Linux Format "Ultimate Distros" Article

[blaster999]

Hello Paul,

Thanks for making the thing clear. Now I understand the position of the LF magazine and why some nominants are a bit strange. Sorry for calling all the LF stuff "a bunch of noobs" - I was in a bad mood when I wrote this (I was forced to write programs in Visual Basic that day by my university). You know, I am a gentoo zealot, so I could not accept that Gentoo has not taken the 1st place

However, I disagree with the nomination "Ultimate distro". In my opinion there is no such thing as ultimate distro. Mandrake could be good on a desktop machine, but I wouldn't use it on a server. Linspire is much hated among the geeks, but it could really help linux newbies migrate from winslows. All distros have pros and cons. The criteria you chose are not "ultimate" - pehaps the "Ultimate desktop distro" would be a better name.

Cheers,
Gleb

[andyfraser33]

'lo all,

Hi Paul,

Second, we were indeed referring to compiling the system from scratch, ie stage 1 - sorry we didn't make that clear in the article.

What hardware was used? Someone in this thread said the article stated that the install took 24 hours. My tests on AthlonXP boxes suggests that a stage 1, X and KDE would take no more than 15 hours. Not a major point to raise. There's no point in quibbling about a few hours.

Fourth, the final table of placings was this:

1st: Mandrake
2nd: Red Hat
3rd: SUSE
4th: Debian, Yellow Dog
6th: Gentoo
7th: Linspire
8th: Conectiva
9th: Knoppix, Ubuntu
11th: Slackware
12th: MEPIS
13th: Turbolinux
14th: Lycoris, Yoper

Just what I was looking for. Thanks.

Have you run mad? Linspire at number 7!. Does Linspire still default to running as root unless a user sets up a user account after install?

Sixth: Yes, our testing was quite specific: we wanted to find a distro that anyone could pick up and use.

I'm surprised that Gentoo came in 6th then. My Dad's anyone and I doubt he'd be able to install Gentoo (he's a Mandrake user BTW and not a random Linux newbie).

[RayDude]

I'm mostly a lurker. I've been using Linux as a hobby since 1994-1995 timeframe. I can't even remember what kernel that was.

I ran mandrake when it came out. I loved it because it was easy to install and use.

However, getting new things to run on it was a major pain in the butt. "Where's a freakin' RPM" I'd shout inside my hollow head, listening to the echo fade.

Then I'd download the source, read the readme, run ./configure and hope that it worked. And if it didn't, I was on google, trying to find some other guy who had the same problem. Sometimes I was lucky, sometimes not.

Around 2000 I was running my own domain on a Mandrake box in my house on my DSL line. I loved it, but then I lost my DSL line (ISP implosion of 2000-2001, remember that?) and switched to Sprint Broadband. Not suitable for hosting domains.

In 2001ish I started looking at other distros. Here's my findings:

1. Mandrake / redhat / fedora. The same as they've always been.
2. Novel. Might as well be Mandrake or Redhat.
3. Linspire <- want MS Windows without the MS Windows price? Perfect for Mom and Dad. I actually like this distro. Its not powerful enough for me, but its very nice for the desktop.

I haven't played with much with other distros.

I can't even remember how I found Gentoo. I remember my shock the first time I installed it at having to do everything by hand. "Man," I thought, "this feels soo nineties."

But then I found the FLAGS command, went a little berzerk, built some amazingly fast and broken systems. Then learned to make stable and faster systems.

Slowly I've been adding ability to my systems. Started playing with HDPARM a few months ago. Just after crashing two systems with the USE command. One was my server, I rebuilt it from scratch in about two days using udev for the first time.

I wish I had a Ben Franklin for every time I've broken my gentoo. *grin*

I have my domain running on DSL again in my house on a "~x86" Gentoo box. Absolute bleeding edge. To be honest, its just simply cool to be running the latest kernel, the latest apache, etc etc etc.

Plus, it should be pretty secure considering how fast the linux community fixes things.

I run my Dell Laptop on Gentoo, its an old install that I managed to clean up a great deal and its running stably. I even got ndiswrapper working with a 108Mbps Wlan card.

Which brings me to the best advantage Gentoo has to offer.

When ever I couldn't get something to work, I came to this forum, put a few key words in that search box in the upper right hand corner, and invariably you guys already had the answer posted.

Plus there are howtos written by community members that help me understand the intent behind the way you do things.

I've only got 20 something posts because I haven't needed to post much. If you knew how many hundreds of times these forums saved my wretched ~x86 or USE= butt, you'd be shocked that I could make so many stupid mistakes. But luckilly for me I wasn't the only one...

I'm not sure you guys should create a GUI install. I think a nice perl or Python install script would be good enough, one that lets you shell out to do your own thing periodically would be cool.

If you guys make this too mainstream you're going to have to support all those people who don't actually want to know how things work.

And that's the main difference between gentoo and the other distros, you guys want to know how it all works, make it as efficient as possible, and make that knowledge available for the community and easilly used within portage.

One last story.

At work we run Solaris and RedHat boxes. But IS has not yet given us a desktop linux solution. So I took my new Dell 3GHz HT, resized the XP partition and installed Gentoo. It took a while to get some things working. Ethernet, AGP, and a couple other things, but now I have a KDE 3.3.2 box with Evolution and Ximian Connector (which still has memory leaks BTW), running a lot of our linux applications natively with NIS, NISPLUS, home and project pages mounted through NFS. The machine looks exactly like IS made it, except its not in DNS.

My productivity has at least doubled because of linux, and now, when I want a new tool, chances are very high that all I'll have to do to get it is type, "emerge <tool-name>". Just yesterday I needed to view some graphics and installed the gimp with a one line command. Not many distros offer that ability.

Emerge is one reason I run Gentoo, another is because of you guys , this forum and the awesome support that's built in, and another because of the ability to tailer each machine to its needs instead of installing a bunch of stuff I don't want or need.

Keep up the good work guys.

Raydude

[LucaSpiller]

Thanks for that Paul, it's good to know you didn't do it on purpose. If it wasn't for you though I would have never got into Gentoo, so thanks - I have 56k, so the two disks you provided, with over 1GB of packages, in issue 58 was fantastic! (Disclaimer: LF aren't paying me. )

I agree with blaster999 about the name being a bit unspecific, but its not the end of the world. I am also interested in the point andyfraser33 raised about what hardware you used? Even in your Mailserver section (letters from readers) you say about how long it takes to compile stuff on Gentoo, but I don't really think this is much of a disadvantage. There is absolutely no reason why you can't continue doing your work while it is compiling.

[carpman]

Hello, i started using linux back when it was on floppy disks for install

Only played with it never used it as working system (web server excluded) as i was not comfortable with it and it just was not up being the desktop i needed. Though saying this i really wanted it to be as found window a pain both to use and support.

Over th years i kept dipping my toes back in the linux water with different distibs but the infernal rpm depency put me off and for some reason i could not get my head around apt.

That was until i installed gentoo 1.2 and was hooked, i learnt so much installing this and future versions that i now only use gentoo.

Also to speed up installs i use the developers method and specifically this post at bottom of this page wihich reports to give stage1 install from stage3:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php? ... &start=375


I installed mandrake for a friend recently, and yes it has central control cent that makes things easy, epsecially for newbies but i still prefer gentoo.

[benyang22]

Before switching to gentoo 2 months ago, I had used Knoppix (hard-disk installed) for about 2 years. Knoppix was serving me well, but I didn't dare to upgrade. Then KDE was getting too outdated and I did an upgrade to it; it broke my system.

I didn't know how to fix it. So I was looking for something to fresh install. I wanted something more upgradable in the future. And I found gentoo.

Compared to my Knoppix system, gentoo is much more responsive, and thus more pleasant to use; I don't know whether it is because of the newer KDE.

I want to keep my gentoo system to live for a long time. I dont't like fresh installation, as it interrupts my work too much. My gentoo seems to hold up well so far, after I have upgraded many packages including from KDE3.3.1 to 3.3.2. The speed gain from gentoo is just a nice side benefit.

[A.S. Pushkin]

I've not yet seen the articles, but as a person new to Gentoo, I would concur that Gentoo rates better, based on my experience, so far. I have used most of the distros mentioned and have good things to say about most.

I was very impressed with Mandrake and how well my machine was configured without much input from me, much better than SuSE, which I have long used. Debian has a very good standing though it lacked some of the nicer pre-configuration one gets from SuSE or Mandrake, at least when I was using it back in 1998-2000 period.

I have a special remark for SuSE, which was, or seemd more cutting edge than Debian, but I found it to be much more buggy, not apps, but installation scripts.

The one difference that Gentoo shows is that it is not a turn key system, while the others, particulalry SuSE, RedHat and Mandrake are. I suspect that the author of the article, whether he intended or not was looking for that sort of system. If so Gentoo loses, but it does not mean Gentoo is lost.

One reason I decided to try Gentoo was mirrored by a friend, who worked for DEC for years. Any of the major distros throw everything from the kitchen sink to the loo. As example I would use Postfix, but typically I prefer kmail.

Gentoo would seem the Porsche 956 or McLaren F1 of Linux, but neither of those cars is for the beginner.

I'm moving to Gentoo as I beliiev it will provide it will continue my education in LInux and provide me with more applications for serious multimedia work. If all goes well it may even via Bochs or like help to move nearly completely away from the Money $queezer.

[vdboor]

It says that "in terms of overall increase in performance, Gentoo is unlikely to bring more than 15%". If you consider Mandrake (ranked #1) takes more than a minute to boot up (to the login manager) for me where as Gentoo takes 20 secs to get to the command line and 30 secs to the login manager, I would say that is definately more than a 15% speed increase.

No, that means Mandrake starts more services at boot time. My system takes 2 minutes to boot and login to KDE, because I start a lot of background services.

My previous Slackware system wasn't much slower then Gentoo. But it was more stable as well.!

There are also comments about how "compiling for 386 usually creates a program that's only the tiniest amount slower than it's 686 equivalent" - I was lead to believe that Gentoo is much faster when you use the appropriate USE flags because your application is only designed to run on your CPU.

'Believe' is the most biased view of things.. And it's not a scientific view either.

• I tend to say these days: "Whoohoo my system is so fast, it's compiling all day". I think you understand the irony, because it's true on my AMD1800 with 1G ram.
• Debian prelinks all their packages by default AFAIK.
• I'm running a desktop system. My USE flags include just about very feature SUSE/Redhat/Mandrake also include in their packages, so it's useless for me.
• ./configure scripts try to find all packages it can link the binary too. At a large Gentoo system, that means packages get linked against a lot of cruft.
• Debian packages are compiled at a minimal system to make sure the packages don't have much dependencies. (having mod_php linked to qt/X doesn't improve the performance of apache for example).

They do say one thing good about Gentoo though, Portage because "it's the only package manager that can hold up a candle to APT" - apart from that they don't really say much, if you consider how much they said about APT which has many simular features to Portage it seems they definately have something against us.

• APT already has an "apt-get security" feature portage still doesn't have.
• APT produces a list of "recommended packages", which portage doesn't have.
• APT has some of the best gui's.
• APT doesn't take 2 minutes to calculate my dependencies.. (no really, portage needs 2 minutes if you have 20 packages in /etc/portage/package.keywords)

I would even think APT is superior.. expect for the less up-to-date packages on Debian, and fewer "hobbyist packages" Gentoo provides.

"Gentoo is little more than a solution looking for a problem: 100% of all desktop machines sold today have CPU cycles to waste, which means that getting even an extra 20% out of your applications will make little difference."

I entirely agree with that quote: what advantage does a fast-application have when it's idle all the time (like most desktop applications)? How are your CFLAGS going to improve that?

Some people over-optimize their applications, which results in large binaries taking ages to load. And since my gentoo desktop is compiling a lot of time, my desktop isn't that fast.

but as a metadistro it is definately the most versatile

I find myself playing my own distributor.. Solving conflicts people at SUSE/Redhat/Mandrake would solve otherwise.. But then again, my Gentoo system works for now, and I haven't found the best alternative yet.


I'm sorry to disappoint you..

[vdboor]

Have you run mad? Linspire at number 7!. Does Linspire still default to running as root unless a user sets up a user account after install?

They did mention this is a funny way:

TO imitate Windows like no other distro dared to do, Linspire kept the user logged on as root all the time, so like Windows, you can delete any file, install any software and spread viruses. Of course, to users accustomed to the Windows way of working, this choice made sense - at the expense of infuriating Linux veterans.

Final verdict:
Slick and refined, but any distro that bases its security model on Windows deservces a bit of a kicking

[theBlackDragon]

<snap>

As you are mostly talking about Debian/apt it might be worthwhile to give you my experiences with it.

You say that apt has one of the best gui's around: true, but I don't care about them.

It's faster than portage: also true.

Also apt install dependencies I don't wanat because the package maintainer has compiled the program with them, who said I wanted XFree when installing OpenLDAP? Nobody and I guess a lot of people running servers don't want XFree (or any X-server for that matter) on it.

Apt doesn't include a lot of java related stuff in fact, also i just apt-getted tomcat and I can't seem to get it to work, that's the worst I've seen _any_ distsro do to me, hell, it's even easier to setup on windows! Same go for other servers, getting Apache1 and PHP to work toghether took me days! In the end I just upgraded to Sarge and installed Apache2, but then I tried getting SSL to work, it's just a plain pain in the ass... And don't count on Google to help you, I didn't find anything useful, only lots of people with the same problem without a solution...

Not to mention that building packages for apt is pretty hard especially compared to writing ebuilds.

The Debian community has a nice little reputation of being very very unfriendly (everybody should just rtfm...even if there is none).

Debian's documentation just plain sucks, it's the worst I've seen from any Linux distro, though last time I checked it had somewhat improved, but it's still bad.


So what do I like about Gentoo over Debian/apt (mind you, I still use Debian):
- it's relatively easy to write ebuilds or modify existing ones
- nearly everything is available on the mirrors (eg you don't have to go hunting around the net for mirrors to add to your source.list...)
- great documentation (Docs, Wiki)
- very responsive and friendly community (Forums, IRC)
- sane defaults if there are defaults (thinking about Tomcat atm) and easy configuration when there aren't (PHP/SSL with Apache)
- great init system

So what does Debian have that Gentoo hasn't?
- fast install
- apt is blazing fast so easy upgrading installing
- it's been tested to the bone (stable that is)

Oh well, I've probably forgotten some things but those are the main things I can think of atm.

[andyfraser33]

Have you run mad? Linspire at number 7!. Does Linspire still default to running as root unless a user sets up a user account after install?

They did mention this is a funny way:

TO imitate Windows like no other distro dared to do, Linspire kept the user logged on as root all the time, so like Windows, you can delete any file, install any software and spread viruses. Of course, to users accustomed to the Windows way of working, this choice made sense - at the expense of infuriating Linux veterans.

Final verdict:
Slick and refined, but any distro that bases its security model on Windows deservces a bit of a kicking

I like that.

On a more serious note though it's no wonder that Linux veterans hate Linspire. Anything that teaches newbies to run as root is a very, very, very, very bad idea.

[LucaSpiller]

I agree with most of the things you said vdboor, over the last week I have learned quite a lot about Gentoo from this topic. This I just have to disagree with though:

No, that means Mandrake starts more services at boot time. My system takes 2 minutes to boot and login to KDE, because I start a lot of background services.

Mandrake has a thing so that all the useful services (i.e. webserver, mail server, database, printing, sound etc) start after X has been started. My Gentoo system loads all of these and more but it still quicker so Mandrake must have a load of rubbish they don't need.

My previous Slackware system wasn't much slower then Gentoo. But it was more stable as well.!

I am afraid I can't say the same about Mandrake - it crashed for me after about 22 hours uptime. - while idle.

You sound like you like Debian a lot more, which I don't have anything against, but why are you using Gentoo? I haven't tried Debian (I couldn't get it installed - it wouldn't detect my cd drive or ethernet port) so I am curious about it.

[vdboor]

You sound like you like Debian a lot more, which I don't have anything against, but why are you using Gentoo? I haven't tried Debian (I couldn't get it installed - it wouldn't detect my cd drive or ethernet port) so I am curious about it.

What I've seen about Debian so far impressed me a lot, and it's one of the few distro's I can compare portage with. I'm still looking for alternatives, but none have the amount and kind of packages Gentoo has (or uses Gnome, etc..). I guess I demand too much.

I used Slackware before, but I was compiling too many packages manually. Upgrading them is a real pain. Gentoo does this automatically. I can emerge just about everything, including the smallest packages or new stuff like FreeNX, gtk-qt-engine, games.

So what do I like about Gentoo over Debian/apt (mind you, I still use Debian):
- it's relatively easy to write ebuilds or modify existing ones
- nearly everything is available on the mirrors (eg you don't have to go hunting around the net for mirrors to add to your source.list...)
- great documentation (Docs, Wiki)
- very responsive and friendly community (Forums, IRC)
- sane defaults if there are defaults (thinking about Tomcat atm) and easy configuration when there aren't (PHP/SSL with Apache)
- great init system

So what does Debian have that Gentoo hasn't?
- fast install
- apt is blazing fast so easy upgrading installing
- it's been tested to the bone (stable that is)

I agree with this. Also worth mentioning are opengl-update, gcc-config, the etc-update concept, and readable init scripts.

[Phonics3k]

well I am a gentoo fan, but I did think that SuSE was a very good distro...

I have this magazine and have read the article and I am happy gentoo got that far because of the criterea it was based on..

I think That gentoo is something that you either love or hate...

[Erlend]

I actually moved to Gentoo partly because of reading that article.

They rated Mandrake, which they admitted was unstable and slow - but just addictively easy to use, #1. I've used Fedora and SuSE (preferred Fedora). Based on this I decided that it didn't matter, as long as the distro I chose was somewhere in the top 6. After browsing the Gentoo forums and seeing the amazing level of support and lots of questions being answerred I went for it.

And I would have to say Gentoo is the best distro I've used. Once set up (which isn't especially difficult) it's extremely low maintenance. I now only very occassionally use Windows for games. One of the biggest strong points I see is that there aren't rpms available for everything - you you're going to have to compile from sources eventually: so you might as well have a system which is at least good at building software.

The only things I'm waiting for now are:
1. xcomposite to make gnome a little faster
2. Acrobat Reader 7
3. Some way of making it boot in under 40s (reiserfs takes ~7s to mount).

On saying that I know someone who was deterred by the same article.

One thing that was really quite untrue wrt that article, something along the lines of: "Gentoo users are usually the first to get new packages, but the last to use them due to long compile times". They seem to be missing that rpms have to be compiled from source before being released.

Erlend

[LucaSpiller]

As you can probably guess boot time vary between users and whatever options they have. After I had installed the base system using nearly all the defaults in the handbook, I got around 30 seconds to the kdm login screen - kdm does take a considerable long time to load so I would recommend something else - not bad on my Athlon XP 2600.

Anyway, I have now got most of the stuff I need in the system and have it near enough configured to be as fast as possible. Cleaning out the kernel config saved me a lot of time - ever since I added bluetooth support (experiment didn't work; bluetooth on phone still doesn't work ; after a million repairs and phone replacement ; don't buy a Motorola V525) my kernel seems to take around 5 seconds longer to load. I have still yet to try and get X to start before everything else has finished loading though, simular to Mandrake.

[humbletech99]

I read that same article with the unintentional mouthing "What the f**k are they on about?!!!"

Mandrake Number 1, get lost!

I agree that overall Debian and Gentoo are close, with Debian just edging it because it's "The Daddy", but come on, I wouldn't let Mandrake anywhere near any of my machines!

SUSE is understandable, it's very polished, graphical tools, and a long standing runner, along with the everywhereness of RPM.

Fedora, ok for newbies, serious dudes usually scoff at it though (I used to run it at work, but not at home, there are better distros, like Debian and Gentoo!)

YellowDog? Who uses that apart from PPC users who in the long run are now gonna be merged into x86 anyways with apple's intel deal...


A More realistic view might be:

1. SUSE
2. Debian
3 Gentoo

From a user's point of view SUSE only wins on polish and speed of setup/ease of use.

[brainiac_ghost]

gentoo did come first in the readers awards though and i've seen gentoo on the cover disk more than i've seen any other distro

[humbletech99]

yeah, it does seem to be a coverdisk fav, doesn't it?

Maybe the type of person who'd use gentoo is more into Linux and would take the time to do the survey?

As oppposed to lazy Fedora/SUSE/noobieGUI types (even if there are more - I don't know) who can only be bothered with a couple of mouse clicks and didn't take the time to vote?

[slycordinator]

It says that "in terms of overall increase in performance, Gentoo is unlikely to bring more than 15%". If you consider Mandrake (ranked #1) takes more than a minute to boot up (to the login manager) for me where as Gentoo takes 20 secs to get to the command line and 30 secs to the login manager, I would say that is definately more than a 15% speed increase.

"Overall performance" is more than just boot time.

There are also comments about how "compiling for 386 usually creates a program that's only the tiniest amount slower than it's 686 equivalent" - I was lead to believe that Gentoo is much faster when you use the appropriate USE flags because your application is only designed to run on your CPU.

You were lead to believe something false. They were correct.

Looking over this I am really unhappy, was this written by a member of the "I love Debian and hate Gentoo club" or something?

If they love Debian so much... why did it tie for 4th?

While the article doesn't seem great, this isn't some anti-Gentoo conspiracy.

[humbletech99]

adding my 2 cents, I have to say I do feel a quick response on a well tuned stage1 machine as compared to a standard i386 distro. I remember when I was used to Gentoo lean and compiled on my laptop, one day I had a mood, got fed up with the amount of time I had "wasted" on Gentoo getting my desktop and everything, then decided to go back and try another quicker distro. Slapped on Fedora and I was like, "What the hell is this cr*p?"

Boy did I regret that, kept Fedora for a while and then switched again... I won't have one of those moods again!

[carpman]

Hello, have posted to this thread before but thought i would add a bit more, i am a big Gentoo fan and would use every time if i could, unfortunatly the one area it lacks is support by webhosting solutions, this mainly because of users ability to configure so many aspects of build.

Now i know you can get gentoo running as a very good server but if you are providing hosting services then end users want easy point and click control panel.


When to talking to windows users about linux i always push Gentoo as best distro but if the user is not experienced i recomend they start with Ubuntu/Kbuntu then if they like linux and want to learn more then try Gentoo.

As Ubuntu/Kbuntu are based on debian you get apt, it is easy to install and has good forum support.

So as has already been said there is no Ultimate Distro, just ones that are good for users they are aimed at:

Power users -- Gentoo
Others --- Ubuntu/Kbuntu
hosting - depends on what control panel


PS when i talk about hosting control panels i know some can be 'made' t work with gentoo but i don't want to be hacking installs when doing upgrades, just to much room for fubars and downtime.

[humbletech99]

Indeed, I agree.

Gentoo would be even better if there was a precompiled repository that you could so something like

Code: Select all

emerge -bin programname

and it would get the precompiled instead of source, be much quicker to install stuff like Debian does...

Then maybe it would get more acceptance for web hosting stuff, if using precompiled tree only gentoo, you could stick stuff in your make.conf to make it a precompiled from i686 branch only, now that would be really cool and add much extra freedom and possibilities...

Speaking of control panels, have you used plesk or anything, what did you think?

[carpman]

Using Cpanel on RH 7.3 on hosting server but plan on changing to H-Sphere which does not support Gentoo

[sundialsvc4]

A lot of hosting places use systems like Plesk on fairly generic Linux releases (and disturbingly early ones), probably so that they can just image the system onto a DVD and roll it out to a rack-full of machines in a hurry. I'm sure that Gentoo could be used to build and maintain such a system if you wanted to -- especially if you were going to use imaging and replication to support the rack.

It would be nice to have a large supply of pre-compiled binaries for some packages. The compile times for some packages are very long and somewhat dicey ... and if the package is ordinary and your environment is also ordinary it would be very handy to have the option to use what has already been compiled by someone else. OpenOffice and even KDE are two good examples. A bunch of very fast compile-servers somewhere out on the Internet could do the grunt-work once, and all of us who wanted to could "share the goods."