[LAU] which lau distro is more commandline friendly?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 20 Dec 2015 16:55:00 -0800 (PST), Len Ovens wrote:
>I can't imagine a Linux without commandline access.

In context of Karen's original request, I suspect that with "command
line access" also is meant "easy to compile".

The tools to build software are available for all distros.

However, software often depends on other software, so dependencies
could cause issues.

Usually developers write software that is based on dependencies that
are up-to-date, but for several reasons some distros do not provide
up-to-date software.

For example Ubuntu, a release model distro provides 2 kind of releases.

1. Long term support releases that usually only get security relevant
updates: Nothing else will be updated, not only to provide stability,
but also to provide a steady work-flow. Employers can't train employees
each month using new software releases.

2. Half year releases: But even those releases do not provide
up-to-date software, when they get released the provided software could
be outdated since month.

For example Arch Linux is a rolling release. It always provides current
stable software releases from upstream.

There are other important policies.

Some distros try to make maintaining Linux user space easy for noobs,
but that's not necessarily a pleasure for power-users.

A policy to auto-start everything that could be auto-started, to
automatically install some optional dependencies and to not install
some other optional dependencies by default could become a PITA for
for inexperienced users and power-users with special needs such as audio
production.

Some distros exclude software with disputed licenses.

Linuxsample is the most famous example, most likely available by third
party repositories for e.g. Ubuntu.

Some distros do not split packages into binaries and source code
packages.

Some distros do not install header files that are needed to build
software from source code by default. The package names are not equal
to the upstream names. Usually those distros provide tools to
automatically install build dependencies. Other distros keep the names
from upstream and by default header files are installed, when
installing the binaries. Tools might allow to prohibit installing
files, e.g. headers for those distros, assumed somebody does not want
to install everything provided by a package.

FWIW even the concept of packages could be very different. Arch Linux
for example in addition to the packages provides a FreeBSD ports like
approach.

Regards,
Ralf