[clue-talk] Hello CLUE

[T. Joseph Carter]

On Sun, Jul 30, 2006 at 09:35:47PM -0600, Collins Richey wrote:
> FYI, I'm the curmudgeon who started off the current round of distro
> discussions.
> 
> Quick summary. I've been through quite a few including Debian and
> Gentoo. My first real exposure to the Debian way came with Kubuntu. I
> love the general setup and the package manager, and both Debian
> Testing and Kubuntu 6.06 worked fine for me until my PC died and I
> bought an off the shelf Gateway AMD64. The Kubuntu installer (shlicker
> 'n schnott) helped me to repartition the WinXP, but I had problems
> with sound and nic, so I moved on to Gentoo (old love affair). It
> didn't help that an upgrade to the Kubuntu Testing branch (Efty)
> fsck'd my system thoroughly.

Personally, I am holding off on AMD64 for another six months at least.  No
problem with the hardware, but tons with Linux distributions' support of
it.  Very immature at present, and I am shocked by how much stuff just
doesn't work.  Too much code that assumes all processors are ia32,
especially if you want to start talking video stuff.

Debian just needs to give up on having a stable, period.  Gentoo needs to
dial back a little and have things actually work more often than not.
Ubuntu needs to care about something other than GNOME, with KDE and XFCE
and school people working on their own little projects on the side.

There isn't a perfect distribution.  What we've got are a lot of imperfect
ones that can almost sortof get the job done with additional stuff the
makers of those distributions can't or won't provide.  (he says noting the
recent example that Ubuntu has MythTV 0.18 packages that break on install
attempt and has outright rejected working 0.19+fixes packages which are
provided in an external repository..)


> I'm not too surprised to hear your problems with Debian internals. In
> the past most people I knew considered Debian to be "Linux with
> ATTITUDE", and there was the time when you could have any desktop
> manager you wanted as long as you spelled it GNOME and an ancient
> version of that to boot <grin>. I don't think the Ubuntu project has
> helped, since Shuttleworth paid bucks to get his hands on some prime
> Debian developers.

Regarding that, I did my best.  In the end, after enough spin to reverse
the flow of time, even I don't know what part I played if any in the
licensing of Qt under both QPL and GPL which effectively ended the license
war.  The whole exercise left me rather pragmatic and skeptical of the
fearless leaders of our movement, regardless of which faction of said
movement we're talking about.

At the time I got involved, I could only use X at 320x200 256 color, so
I frankly could use neither KDE nor GNOME.  Nowadays I'd call them two
opposing extremes of how to reimagine the Windows XP interface.  Right
down to those annoying as %*@&! taskbar pop-up balloons!


> Welcome to CLUEful Denver.

Thanks--they tell me I have another six weeks of what they tell me is
really weird hot + wet weather.  Guh.  At least it beats what Oregon has
had the past month.  Global warming in action, or something.