UBUNTU!
Only two Linux distributions participated in our Battle of the Distros competition. The two competitors were Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu Linux. Representatives from both distributions had an opportunity to give a fifteen minute presentation on why their distribution is best. While both distributions had its advantages, the audience chose Ubuntu Linux as the overall best distribution.
Earlier this year the University of Illinois at Chicago’s ACM group put on a very nice “Open Source in the Business” conference. The conference, called Flourish, went off without a hitch and had plenty of people show up. Last I heard roughly 200 people showed up, which isn’t bad at all, considering they held it on Easter weekend, yes the one Easter weekend where all religions who celebrate it had it at the same time. Not to bad.
Ubuntu vs. Red Hat. It was a great opportunity to show off Ubuntu as well as Red Hat (Fedora) as two amazing operating systems. Tom “spot” Callaway from Red Hat give his part about Red Hat and did an amazing job. He showed off some coolness with Fedora that made me actually like the way Gnome looked. What started out as a competition really turned into a pretty cool little talk between the two distros. Ubuntu Chicago gave their talk, after a five minute episode of “Ubuntu doesn’t like this LCD.” Tom fired up Fedora and right away it was up an rocking on the LCD. OUCH! So, to prove our point, we simply asked, “Who here is using Ubuntu or one of its projects?” Pretty much everyone raised their hand. And out of all of them people who raised their hand, I can comfortably say Xubuntu was the majority. Xfce and Xubuntu are pretty big here in Chicago among the developers it seems. Our other point was a funny really. We googled “Ubuntu sucks” and “Red Hat Sucks”, and Google showed that Red Hat had roughly 400,000 more hits for the search topic 🙂 Thanks to Tom of course and to the Ubuntu Chicago guys who kicked arse. Truthfully, Tom was outnumbered, but I feel that overall his presentation(s) were excellent, and Tom if you just happen to read this, Ubuntu Chicago would love to call it a tie and share the award with you. Even though we offer the battle as a tie, don’t think we won’t rub it in every chance we get when you are around 🙂
Also, who took pictures of Tom and I in a deep, loving, embrace? It was a show of Linux force 🙂 If you have those pictures, because I seen the flash bulbs (so 1970s) going off, send them my way or link me to them please. You can view pictures as well as the talks via Google Video by visiting the Flourish Media page.
