On Wednesday 17 May 2006 06:51 am, Ed Wilts wrote: > On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 11:33:33PM -0500, Justin Krejci wrote: > > They all run the same kernel - yes, commonly with their own distro based > > modifications, but really, what differences are there to end users? > > A *lot* - if you're thinking you might need an updated fibre channel > driver, or you want the security of a protected stack, you want a kernel > you can trust. Red Hat backports a *lot* of changes to the kernel. > Remember that the server focus is stability. I am making generalizations throughout my email, maybe I wasn't clear on this. I know there are tons of differences. If one wanted to, I bet one could port the same redhat kernel patches to just about any distro's kernel. Note - I am not a kernel hacker in the slightest. I am just stating that for the most part, there are not a ton of visible differences. I have zero stability problems with Gentoo on my desktop (where I am typing this email). This is the same installation from 2001. > > > They all support the same hardware for the most part. > > Nope - all have differing driver support. > Ok. How much hardware out there works on on distro but not another? Sure if it is some super proprietary driver with some binary blob for some hardware, it might be tougher to run the hardware on a distro the vendor did not generate code for, but is this even a reality? I have installed several Linux distros on a variety of hardware and have not really had any hardware issues that only affected one distro, possibly after at least a little user intervention on my part. Again, I am just stating that in general most distros are going to be fairly close in end user experience with the exceptions I noted in my original email. Apache running on gentoo will look and feel the same as apache running on suse. Postfix running on redhat will be the same as postfix running on debian.