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Defaults matter because they're sat in a juicy little feedback loop: more people have them installed, so they get more eyeballs and bug-effort, so they get better and have better support, so more people use them.

At least, in theory.

Indeed, there's a delicate balance between customization and fragmentation that can't be ignored.

In practice, developers are usually ‘power users’ that adapt the system to their liking, i.e. don’t use the defaults?

Everyone might customise something. Very few people customise everything.

"I never understand why people spend ages trying out fifty different distros if they could get just what they want if they spent half that time actually installing/adapting one distribution with a reasonably broad package base."

Because if you have to do it more than once, or, say onto 100 desktops in a work environment, the time spent searching for a distro will pay off. Besides that, some people want stuff to work the first time - and every subsequent time - without having to worry "oh I need to install this on another computer, but I can't remember all the steps I took" in order to get to real actual work.

If you just want the same programs on your laptop and desktop, use something like dpkg --get-selections and dpkg --set-selections (for APT, I’m sure RPMland has an analogue). If you also want the same configuration, copy over your homedir or the dotfiles therein and be happy.

Futhermore, testing n distros is not really my definition of ‘work the first time’, nor can you expect that what worked a year ago still works two releases later.

Your point about 100 desktops in a work environment also strikes me as slightly odd, given that I would consider using Puppet, Chef or possibly NFS mounts (depending on the exact setup) rather than configuring/installing 100 desktops individually.

Point taken about Puppet/Chef.

As far as same programs, I would still have to load them the first time and know what to look for. So in addition to stuff I need for work (e.g. LAMP stack), I would have to Google around (more than once) for stuff that I know comes with other distros (example of slight annoyance: vim vs. vim-tiny: thanks, Ubuntu). It's just a little bit less work.

But the beauty of Linux is that we can make these choices willfully :)

This is the kind of thing that should be automated anyway. Write a script to do everything you're doing in the process of setting up your system, and you won't ever have to do it by hand again.

Certainly anyone managing 100 corporate desktops will be deploying a customized image to those machines, rather than using a distro's default installer on each one. In which case, it still doesn't matter what the OS defaults are.

I think people basically carry over their Windows habits, treat each distro as a completely separate OS offering a certain look & feel and app selection.

I like that someone else spent the time trying to figure it out so that I could read about his experiences, then spend only 10 minutes figuring it out. I don't know if that was the purpose at the outset (probably not) but I still find it highly worthwhile.

I am a Linux user that likes to stick with distro defaults for everything that isn't part of my core tool set because it seems like my system is less prone to breaking when updates happen, and because I get more updates that way. It's nice to see others' reviews of those distros so that I can make a better decision without doing all of the legwork, so I say kudos to this guy for doing it. I might try Fuduntu now based on his review, and I wouldn't have bothered otherwise.

It seems like my system is more prone to breaking when I use obscure distros. I might think a distro's choices were totally awesome but if not many other people are using it and/or the development is not that active, and I expect it to 'just work,' then I'm going to have a bad time.

Yeah, that's a good point as well. These days, I tend to stick with stuff that's based on apt on the theory that it hopefully requires less effort on the part of the maintainers to keep it up to date because they can piggyback on the larger community. Not foolproof, but good enough for me. I got tired of the unfriendly (to me) UI changes in straight Ubuntu, so I switched to Lubuntu. So far it's been decent enough. I've been thinking about giving slackware another round though, as I haven't used them for about 10 years and have mostly positive memories of the experience. Maybe on an experimental box.

While that ought to be the case, a lot of novice-intermediate level users often fail to take these points into consideration simply because they are unaware of the fact that the default DE+WM etc can be easily swapped out. Often, many people tend to give more weightage to higher visibility points like the DE+WM etc, rather than package manager and release schedules.

I ran Ubuntu with cinnamon for a little over a year but finally moved over to Mint. There is just a lot more support and stability for using the default DE+WM and a lot of programs can have problems outside of the expected.

A lot of my Linux use is similar to sitting in a garage and taking apart an old car. It's fun to install different distributions and play around with them, and then blow it away and start all over. With a fast internet connection and a handful of USB drives you can try all the major distributions in one afternoon.

I wish I could find it fun to install linux distro's, then I'd find pretty much anything in life entertaining!

It’s fun the first few times (or if the alternative is revising for ‘Symmetries, Fields and Particles’ exams…).

well, you just described why there are even distros to begin with.

otherwise everyone would spend 'half the time' reading the LSF guide and having the perfect distro.

Distros, at least in my opinion, are not about choosing default settings, but about making all the different components (Kernel, whatever else you like) work together nicely and distributing them together (hence the name Distribution).

It therefore makes sense to classify a distribution by its mean of distribution (duh!), i.e. the package manager and by the set of things it distributes (the packages).

You may also note that I did not say that everyone is capable of collecting software from ~50 different upstreams and then compiling said software in half the time it takes to install five distributions – but installing the packages of one’s choice from the archive of the distribution is probably roughly as easy as installing the distribution in the first place.

It might well be that I misunderstood something you said, so please feel free to correct me.

you got it wrong and right at the same time. Right when you say the distro must centralize the work of making the several pieces work. Wrong when you think those pieces are only "kernel, whatever else you like" and think that "whatever else i'd like" does not include the desktop.

The fact is that linux on the desktop barely works without some work still, and that's by using the defaults! without using the defaults it's even harder. heck i spent hours trying to get sound to work on a eeepc with ubuntu 12.10 just because the distro decided to put pulse audio on top of alsa and when i connected the headset it muted the speakers, but when i disconnected it it never moved the sound to the speakers again (turned out a gnome component was doing that, and i didn't have that running)

i could point you to several of the pages i've create on http://www.linlap.com/ most mention more than one solution based on the desktop environment, same distro.

> Wrong when you think those pieces are only "kernel, whatever else you like" and think that "whatever else i'd like" does not include the desktop

Eh? Of course ‘whatever else you like’ includes the DE, WM, Editor and really, whatever else you like. Furthermore, I didn’t have many problems with Linux in the desktop in the default stable installations of Debian during the last few years, nor in deviations from said stable installations[0] – of course, if you want to change/adapt things, those changes are not going to happen magically.

Really, my point is: Ideally, the distribution packages everything and picks some reasonably sane defaults. Then, it is easier[1] for a user to install their preferred applications from the archives of this distribution rather than testing out many different distributions hoping that one of them, by chance, picked their preferences as defaults.

[0] There was some trouble way back in 2005 with encrypted root devices on software RAIDs for which I had to hack together a little extra initramfs script, but apart from that, everything major worked the way I expected it to work.

[1] In terms of time spent, not necessarily in terms of additional exercise by playing around with installation CDs.

ideally is the keyword above.

but in reality even trivial stuff like changing the brightness will not work in ubuntu if you change the DE.

also, buy a newer laptop with the new intel sound drivers (the architecture that is replacing AC97) and tell me sound works out of the box. There's dozen of implementations and none follow the standard correctly. the driver code is a spaguetti hell. and on top of that, most mixer apps tries to add more decision logic...

Well if you’re using a broken system, that’s not really reason to extend your argument beyond said broken system. Sound works just fine on my T410s with

    00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio

(assuming that’s what you meant) and ALSA. The same goes for changing the brightness, though I have to admit that I don’t quite know what actually changes the brightness – it might well be implemented in hardware for all I know. Nevertheless, as this particular installation started out with Gnome 2.x, then got changed to a mostly-Gnome-some-Xfce mix and now is at mostly-Xfce-with-Nautilus, switching DEs obviously doesn’t necessarily hurt functionality.

as i said, look at the code for intel audio driver that you are using and see the spaghetti to support every bogus implementations.

mine works until it tries to handle the audio channels for the HDMI, then it sometimes route audio there instead of the speakers.

and my point is that, under ubuntu with gnome3/unity, they took care to test this machine (most sold win8 ultra portable) and made it work around those bodus audio channels on the gnome mixer.

using xfce gives me silence everytime i plug and unplug a headphone (have to fiddle with alsamixer, or use gnome3/unity's mixer which will not work on my setup)

i don't even know what we were discussing :)

Point taken: you're a 1337 user, but seriously? If you can't see why people want a distro to be _usable_ out of the box then maybe you haven't given much thought to the whole thing.

Y34h, t0t4lly 1337 – I can see why people want a distro to be usable out of the box. I could even see why people want a distro to have their exact preferences as defaults, had you made that point. I cannot see why people prefer opening fifty boxes over properly unpacking one.