***Yeah, and as much as I love Debian (and ubuntu) and avidly used Red
Hat and all its friends before, there are plenty of Slackware and
Gentoo folks out there. We _could_ strive to be absolutely
comprehensive, in which case we should add everything we find
including BSD. (How do you list Unix these days? I used to us HP
Unix, but that's it.) How many cool little icons can we have, Justin?
If it works on one version of Linux, a piece of software pretty much works on other versions. I don't think it's necessary to specify specific distributions such as Debian, Red Hat, Gentoo, Slackware, etc. Justin mentioned the only reason he listed so many at the site is for SEO. On the other hand, if a FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD or PC-BSD or other type of BSD user is looking for software, there's currently no way for them to search the site easily. If it works on Linux or Mac OSX, it may work on a BSD system. Then again, it may not. I realize there are several alternative operating systems and we can't list every one, but BSD is an important and highly stable system for servers and in my opinion, one of the best systems as far as responsiveness and efficiency for low resource machines. So, it's great for schools that can't afford the latest technology or just want a stable server to set up and forget about. I feel it would be useful for any of the users of the various BSD systems if we could let them know what was available in education for their systems.
As to UNIX, I guess I was thinking Sun Solaris, HP, AIX, SGI IRIX, basically any of the Unix compatible operating systems usually used as servers, but definitely not Linux or BSD. These machines are often even more limited as to what software runs on them. Some programs that work fine on Linux or BSD will not work on them. However, these types of machines are popular for businesses and certain schools as servers. It would be nice if a sysadmin or someone who's doing the work of a sysadmin with one of these systems could easily find useable software for it. Usually, the web applications like Apache are popular. However, we have some DBAs here that are handling our educational data warehouse database on AIX and I think they'd be thrilled at this point just to have a decent editor program that would work in console mode.
As I mentioned, there are several other operating systems, DOS/FreeDOS, Reactos, Syllable, Haiku, AROS, Plan 9, Minix, etc. I realize it's difficult to cover them all and we need to draw the line somewhere. However, I do think BSD and UNIX systems are sufficiently used that they warrant their own categories and their requirements are sufficiently different that we can't just go tell users to go look up another UNIX-like system like Linux or Mac OS X and whatever they find will work on their systems. What works on BSD will usually work on Mac OS X, but the reverse is often not true.
Going by what operating system categories I typically see in the statistics at my own web site, the most common or popular are usually Windows, mobile devices, Linux, Mac, BSD and occasionally Unix users. I think if we have content/categories for BSD and Unix users, if they're not currently frequenting the schoolforge site now, adding it and letting them know about it, should allow us to reach and assist more people.
Sincerely,
Laura