh
November 24th, 2008, 08:11 AM
I'm surprised that Fedora isn't getting more votes. A lot of cutting-edge technologies have been first trialled on Fedora before being adopted by other distros (Anaconda, Gnome animated wallpapers, IcedTea, Liberation fonts, bleeding-edge X.Org drivers and Linux kernels, to name a few). If not for Fedora, I think technology adoption would be slower in the Linux community.

cmay
November 24th, 2008, 08:17 AM
redhat.
debian gnu/linux

and knoppix.
knoppix have been used as a live cd which then now is used very much also for live installers which makes it more easy to install linux than ever. even solaris and desktop bsd uses live cd as installers just like ubuntu does. so knoppix is a great invention.

loell
November 24th, 2008, 08:20 AM
when its comes to technicality, red hat still is.. unmatched.

handy
November 24th, 2008, 08:28 AM
From this image (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Gldt.svg), I counted the streams still alive from the two prime contenders:

Debian - 32

Red Hat - 37

Perhaps the image is not up to date?

Even so I would think that due to Ubuntu being debian based, & the numbers using *buntu's that Debian should have a lead on the desktop & Redhat would certainly have a lead in the in the server side.

I'll call it a draw. :-)

loell
November 24th, 2008, 08:37 AM
I'm surprised that Fedora isn't getting more votes. A lot of cutting-edge technologies have been first trialled on Fedora before being adopted by other distros (Anaconda, Gnome animated wallpapers, IcedTea, Liberation fonts, bleeding-edge X.Org drivers and Linux kernels, to name a few). If not for Fedora, I think technology adoption would be slower in the Linux community.

you seem to forget that many of those bleeding edge technologies in fedora are funded by RedHat itself (RHEL money), with the intent to push those tech on RHEL once it becomes super stable. ;)

so it is RHEL whose influencing fedora and not so much fedora on RHEL. :)

inobe
November 24th, 2008, 09:10 AM
i say opensuse pointing towards novell.

their movement to opensource in 2001, prior to that battling micro-soft, their role in Ximian, also their rites to unix.

ultimately they have been around for a long time.

i have used suse 9.1 and up, everything that novell has done from then till now makes novell/suse one of the most influential and distributions.

may i include controversial too .

Phreaker
November 24th, 2008, 09:19 AM
Debian, most cool distros are descendant from Debian

Grant A.
November 24th, 2008, 09:19 AM
i say opensuse pointing towards novell.

their movement to opensource in 2001, prior to that battling micro-soft, their role in Ximian, also their rites to unix.

ultimately they have been around for a long time.

i have used suse 9.1 and up, everything that novell has done from then till now makes novell/suse one of the most influential and distributions.

may i include controversial too .

They only re-obtained the UNIX IP (The patents expired, didn't they?) in 2007, after a lawsuit from SCO that ended in Novell's favor.

lakersforce
November 24th, 2008, 09:21 AM
I'm gonna go with Knoppix. Chances are that your first try at GNU/Linux ever was a Knoppix distro.

halovivek
November 24th, 2008, 09:24 AM
First I have grace in Red hat. i was using that one around 2001 to 2002. i was using mostly in command little bit in graphics work.
Two months before i heard about Ubuntu and i saw in my friends computer. I got one copy from him and i have installed in my laptop. now i am going good with that one. It will beat Red hat in near future.

Paqman
November 24th, 2008, 09:25 AM
Red Hat, blatently. They were the ones that proved Linux could be a real contender against proprietary OSes

inobe
November 24th, 2008, 09:34 AM
nothing expired to my knowledge' apparently they had rights to unix since 1993 with their deal with at&t.

Grant A.
November 24th, 2008, 09:35 AM
nothing expired to my knowledge' apparently they had rights to unix since 1993 with their deal with at&t.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_v._Novell :)

Patents expire every 10 years to my knowledge.

inobe
November 24th, 2008, 10:07 AM
that was an interesting bout, its funny how that turned out.

ms funding sco, prior to that novell battles ms :lolflag:


sco loses, just really weird stuff

btw, i think patents usually last about twenty years' discovered by a quick google.

i would have to include that suse was popular prior to novells purchase.

karellen
November 24th, 2008, 10:11 AM
I've picked Debian

SupaSonic
November 24th, 2008, 10:14 AM
Debian

kellemes
November 24th, 2008, 10:37 AM
1- Debian
2- RH
3- SUSE
4- Slackware - because it's been around longer then any other.

notwen
November 24th, 2008, 02:41 PM
Red Hat for the past, Ubuntu for the future.

Ditto

chucky chuckaluck
November 24th, 2008, 02:45 PM
Isn't slackware like, the oldest distro around? I think it introduced package management.

hoping to sap the precious bodily fluids of other distros, no doubt.

billgoldberg
November 24th, 2008, 02:50 PM
I went with Red Hat.

However, for the desktop, I think Ubuntu will be looked upon in the future as the distro that got it all started.

lukjad
November 24th, 2008, 02:54 PM
I'm not sure. I would either choose Debian or Ubuntu. Debian is the base while Ubuntu is the fame. Who do I choose? Hmm...

hyper_ch
November 24th, 2008, 02:56 PM
Well, ubuntu just takes off on google when comparing debian, fedora, red hat, slackware, ubuntu:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=debian%2C+fedora%2C++red+hat%2C+slackware %2C+ubuntu&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

bigbrovar
November 24th, 2008, 03:48 PM
for servers i would say RedHat .. brought professionalism to linux as a server platform bringing in commercial support and the likes.
but when it comes to desktops i would pick debian. debian in my opinion cleared the path for the linux desktop. and here is why
apt-get = one of the must difficult thing to do on linux was package installation dependences hell was the order of the day. the introduction of apt-get and debs by debian changed all that. making the installation of packages and resolving their packages a breeze. thus making it easy to setup a desktop system without much fuss. apt-get insipried synaptics which many still say is the best package-management system in the Linux world. synaptic made installation of packages even easier and more user friendly. user friendly meant more pple were drawn to the Linux as a desktop platform because they no longer have to spend hour hunting down dependencies.

Debian Repository
the debian repository is arguably the biggest repository in the linux world. over 20,000 pacakages. are maintained in the debian repo. any application u can think of. this further made adoption of linux as a desktop because the size of the debian repo meant that most needed packages were just few clicks away.

Derivatives
Debian is the mother of ubuntu. the most popular linux on the desktop. i need not mention the amount of attention and momentum that ubuntu as brought to the linux desktop since 2004 when the first version was released. ubuntu as is based on debian sid (i may be wrong). perhaps it could be said that were there no debian. they wouldnt have been ubuntu. and many of us including yours truly would have still been under the shackles of MS.

eeepc
one device that single handedly brought linux to the homes of over 4 millions non linux crowd. and led to revolution of sub notebook computing. the first version of the eeepc ran only Xandros a debian based distro. the Nokia internet tablet. i own one so i can tell you that its an amazing little device guess what .. its uses an OS called maemo a port of debian for mobile device.

Volunteers
No other distro still live by the ethics and code that was culture in the formative years of the Linux community. a bunch of volunteers all working together for the common good. today Debian is still a non-commercial development project run by volunteers spread around the globe. That the efforts of all these people manage to come together to produce a well-tuned distro
. infact its said to be the largest collaborative software development team made put of volunteers in the world.

platform support.
Few distros matches debian in term of platform support Debian runs on 11 platforms just name it.

it is for this reason and more that i think that debian is the most influential linux distro of all time

SeanHodges
November 24th, 2008, 04:01 PM
redhat.
Debian gnu/linux

and knoppix.
Knoppix have been used as a live cd which then now is used very much also for live installers which makes it more easy to install linux than ever. Even solaris and desktop bsd uses live cd as installers just like ubuntu does. So knoppix is a great invention.

+1

Guilden_NL
November 24th, 2008, 04:16 PM
Red Hat. First distro where I knew more than one person using it back in '97. Now is the mother of all distros in the enterprise. In fact, I just yanked a multi-million US$/yr licensing pot of gold from Microsoft and moved everything to RHEL. All of the vendors involved (8 or 9) required RHEL for the Linux distro in order for them to support their products.

This project also opened my eyes to how fast and far Solaris has fallen. Linus and MSFT have put a big squeeze on them.

Having said this, Ubuntu seems to be on its way to winning on the desktop front with OpenSUSE its nearest competitor.

kk0sse54
November 24th, 2008, 05:25 PM
Softlanding Linux System
Yggdrasil
Slackware
Red Hat
Debian
Ubuntu

ghindo
November 24th, 2008, 08:55 PM
It's really a toss-up between Debian and Red Hat. I voted Debian, but that's really not to discount Red Hat.