[clue-tech] Distro musings

[Hex Star]

what's the point of not=quite-current?

203:~ hexstar$ not=quite-current
203:~ hexstar$ echo $not
quite-current

huh??? waste of bandwidth..<_<

On 7/29/06, Collins Richey <crichey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've drifted in and out of quite a few distros over the past 8 years.
>
> Slackware - my first - not enough packages
> Caldera - pretty good but SCO screwed the pooch
> Man[drake|driva] - never really liked it.
> SuSE - nevery really liked it, most especially the all-in-one
> configurator that screws with every configuration file in existence
> RedHat - you can have any package you want as long as we have deemed
> it's good for you (and our profit margin). Oh yeah, you can't really
> tell what you're running, because we like to screw a round with
> patches. The initial reply toany supportquestion: uhh, we don't
> support that.
> CentOS - does a better job of marrying the RHEL base to other useful
> packages.
> Novell - see SuSE, and oh yeah KDE is so passe (NOT)
> Debian testing - pretty darn good, lots of packages
> Ubuntu - pretty darn good, lots of packages
> Gentoo- my favorite for years
>
> Most recently (past 1 1/2 years) I've run mostly the Kubuntu
> development branch, but that came to an end recently for several
> reasons. I got a new machine that isn't well supported by the 6.06 LTS
> version I'm running (more below). I tried to upgrade to Efty, but
> their amateur attempts in the xorg modular arena screwed my system
> thoroughly. If you have not=quite-current hardware and stick with what
> 6.06 LTS provides, it's still a great system, as is Debian Etch.
>
> Right now, after a diversion, I'm back where I was 2 years ago Gentoo
> land. I don't have a complete set of packages built yet, but the
> system performs the way I expect a system to perform.
>
> I've grown rather jaded with respect  to the Enterprise systems, at
> least for Desktop users. They provide a good solid product, but
> they're all built around the concept of providing a base that is only
> upgraded if something is badly broken (doesn't work for me does not
> constitute badly broken!) or a vulnerability crops up. That's great
> for the corporate server environment and for the mythical corporate
> desktop environment (there are damn few of these at present), but you
> are SOL if you want something newer. Sometimes you're SOL even if you
> want what is broken to be fixed.
>
> What I am always looking for is a middle ground between the bleeding
> edge new development and the oldy-moldy enterprise distributions. I
> don't appreciate screwing around with glibc and the compiler or X on a
> daily basis, butI like the ability to try out newer versions of
> peripheral packages (Apache, MySQL, PostgrSQL, PHP, Ruby, etc.) on a
> STABLE BASE and preferably alongside the tried-and-true versions.
>
> In essence, that means Debian (possibly Ubuntu) or Gentoo. I'll still
> hang onto my CentOS and Ubuntu (maybe that will be usable again in a
> month or so) setups, but most of my effort will go into completing my
> Gentoo system.
>
> There is another advantage in working with Debian or Gentoo. Ubuntu
> has done a fantastic job popularizing Debian, and their forums and
> lists are populated by a lot of clueless newbies. No putdown intended;
> clueless newbies are the hackers of the future if well treated in the
> present. The Gentoo forums (and I'm sure the same appliesto Debian,
> but I have less experience there) and lists are visited mainly by
> users with a more technical background, and thus frequently the
> waiting time is less to get answers.
>
> And then there's the matter of kernels. Debian, Ubuntu, and the
> Enterprise solutions all believe in the pre-packaged kernel with an
> initrd and every module known to kerneldom. and pretty far removed
> from the current stable kernel Gentoo also offers this "perverted"
> practice with the genkernel tool. My simple kernel with only those
> functions I require will complete booting in about the same time it
> takes one of these monstrosities to uncompress. Also, waiting for a
> problem to be fixed in the pre-packaged versions is like watching
> paint dry, whereas I can easily compile a new kernel from kernel.org
> to see if it fixes a problem. Granted there are procedures for
> rebuilding the kernel package in Debian/Ubuntu, but you still get one
> of the all-in-one packages.
>
> Fortunately, Gentoo is very much window manager neutral. Most of the
> other suspects are in the category: Gnome is blessed by $DEITY, if you
> want something different, knock yourself out.
>
> End of musings.
>
> --
> Collins Richey
>      If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
>      of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.
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