[clue-tech] Looking for distro recommendation

[dennisjperkins at comcast.net]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Mccowan" <dmccowan2 at gmail.com> 
To: dkwloki-clue at yahoo.com, "CLUE technical discussion" <clue-tech at cluedenver.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2010 11:09:26 AM 
Subject: Re: [clue-tech] Looking for distro recommendation 

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 3:52 PM, David Williams <dkwloki-clue at yahoo.com> wrote: 
> 
> Guys, 
> 
> I am looking for a distro recommendation for a netbook. 
> I would like a decent desktop, and want to do surfing and a bit of development and network hacking. 
> 

I would suggest Arch Linux, 
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Compared_to_Other_Distributions, 
it is quite snappy and lean, with decent package management. Arch 
makes it east to keep the system small, and fast, without having to 
compile everything. 

I am recent coming back to it after using Debian for a long while 
because the machine I am currently using is quit low end, but still 
686 and just switching I have seen a massive speed jump. I know that 
on the Debian mailing list that comment gets shouted down but for 
non-64bit x86 they still think compiling to 386 is fine. Arch is 
quick to set up including the install of packages but they endeavor to 
patch the source as little as possible, and so configuration is though 
upstream methods usually config files, (which makes things easy to 
backup and port to another sys). They do have an /etc/rc.conf that 
makes editing run levels a snap and the only services turned by 
default are syslog-ng, the network if configured, netfs if configured, 
and cron; as such Arch has excellent boot speed without any fine 
tuning. 

If ease of administration is more your game and you have more up to 
date hardware, I would suggest Debian, 
http://www.debian.org/intro/why_debian. Ideally squeeze the current 
testing, testing itself, or sid. In all three set ups once configured 
administration is a breeze and for standard tools Debian's defaults 
are usually just fine if not easy to change via debconf. Since your 
are use to Ubuntu it would be less of a culture shock than an rpm 
based distro. If you choose not to auto install recommends and 
suggested packages it can be kept lean, also I feel that Debian has 
the best package management despite that many apt like features are 
standard in other distros now, this is mainly because Debian is quite 
willing to patch and has excellent policy. This policy does have some 
down sides for the rate in which packages enter the various Debian 
level. For example although there packages can be opened with standard 
unix tool, there are not simple tar.[gz,bz2,xz] files. Reading there 
package database and installing with dpkg can take a large amount of 
time on slow hardware. On the other hand you would likely never have 
to compile anything, which can be good or bad. 

Don't get me wrong, I like both distros, have used them a lot, 5+ 
years for Debian over my 10 years of Linux and around 1.5 years for 
Arch, although not recent until as of a week. I do plan to try give 
Gentoo another try some time in the future once I get my tech back up 
and have a spare system to hose, and maybe also give Crux, Slackware 
or one of the BSDs a turn. 


> I have used Ubuntu, it seems to get slower w/each release, and has endless updates. 
> I have used CentOS as a desktop and that has been OK, not as rich an environment as Ubuntu. 
> 

Have you considered switching away form a desktop environment and to a 
plain window manager. This can often cause a surprising change in 
system responsiveness and with a netbook can be a great way to remove 
clutter and maximize screen space. I personally use ratpoison, 
http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/, 
http://freshmeat.net/articles/the-antidesktop but I realise that it 
may not be for every one. Other choices include jwm, 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JWM, and icewm 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceWM. I think both support applets so 
you can use things like nm-aplet although I am not sure of that 
Because I don't use them myself. 
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I like Arch Linux too. I plan to be at the Installfest this Saturday if you want/need help installing it. Arch does take more work to set up than Ubuntu because you only get a command line after installation, so the next step is installing X.org and your favorite desktop and apps, but keeping it up to date is easy. It is a rolling distro, so you don't have new releases to deal with twice a year. It is also more bleeding edge than Ubuntu, but I find that it works great. 
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