[clue-tech] Distro musings

[Collins Richey]

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.