For years, I’ve maintained that having a ton of Linux distributions is a good thing. I still believe that — but it’s getting damn hard for me to keep up with all the various and sundry distros that are good for this and that. I love SUSE’s distro on the desktop, and I’m also a big fan of Mandrake… for different reasons. I also like Xandros’ latest offering, even though it’s not really my cup of tea. And there’s Debian… I feel like I should be keeping up with Debian “stable” and “testing,” not to mention Fedora. And there’s my old favorite: Slackware. Then there’s KNOPPIX, GNOPPIX… and there’s OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD…
At this point, I need about twenty different computers to keep up with all the distros. And I have a ton of computers for testing and so forth… however, I’d also like to be able to compile a package once and create an RPM or Debian package and be done with it…
What’s the solution? Is there one?
Sure. Just use GRUB, and have about 10 or so distros installed on a few machines. I’ve heard it’s possible to get an insane number of things all runable on one machine. IIRC, there was a Slashdot article on some guy who had 30 or more on one box. I think Dave Hahn mentioned having 4 or 5 going on one box.