Linux distros - does personality matter?

July 26, 2007

I got a question from my brother the other day about why Mandriva wasn’t as well received as a distro.  It’s his primary distro, and was mine for about 2 years.  I don’t think there’s all that much ‘wrong’ with it, but I went to ubuntu about 2 years ago, mostly to ride the momentum (packaging of  current projects, primarily).  One key thing that struck me about Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) compared to ubuntu, redhat/fedora, gentoo, debian, slackware and others is that there’s no core  personality behind Mandriva.

There’s not behind fedora anymore, but redhat was (in my mind) synonymous with Bob Young.  Slackware = Patrick V.  Ubuntu = Mark Shuttleworth.  Debian = Ian (Murdock?)  Gentoo is/was Daniel Robbins.  For better or for worse, the early adopters of these distros often feel a connection with the personality behind the project.  It’s the same with many popular open source projects in general.  Linux=Linus.  Perl = Larry Wall.  PHP=Rasmus.  Rails=DHH.  MySQL=Monty.  Even though many people  complain about his, DJB’s tools (dns, qmail, etc) are widely adopted often *because* of his personal views on competing software, bugs, development and so on.  Compare some of these tools and their passionate adoption rates vs Java.  Java might = James Gosling in some sense, but I never saw as much passion around Java adoption as around the LAMP stack.  Java just felt too ‘corporate’ (not just to me but to many I’ve spoken with during the early->mid ‘net years - ‘96-> early ’00s)

Obviously it’s not the same for *all* distros and projects.  However, having a recognizable personality/face/name with a project will, I believe, boost its popularity.   Am I barking up the wrong tree?  Are these wholly coincidental, or is there a causal link between these concepts?

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