Distrowatch review grumbles

[davemx]

When you get to Nº1 in distrowatch, out come the idiots, especially if the distro focuses on user-friendliness and isn't one of the big names. The same happened to PCLinuxOS many years ago, it was Nº1 before Ubuntu was even thought of and I was a moderator at their site in those days. Strangely enough, antiX is rated higher by the distrowatch "experts", I mean it's a great distro for what it is, but it's not Linux for the masses.

Or maybe that's the point. These people yearn for the good old days when it was GNU/Linux and a private club for clever people.

[JayM]

The old software did it for me. Very poor development platform if you need the latest thing. Nobody wants my work unless I am compiling the latest LibreOffice/ Openoffice. Frustrating.

I wonder what this even means, and what the person expects from a distro based on Debian (old)stable?

[gosia]

You just can't please everyone, someone's always gonna complain. Sure, sound criticism is important and noteworthy, but complaining "software too old", "this or that is missing", "I can't cope with it, is that supposed to be user-friendly?" leads to nothing.
There are at least 200 different distributions, and everyone has to choose the one that suits their needs. But that doesn't mean that the other districts are bad. And "usability" often raises the wrong expectation that I don't need to know anything about Linux and it's enough to click on colorful pictures.

[zorzi]

The old software did it for me. Very poor development platform if you need the latest thing. Nobody wants my work unless I am compiling the latest LibreOffice/ Openoffice. Frustrating.

I wonder what this even means, and what the person expects from a distro based on Debian (old)stable?

I'm generally reluctant to Distrowatch bad feedbacks since arguments are usually very poor.

Nevertheless, this "review" underlines a true problem: the MX packagers/maintainers colossal work.

IMO, MX could more rely on Debian ressources/apps. For example, some apps (Thunderbird, VLC...) are doubly proposed whereas, in the same time, other packages like MX kernels and LibreOffice 6 have not received updates for a while.

[manyroads]

@gosia @zorzi I think you both emphasize a critical point. Both the greatest strength and most difficult challenge MX has involve Debian's stable software base. :lipsrsealed: I personally think MX does a stellar job of attempting to leverage and address both sides of the stable base challenge... reliable but frequently older software. Because, there is no universally acceptable, perfect solution users will see/experience differing 'challenges'.

[Stevo]

The old software did it for me. Very poor development platform if you need the latest thing. Nobody wants my work unless I am compiling the latest LibreOffice/ Openoffice. Frustrating.

I wonder what this even means, and what the person expects from a distro based on Debian (old)stable?

I also really doubt that person is actually compiling LibreOffice. I think they meant "using". Regardless, there are several different known methods to install and use the latest LibreOffice on MX 18 (can you say Appimage?), so this is another bogus review. Knock off a point for MX for not having it in the repo, at most. Give the reviewer three demerits for not doing any simple searches and spreading FUD.

[timkb4cq]

I'm not bothered much by this kind of grumble. They just picked the wrong distro for themselves.
Obviously, MX is not the distro for "bleeding edge" aficionados. We advertise that we're based on debian stable. If you want the very latest library versions that's not what you want. If you want stability & reliability it is.

[Stevo]

Yeah, I was just mystified why they need the latest LibreOffice for development work. I would think a newer npm, nodejs, gcc, llvm, Qt 5, or Java platform would be way more important to a developer.

[JayM]

Yeah, I was just mystified why they need the latest LibreOffice for development work. I would think a newer npm, nodejs, gcc, llvm, Qt 5, or Java platform would be way more important to a developer.

That's what I couldn't understand either, what LibreOffice has to do with development/coding. Unless the person is misusing the term "development" as he did "compiling".

[Stevo]

Yeah, I was just mystified why they need the latest LibreOffice for development work. I would think a newer npm, nodejs, gcc, llvm, Qt 5, or Java platform would be way more important to a developer.

That's what I couldn't understand either, what LibreOffice has to do with development/coding. Unless the person is misusing the term "development" as he did "compiling".

Even if English is not their native language, I personally find it hard to believe that an actual developer would misuse "compiling" in that way. That, plus "needing to use the latest Libreoffice for their development", makes makes me think that this was a troll throwing in some Linux technobabble that they don't really understand enough to make sense with.