Re: best gnu/linux distro for emacs

[Xue Fuqiao]

On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 03:09:47 -0700
"Alan E. Davis" <lngndvs@gmail.com> wrote:

> Many distros do not provide emacs out of the box.  Something of a slap in
> the face, and unexpected.  And annoying.  Various distros handle emacs
> differently.

> I like the way Gentoo handles emacs, and I may reinstall gentoo in the
> future.  Arch worked farily well.  I would prefer to just leave it alone,
> pretty much, and tolerate compiling it oneself.

> For now, what is the "best" distribution of GNU/Linux for running emacs?

It depends.  There are different views on the word "best".

According to Saint IGNUcius[1], wholly free GNU/Linux distributions[2]
are recommended.

Although Gentoo and Arch Gentoo do not have a policy of only including
free software, they are good distros technically.  Other distros like
Debian, Fedora, Slackware and openSUSE all have their own advantages.

Debian is known for relatively strict adherence to the philosophies of
free software.  But in Debian, Emacs documentation is in package
`emacs24-common-non-dfsg`, since the Debian community and the FSF have
some disagreement.  There are many packages about Emacs in Debian, like
`emacs-goodies-el', `emacs-snapshot' and `debian-el'.  And there are
also many Debian related Emacs libraries, like devscripts-el[3],
apt-mode[4], apt-sources[5] and so on.

Fedora leads the advancement of free software; Slackware aims to be the
most "Unix-like" distro; and YaST in openSUSE is very elegant.  All of
them are good distros; which is best is depending on your taste.

In Emacs-dev, according to some details, I guess that (just a guess,
there's not much basis):
Richard Stallman uses gNewSense
Stafan Monnier uses Debian
Paul Eggert uses Fedora (or Ubuntu?)
Dmitry Antipov uses Ubuntu
Tom Tromey uses Fedora
Eric S. Raymond uses Ubuntu

And there are some other people who use MS-Windows/OSX/... , like Eli
and Leo.

[1] http://stallman.org/saint.html
[2] http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html
[3] http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/software/devscripts-el.html.en
[4] http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/software/apt-mode.html
[5] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AptSources

-- 
Xue Fuqiao
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/