Re:I had no idea so much still needed work (Score 2, Insightful)

Now I don't want to start a flame war here, but when someone says "Linux" what do they mean?

There are so many distributions, each with little kernel tweaks (RedHat IMHO is especially bad) and different userland applications. So, I have kernel 2.4.9 with what patches, and what userland apps, what compiler, etc.? I'm totally confused. What *is* Linux?

If I go to kernel.org and download a 30MB tarball of the kernel.... now what about the userland apps? Where do those come from? Who wrote "ps"? What version of "netstat" should I use? Which gcc compiler should I use?

However, with an OS like FreeBSD... "FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE" refers to one and only one kernel & userland. No questions. No confusion. If there are problems with a particular version, I can retrieve a CVS snapshot of the kernel and userland sources at any point in time since the beginning of the project. Very impressive.

~g.