[Discuss] Last Night's VLUG Meeting

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2008-04-10 21:56-0700 John Blomfield wrote:

> Yes, Joan, I think Alan has a strong philosophical argument for becoming 
> expert in one particular environment rather than "a jack of all trades but 
> master of none". Not wanting to put words in Alan's mouth but I don't think 
> he was referring to the differences between Linux distributions but rather 
> between say major OS's e.g. Linux, Max, Windows etc.

The argument remains strong for individual classes of applications where the
free software world has such a large degree of choice. For example, I think
it is a good idea to learn one mailer well rather than spreading the
learning effort over many mailers.  The same goes for desktop environments,
browsers, etc. The argument is not as strong for distributions since by and
large they give you the same application choices. For example, most
distributions give you the option of installing any of the major open-source
mailers.  However, distributions do have major differences in their software
update and configuration methods, and for that reason I think it is
generally a good idea to stick to one distro rather than spreading your
learning effort over different distros.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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