On Wed, 11 Sep 2002, Matthew S. Hallacy wrote:

> Feel free, most folks who would notice the difference have the know-how to 
> compile their own. I for one appreciate the fact that redhat puts time
> and money into working on the linux kernel.

very important here... I'm not saying that vendors are in the wrong.  The
nice thing about linux is that if I have no clue what I'm doing, a vendor
like Redhat will select the options and build me what I PROBABLY want, and
I'll be happy with it because it does what I asked it to do.

Then I find out (Slashdot, LUG, Google) that by going into the code and
changing DEF_FOO = 5 to DEF_FOO = 10 I can increase the window size and
load more widgets.  Sweet!

Windows model:
Those who don't want to know, can't
Those who WANT to know, can't

Linux model:
Those who don't want to know, don't have to
Those who WANT to know, can, and usually do.

So, I'm not syaing that any vendor is at fault for what they do.  I just
have a better feeling when I know what's in my kernel.  Linux gives us
choice.  If we want a pre-packaged Windows replacement, linux will do
that.  If I want to boot into a kernel and a shell and work up from there,
I can do that too.

-Brian