Aligning Linux Distributions with Presidential Hopefuls
Jan. 17th, 2012 by Christopher Tozzi
Most politicians probably don’t use Linux. After all, some of them have barely figured out computers at all. But since the American presidential campaigning season is once again upon us, I’ve been wondering to myself lately: If the candidates did run Linux, which distribution would they choose? At the risk of offending various groups of people, here are my answers, for better or for worse.
To be clear, and to temper some of the passionately loathsome comments that a post like this might inspire, I’ll preface these thoughts with an assurance that they are not intended as an endorsement of any candidate, party or ideology. Personally, I’d like to resurrect Rousseau’s state of nature, if only I thought it could endure. And there would be no Linux there, since everyone would be running around the forest. But that’s neither here nor there.
Linux Distributions of Choice
That said, here are my picks for presidential candidates’ Linux distributions of choice:
First, let’s start with the current leader of the Republican pack, Mitt Romney. If he ran Linux, I’d pin him as a Debian user. It’s a bland but predictable distribution, the Old Faithful of the open source world. Although not particularly stylish or sensational itself, it nonetheless has provided the foundation upon which myriad more trendy distributions have been built by borrowing its ideas and adding flair. And it’s also the distribution many of us will default to from time to time — not because we think it’s the best, but because it’s better than all the others.
Moving on to Ron Paul, gNewSense would clearly be his distribution of choice. It’s radically free — as in, no proprietary code whatsoever, anywhere — and it doesn’t worry about offending anyone on its crusade to spread the Free Software gospel. It’s also one of the few distributions endorsed by Richard Stallman, who happens as well to be a fan (with a few reservations) of Paul.
Newt Gingrich is a tough call. My guess is that he’d refuse to use Linux at all, since he’s such a path-breaking, unconventional guy — or at least believes he is. Maybe he’d run one of the BSDs, but more likely he’d have an operating system custom written just for him. And then he’d pout when his adversaries used their superior resources to denounce his OS and scare users away.
Then there’s Rick Perry. A man so strongly committed to cultivating an image as a rough-and-tumble cowboy would probably not spend much time in front of a computer, but if he had to, it would run Slackware. Like Perry, Slackware — as the oldest continually existing Linux distribution — once promised to go far, but it stumbled in the face of more polished contenders backed by stronger organizational networks. Now everyone’s just waiting for Slackware to cash in its chips, but at this point, chances are it will at least outlive Perry’s campaign for the Republican nomination.
Last but not least among the Republicans are John Huntsman (who, at the time of this writing, was still in contention) and Rick Santorum. The former, I suspect, would choose Mandriva Linux, which is like Huntsman in that everyone ignores it but doesn’t know why. It’s actually a very solid distribution with a great focus on user-friendliness; unfortunately, it never seems to get the media attention it deserves.
As for Santorum, he’d most likely go with Fedora. Although it has the potential to appeal to a wide swath of open source users, Fedora mostly focuses on a narrower, geekier base that demands cutting-edge code. Similarly, Santorum’s fierce commitment to a conservative constituency will probably prevent him from gaining the broad support he needs to overcome his competitors.
And finally, on the other side of the fold, there’s Barack Obama. He’d doubtless run Ubuntu, the distribution that tends to set ambitious goals that get people excited, then breaks hearts when the harsh realities of real life — not to mention uncooperative partners elsewhere in the open source channel — inevitably cause it to fall short of realizing all of its lofty objectives. Its survival will depend on its continued ability to inspire the masses, as well as the absence of any competing distribution that promises to do a better job.
A Final Thought
Since I’m writing this from Paris, where I’ve been expatriated for most of the last two years, the American presidential campaign has much less of an immediate impact on my life than, say, the European sovereign debt crisis and impending collapse of the euro. Also, I cast my absentee ballot in New York, where my vote for president doesn’t actually matter at all, thanks to the way the electoral college is stacked.
But these things are still lots of fun to follow, and I’ll be eager to see where the worlds of both open source software and American politics find themselves next year at this time.
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Slow news day, much? While this seems like a fun exercise, I’m sure these FOSS projects wouldn’t take too kindly with being aligned with a bunch of homophobes.
I would think Obama would use Ubuntu Satanic Edition.
I would think that the GOP hopefuls would all use the Satanic version of Linux.
why did u think mixing something utterly disgusting(politics) with something as Linux is a food idea?
I can’t picture any of the Republicans using anything FOSS. It would have to be something closed source. The winner system means that the Republican Nominee would run Windows 8 and his running mate would operate Apple OSX. All the others are users who failed would still be operating Windows 1, 2, 3.11, 95, 98, NT, 2000, ME, VISTA, XP and Windows 7 …depending on how close they came to winning the nomination. The democrats use FOSS. The President uses Ubuntu, I agree.
Funny article except for the problem that all of these candidates (Barack Obama and Ron Paul included) are anti-freedom…
Agree w/ odd numbers above. But you got it all wrong.
All customized remixes:
Linux Mitt
Santorumbayon
Perry PCLinuxOS/Mythbuntu/Untangle/TinyMe oops i botched the install
Ron Paul FreeBSD
GNewtSenseGningrinchOS
BachmanBox
CainTOS/CrunchBang (dual-boot)
Pawlenty Puppy
Arch Huntsman
Obuntu
^ thanks for making it funny again
^ thanks for making it funny again!
Buru, thanks for making it funny again!
Actually, there was a story during the 2008 presidential campaign about what the campaigns were using on their servers. I seem to remember that everyone but Hillary Clinton was using Linux, and I think her campaign was using Windows NT. Maybe that’s why she’s “just” Secretary of State now.
But Romney? Clearly Ubuntu, the easiest one to use.
Larry: I remember that. According to nmap, Clinton has since switched to a BSD — perhaps she’s looking for a brighter future in 2016.
You’re right… this article is offensive. To associate Fedora, which is by definition and charter the epitome of free software, with the homophobic, anti-choice Rick Santorum is ridiculous. Considering the stance of this years GOP line-up it would be better to say which proprietary, closed distribution they would use. I seriously couldn’t imagine any of them using or supporting anything GNU (with the possible exception of Ron Paul).
I would see it being different, with the exception of perhaps Obama. I agree that he would use Ubuntu but for very different reasons. Where you see Ubuntu hindered by “other open source players”, I see them aiming for mass appeal, promising a lot in the beginning and then executing poorly. The original emphasis on Free Software that Ubuntu once had has faded. Then Ubuntu went to piss off early adopters by breaking compatibility with Debian. After it was established as “the distro” they go in, dislike what everyone else is doing and then write Unity – reducing usability seemingly for the SAKE OF pissing people off.
Yeah, Ubuntu is Obama’s distro.
Romney… He would be Kubuntu. It’s exactly the same as Obamabuntu, but tries to make itself look different with a different interface that organizes the same things differently and having a different letter come before it’s name.
Ron Paul would probably be Debian, if his campaign is any indication. The people who love Debian LOVE DEBIAN. It’s maintained by volunteers like Paul’s grassroots. Debian is now the most popular Linux distro on the net and if there’s one thing Paul’s supporters are good at it’s making him visible on the net. It also holds to a relatively strong ideological policy revolving around freedom, but makes SOME exceptions so it isn’t QUITE consistent with it’s own goals.
Gingrich would be FreeDOS. For much the same reason that the author mentioned, but claiming that “catering to an older bygone day” is a virtue itself. Nevermind that even Windows no longer gives a damn about DOS and those that HAVE TO because of dreadful management absolutely loathe it’s existence.
Huntsman would likely be Arch Linux. Mainly because to get up and running with Arch, you have to put up with a lot of annoyance and legwork. And then you just give up.
Perry is Fedora, for sure. Fedora is the proving ground for new FOSS, catering to a wide but specific set of users. However, the goals of Fedora are never really met and none of the work on Fedora means much until the good is accepted, the bad is rejected and the very distro itself is then scrapped to form Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
And Santorum… Well… Santorum is probably GNU HURD. Stubbornly pushing on while offending people left and right. being absolutely useless at anything except consuming bits and filling up valuable disk space (disk space is dirt cheap… but not cheap enough for Santorum). And despite the fact that it’s so hated, so vile and disgusting, Googling “Spread Santorum” or “Spread GNU HURD” both have direct hits.
The good part of the article is that it didn’t sully the good name of openSuse by associating it with politicians.
Everyone here seems to forget that Mitt Romney as Governor was supporting a move to open formats for all Massachusetts State executive branch paperwork. Remember how Microsoft lobbied the State Legislature to quash this.
I suspect he may be the only Republican or even Democrat that will be in the race that has gone that far. Big deal that some of them use Linux for their websites. That is mostly just a reflection of choosing a hosting company.
Matt Manos (No.2) has it right. “I would think Obama would use Ubuntu Satanic Edition.” Good call Matt.
At best this is a lame attempt to make a story *out of thin air*, Kinda like our current and not so past president had decided in making money,
None of the current hopefuls have any likeness to any distrubution of Linux except Ron Paul. So good luck with trying to make a comparison.
-Mitt Romney may be old – but there is nothing Faithful about him!
-Newt Gingrich “is a tough call? He would run BSDs? or have an operating system custom written just for him?” He is certainly not going to run BSD – first of all this is an insult to BSD community because they wouldn’t have anything to do with custome made or free, in fact Newt would still likely just run Windows, cause he wants to be where the money is! (of course the money part can be said for most of them)
-Rick Perry, I would agree with him trying to cultivate an image as a rough and tough cowbow, MS-Dos would be his claim to OS’s.
-Santorum – He would distro hop the main stream OS’s that are not Unix, Linux or BSD based!
-Barack Obama would not run an OS, because he is not interested with communication in the first place, just giving out commands!
It’s sad that you would try to make a far reaching comparison like this to Linux.. or for that matter any Open Source project.
Like someone said before, must be a slow news day, or you just don’t want to cover the real stories happening in the Tech and News.
No Surprise There…
Well, you knew you were going to draw some lightning…
But some of the comments are pretty funny in and of themselves. Interesting exercise to try to put a ‘personality’ on a Linux distribution. The fact that it’s presidential candidates here is immaterial. You could use any subset of widely know personalities.
Jack Nicholson would use gentoo… mind boggling, incomprehensible, seemingly impossible to grasp, yet the finished product is pure genius. In retrospect it all looks so easy.
Or you could use the Mercury 7.. Gus Grissom would use Mandriva… after a perfectly flawless performance and spot on delivery upon the Atlantic, he blew the hatch and sank the ship.
Good fun, but yer going to draw heat no matter what. People are just like that.
Funny-ish post, although I tend to agree with the other comments that Fedora for Santorum is a bad call. You should have picked something obscure that people keep trying to maintain or bring back from the dead, let’s say OpenSolaris.
Since both parties are corporate-backed, it’s best to imagine that all these distros are only used in campaigning and will be running as Oracle VirtualBoxes on Microsoft Windows Server 2011.
I do love the Obuntu comment though..!
Read with great trepidation — and WON’T read the comments for the same reason — but you actually did well with a tough assignment. I (dismayed Independent who loathes the entire array put forward by the Right) also think you nailed Obama’s choice.
Tres bien fait.
I really enjoyed this article and didn’t find it offensive at all… I liked Mr. Huntsman the best of the major Republican candidates and actually laughed the most at the reasons for his choice.
While I thought the reasons behind Mr. Romney’s pick were very good and true, it also seemed to me that with his executive suite background a commercial selection like Red Hat might also have worked… same stability and non-cutting-edge characteristics of Debian, but with a corporate backing.