What Does Linus Look for in a Linux Distro?

What does Linux founder Linus Torvalds look for in a distro? It might surprise you, but the guy who is one of the lead maintainers of the Linux kernel and could tackle most any issue that would leave the rest of us stumped… prefers a refined and simple distro. It’s not hard to see why, though. Even as a lead kernel developer, not many people enjoy battling with an OS to get it to work.

His distro of choice is Fedora 9, which in a way doesn’t surprise me. Fedora, though I don’t use it, seems to be one of the most stable distros on the market, and its package manager makes sure of it by not automatically allowing unsafe or untested applications or services to get on your machine. Ubuntu looks to be his leading second choice, and again, it’s easy to understand why.

Linus goes on to say that the sheer choice we have with distros is good, and that competition improves things all-around. I still can’t help but thing a few simple standards would improve things even further though, like a dependency manager that would actually work on all distros. That, to me, would be a good start to making sure that all applications install on all distros the same way. But there’s probably a reason I’m not a developer!

And when it comes to distributions, ease of installation has actually been one of my main issues – I’m a technical person, but I have a very specific area of interest, and I don’t want to fight the rest. So the only distributions I have actively avoided are the ones that are known to be “overly technical” – like the ones that encourage you to compile your own programs etc.