What distribution will *YOU* switch to?

morfic · Retired Dev Joined: 28 Jul 2004 Posts: 31

If you think about switching distros, i would like to hear WHY you consider switching, and WHICH distro you favor as your next distribution.
I am just wondering where gentoo seems most broken, for a broader range of peope, not just the people i saw switch away from gentoo.

Thanks in advance for your replies,

Daniel

Shadow Skill · Veteran Joined: 04 Dec 2004 Posts: 1023

I would probably move to freebsd where there is much better binary support than there is with Gentoo. Sometimes you just want to install something quickly hearing people whine that Gentoo is about installing from source and the sheer idiocy that you would need to create a bazillion binaries for every possible configuration (which no binary distro or Fbsd do.) doesn't address the simple fact that doing so in some cases is just an exercise in overkill especially on Laptops and older machines, not to mention waste of time if you find yourself needing to install an app to get something done when time is a factor.
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erik258 · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 5:25 am Post subject:

that is an interesting point. i know how little of a percentage these optimizations actually make. but it is kind of a cool idea to have relatively uinque binaries.

I for one would like it if the portage system's storage were overhauled. I read some about sqashfs storage possibilites; and am no expert by any means, but certainly do wonder whether i need, especailly on older machines, to wait 20 minutes for the portage tree to sync, and many minutes even to transder the many directories full of files around on hard drives. It really is rediculous how long it takes to extract even a snapshot. I wish there were an alternative and that migrating to it was made as easy as .. as the migration to 2005.1 to 2006.0, or devfs to udev (as long as you know it's happening) or 2.4 to 2.6, which i thought went miraculously well.
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Shadow Skill · Veteran Joined: 04 Dec 2004 Posts: 1023

it'd be interesting to see if Portage's tree could be made to use xml and fetch ebuilds on demand that way you have one file to sync up and you may even be able to eliminate the need for overlay functionality all together who knows.
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Ware wa mutekinari.
Wa ga kage waza ni kanau mono nashi.
Wa ga ichigeki wa mutekinari.

"First there was nothing, so the lord gave us light. There was still nothing, but at least you could see it."

playfool · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 5:45 am Post subject:

I already switched to Fedora but if I was to leave Fedora I think I'd go for Foresight Linux.

erik258 · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 6:16 am Post subject:

no offense, but i thought fedora sucked. it was so slow. I found it difficult to configure things the fedora people hadn't thought of, or at least i couldn't do it the gentoo way on the side when i couldnt' find the right module.

what do you like about it?
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PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

I tried PC-BSD, as an installer for FreeBSD. Plugging in my Razer Copperhead mouse made the BSD kernel "consistently" panic (i.e. reboot) immediately, which was extremely unimpressive. I was expecting an "unrecognized device" warning.

playfool · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 6:41 am Post subject:

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 3267 Location: Canada

I am still fine with Gentoo on my pair of rather powerful Opterons in the office.
It is also OK on an older machine I have to manage (Athlon XP1800+), although gcc upgrade took almost 2 days there.
On that machine Gentoo replaced some early FedoraCore.

On the other hand I have a laptop (5 year old but still snazy) which got stuck somewhere between RH9 and FedoraCore2.
Still on 2.4.x kernel. But it has all the hardware working (not alway trivial for a laptop) and I don't touch it.
But that old Firefox (1.0.x) start failing on some modern websites.

I also have old venerable desktop, 8 years with 1.5 year uptime stretches, which just had its (7 year old) hardddrive died.
That carried some upgraded RH7.2-7.3 - perhaps the best RH ever

Amazing, this 266Mhz machine run Gnome 1.0 in full glory
and beauty (still long for Gnome 1 icons

). But it has a second drive and I'm thinking about resurrection !

So for a laptop and this old box I have started looking at VectorLinux or perhaps xUbuntu

rambam

runningwithscissors

Earthwings · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 10:16 am Post subject:

I already switched to Kubuntu some months ago and don't really see an alternative to it currently. Gentoo at that moment didn't suit me anymore because constantly compiling things takes too long and Portage was slow, not even usable slow. Some Portage related utilities were removed as well and replaced by nothing or a slow Python based application. Altogether having an uptodate package status just took too much time and manual work.
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runningwithscissors · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 11:24 am Post subject:

Currently, I do not have a problem with Gentoo. The quirks that I sometimes encounter during updates haven't been too serious or unfixable.
And I am not naive enough to believe that any other distro completely eliminates all such inconveniences.

I do understand that binary distributions are fast and suitable for most tasks, and I'd probably use Debian if I decided to use one, but Gentoo is decent. Does what I expect and I learn a little bit along the way.

Sachankara · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 11:56 am Post subject:

Gentoo may have quite a few problems, but that's nothing compared to other distributions. Also, once you get hooked on the amount of packages available in portage, there's few people who will honestly change permanently to other distributions.
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krolden · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 2:32 pm Post subject:

Although I'm perfectly happy with Gentoo ATM, the "distro" I'd be switching to would probably be FreeBSD. It feels like a stable OS that offers both binary as source installs. Plus it has a nice community as well.

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

HS · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2005 Posts: 10

I'm not going to switch. But there is thing that can make me to switch - it is removing of packages, that I use, from portage tree. I've already switched from RedHad (7.x) because of this reason. They started to removing packages from distro and I had to maintain them "by hand". It was just too much work so I switched to Gentoo.

Gentoo already have one similar example - xmms removing. It is very unpleasant step but as I wrote I'm still happy with Gentoo and far from switching.

If I switch, it would be probably Debian.

Phenax · l33t Joined: 10 Mar 2006 Posts: 972

CreepingDeath · n00b Joined: 10 Sep 2005 Posts: 12

Honestly since I started using Gentoo, I've been constantly trying the latest releases of Fedora Core, SuSe, and kubuntu; so far I haven't found that I liked any of them better then my tried and true Gentoo installs. I'll admit sometimes I've been frustrated with the headaches that come with portage, the latest being the rather abrupt removal of XMMS, but overall Gentoo speaks to the control freak within. I like the idea that there isn't anything installed that I didn't put there, there is no one else making the decision of when to goto, say GCC 4.1, or Xorg 7.1, or anything else for that matter.

Right now I'm using Kubuntu Edgy on my laptop, but I'm probably going to switch back to Gentoo there too since I don't really feel like I gained anything making the switch. Hell I still haven't found the SMP kernel there yet, still using the -386 version because thats all I see in Adept.

If tomorrow Gentoo was gone and I had to make a move though, it would likely be to Kubuntu or perhaps I'd give Slack another go. Its been many years since I tried it out (basically since I found Gentoo). I like SuSe too, but it feels kinda slow.. could just be perception or the fact that 10.0 wasn't really that great. (and 10.1 was worse); maybe 10.2 will be better.

morfic · Retired Dev Joined: 28 Jul 2004 Posts: 31

pbardet · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 4:55 pm Post subject:

Glad you asked the question.

I'm currently considering Ubuntu since I'm tired of handling the "block of the day".
Ubuntu seems to be very popular and I expect support will be up to the standards I expect from a Linux distro, unlike the current gentoo.
First xmms was removed without notification, except a message a week later without an apology in the weekly newsletter.
Second, Xorg has changed flags 2 days in a row, necessiting a big recompile both times.
Now, I have to handle a different problem everyday. First, Fox (no idea what this was doing on my system) was blocking some other packages. Today, it's callgrind blocking valgrind... Yesterday, I got invalid digest while trying to upgrade openssh. Still haven't tried to recompile today, since I have to handle callgrind

Most of the good software is masked, therefore, there is a need to handle a lot of masked dependancies that at some point will break the "stable" environment. This creates a lot of mess that I hope will be removed by switching to a stable release every 6 months. The gentoo model was very promising, but it doesn't work when you want to use Linux for productive stuff since you spend more time fixing craps than using it.

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

olger901 · l33t Joined: 17 Mar 2005 Posts: 625

I am not planning on switching, gentoo runs fine on my notebook and I do not have any complaints at all. (Expect for the fact that stage1 support was removed...as it did help IMHO)

brucebertrand · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 6:18 pm Post subject:

I've used Arch Linux a bit and it seems pretty good, though the community isn't as active as Gentoo's.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Probably in this order: OpenSuSe, FC, Debian, *BSD. I've already tried Ubuntu and didn't care for it.
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