Interview with Linus Torvalds

I just read this interview with Linus Torvalds over at www.oneopensource.it .
One of the questions that really stood out for me was this one.

A curiosity: which is your favourite distribution, and which on e do you consider more secure?

I don’t really tend to care much, I’ve changed distributions over the years, and to me the most important thing tends to be that they are easy to install and upgrade, and allow me to do the only part I really care about - the kernel.

So the only major distribution I’ve never used has actually been Debian, exactly because that has traditionally been harder to install. Which sounds kind of strange, since Debian is also considered to be the “hard-core technical” distribution, but that’s literally exactly what I personally do not want in a distro. I’ll take the nice ones with simple installers etc, because to me, that’s the whole and only point of using a distribution in the first place.

So I’ve used SuSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu, YDL (I ran my main setup on PowerPC-based machines for a while, and YDL - Yellow Dog Linux - ended up the easiest choice). Right now, most of my machines seem to have Fedora 7 on then, but that’s only a statement of fact, not meant to be that I think it’s necessarily “better” than the other distros.

I thought this to be a very funny comment, coming from a major kernel developer. Allot of Linux zealots bash windows users because of there dependence on so called dumb down user interfaces and lack of knowledge of the command line. When at the end of the day one of the main creators of Linux likes to use the distro that is the easiest to install with the dumb down GUI.

Now I know this question is talking about system installations. But I want to take it a step further to application installs. One of the major missing features that I think is holding back Linux is a standard install and uninstall service across all distros. This would make the lift to switching to Linux, for first time users, allot easier.

Full interview here...