What distribution will *YOU* switch to?

Message

papal_authority · Post by **papal_authority** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 3:59 am

I don't think I'd ever switch my home machine from Gentoo. I run FC6 at work though and I installed Ubuntu for my room mates.

marcus0263 · Post by **marcus0263** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 4:19 am

NaturalRandom wrote:I'm actually comtemplating whether to jump to Debian or stay with Gentoo.
I want customisation, but I don't know whether the compile time

What is all this whining about compile times with updates?
Who in their right mind sits there and watches compiling code?

Do the damn thing before you go to bed and be done with it!!!!

NaturalRandom wrote: and the little update problems are worth staying with Gentoo.

Now with the "little update" problems, name one OS that has zero issues with updates and or upgrades?

NaturalRandom wrote: I've been running AMD64 for almost 2 years. Should I go to x86 or go to Debian?

Buy a Mac and stop complaining

NaturalRandom wrote:Go and convince me

No

syouth · Post by **syouth** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 8:36 am

I had some thoughts about switching distribution at my work. I wanted something fancy, just for the try. I chose openSuse 10.2, because my work colleague promotes this and I wanted to try binary and rpm based distro, because I've had some allergy to RPMs. So I installed it and set it up -- everything went very smoothly. But then came some downfalls and the last one broke my patience.

1. There were some packages I didn't find to install from repositories (I used Smart and enabled all those which came with Smart). I had to hide and seek them -- I survived.
2. Second downfall was a bonebreaker. I use xinerama and some packages weren't compiled with xinerama support. They were fullscreen apps and actually games, which were irrelevant for work, but still -- issue was there. I didn't know how to solve this problem with most ease. I had to make my own packages etc... It's not what I want, when I use binary distro. So I booted back to Gentoo and so my 1 day exploring mission ended.

NaturalRandom · Post by **NaturalRandom** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 12:35 pm

marcus0263 wrote:
NaturalRandom wrote:I'm actually comtemplating whether to jump to Debian or stay with Gentoo.
I want customisation, but I don't know whether the compile time
What is all this whining about compile times with updates?
Who in their right mind sits there and watches compiling code?

Do the damn thing before you go to bed and be done with it!!!!

NaturalRandom wrote: and the little update problems are worth staying with Gentoo.
Now with the "little update" problems, name one OS that has zero issues with updates and or upgrades?

NaturalRandom wrote: I've been running AMD64 for almost 2 years. Should I go to x86 or go to Debian?
Buy a Mac and stop complaining

NaturalRandom wrote:Go and convince me
No

I'm sorry for having doubts on Gentoo. I was just being irrational and moody.

I just came from trying debian. Deleted within 15 minutes. Although you have a valid point with having the computer compiling at night, I can't do that, because my computer is right next to my bed(and there is nowhere else in the house to put it) and the humming prevents me from sleeping. I'll start installing Gentoo x86 tomorrow afternoon. Lesson learnt.

EDIT: I forgot to say. Although I can't compile before sleep, my workaround for compile time is that I update every saturday, as I read my weekly batch of bookmarks(I hoard quite a few of them during the week). It doesn't affect the perfomance of my browsing at all.

marcus0263 · Post by **marcus0263** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 1:57 pm

NaturalRandom wrote:I'm sorry for having doubts on Gentoo. I was just being irrational and moody. I just came from trying debian. Deleted within 15 minutes. Although you have a valid point with having the computer compiling at night, I can't do that, because my computer is right next to my bed(and there is nowhere else in the house to put it) and the humming prevents me from sleeping. I'll start installing Gentoo x86 tomorrow afternoon. Lesson learnt.

EDIT: I forgot to say. Although I can't compile before sleep, my workaround for compile time is that I update every saturday, as I read my weekly batch of bookmarks(I hoard quite a few of them during the week). It doesn't affect the perfomance of my browsing at all.

Welcome Back

We all have our moments at times

Dieter@be · Post by **Dieter@be** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 4:13 pm

syouth wrote:I wanted to try binary and rpm based distro, because I've had some allergy to RPMs.

i seee

gubbs · Post by **gubbs** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 4:57 pm

If Gentoo gets much worse, yeah FreeBSD.

Compiling everything from source to get a specialised/personalised system is fine.

Constantly (rev-dep) recompiling everything and/or having no maintained ebuilds for many of the latest apps in stable is killing Gentoo.

Right now its just a minor annoyance, but if it polarizes I'll jump ship to BSD.

In fact the only real reason I use Gentoo now I am an all grown up Ricer is so I can use Helvetica for everything.

No other binary distro has fonts I can tolerate/stand.

dancbr · Post by **dancbr** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 4:54 pm

Not really experienced in all the different distros but when comparing to Fedora CentOS Ubuntu(Laptop) and a few others I would say Gentoo is ahead of the rest. But ask me the same question a few months from now and we'll see.

I guess its just like a girlfriend you have to try it from all different angles before you get ideas about her girlfriends.

jerann · Post by **jerann** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 6:38 am

I've switched back and forth from Gentoo to Debian several times. With Gentoo, it comes down to the upkeep - it just takes a while to get it running and keep it running. But, I love the ability to customize, and the documentation. I also like the system layout - much slicker than Debian. I have also found that Debian's installation procedure is insane - the install CDs never work for me (I get known issues which aren't answered on their forums), so I end up doing a cross-install from Knoppix which is not properly documented on Debian's site, so I end up Googling the half-dozen problems I get while installing that way. I tried Ubuntu figuring that the install process would be nicer, but if you're a Gentoo user, you're likely to find Ubuntu's install process to be extremely frustrating. It assumes everything and gives you very few options. I ditched it immediately and went back to Gentoo again. Honestly, what keeps me coming back is the community - I can always get questions answered here. That and the documentation - Gentoo has hands down the best documentation of any distro I've used (out of Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat, Suse, and Mandrake back in the day).

EDIT:
I've left this post up so later quotes will still make sense, but if you read this, you should read my next post a few posts down as well - I had to take a lot of this back

metuwi · Post by **metuwi** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 9:00 am

ArchLinux!

Bizarro · Post by **Bizarro** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 3:16 pm

If I moved from Gentoo to another distro, i would go to slackware (if they had an oficial support for amd64)

another distro i dunno, ubuntu it's kinda slow and assumes not only the first install, but everything, and not knowing which settings are around there doesn't look good for me. in the case of suse, repository system is tooo slowly. i never tried with Fedora, maybe it's good

but honestly i prefer Gentoo by far

PaulBredbury · Post by **PaulBredbury** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 3:26 pm

gubbs wrote:No other binary distro has fonts I can tolerate/stand.

Simply customize them in ~/.fonts.conf - applies to any distro.

Infected · Post by **Infected** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 8:28 pm

For quite some years now I have been a faithful supporter and promoter of Gentoo, but currently my patience is about to run out.
Gentoo has served me well, and in general i have little complaints, everything is "working" with Gentoo, and if not, you can make it work.

Over the years Ive run Gentoo on everything from small embedded systems, to strange servers and irritating laptops, thats always been my vote towards Gentoo,
most other distrobutions out there are pissing me off by applying snazzy features and wizards for configuration etc, while i enjoy using the applications as the original developers intended.
Gentoo has always let me do this, with a nice little collection of global configuration files for the few system wide configurations you might need.
Wizards and "automagic" always tends to complicate things (i feel), atleast when it comes to strange and customized systems, this way Gentoo has always been good.

Before Gentoo i was running Slackware and even before that Debian, oh and before that, Red Hat, and to tell the truth i hope to never touch a package based distro ever again, source is the way to go,
even tought this is purely personal preference.

Mainly my reason for slowly merging away from Gentoo, currently on the server-side is the maintenance issue, there was a long war about this on slashdot some time ago,
fine, Gentoo bleeding edge, security risks this and that, and so on. http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?si ... 28/2227232

Last time i wanted to leave Gentoo was due to the sudden "Gentoo super 1337 haxor, i am so cool because i run Gentoo wave", saying you were running Gentoo in a real production enviroment were a shameful experience,
but as every fad, it tends to blow over, and so did this one, and i stuck with it. Or perhaps i should stop drinking with my *BSD, Debian, Slackware whooing friends? Then again thats a different story

Ok, but back to my point, i do have one...

Maintenance, Gentoo has a tendency to become bloated and hard to maintain, not in the conventional way, but multiple servers/systems running Gentoo, everyone with a different configuration, everyone specialized and tailored to its spesific task, and it tend to be very easy to loose track, yes there are endless scripts, and tools, and toolkits to help this (one reason why you loose track perhaps?), yet thats *NOT* the issue im talking about here.
After the system has been running for some time, and as every sys-admin with respect for themselves, you update and keep your systems current, this way you (ie portage) tend to fill your system with updates and packages (dependencies), and after some time, on multiple systems, you tend to loose track. You start to feel your systems as "bloated", start distrusting them, getting paranoid, and wasting time and time again
just making sure that everything is the way it should, while what you actually wish is to "just reinstall" and make it "clean" and nice once again. After all, there is little cleaner than a clean Gentoo install

On a desktop this is quite all right, and you have the "time" to keep on top of everything, but on a server this is not a favourable position.

You might argue that this is fully my fault, for not keeping on top of it all, but then i would argue that you have little experience with a multi-server enviroment, and we would have a jolly good flame war...
Please refer to the slashdot link for examples...

This all in all ends up with a small list of annoyances:
- Portage is great, but since the Gentoo developers never tend to stop developing it, and always changing this and that, it becomes an obstacle rather than an asset on anything other than desktop enviroments.
- Configuration files are "moving" around the system "all the time", suddenly a new baselayout, a new way to do this, a new file for that, etc.
- Portage is growing like an elephant on steroids, and still there seems to be packages that im depending upon thats being removed?! (no one will maintain them etc.)
- Where Gentoo once upon a time was a clean distro, where little were hidden from you, is turing into something out of Red Hat or SuSE, where more and more are happening behind the scene.

I do know that some of these are not purely Gentoo's fault, and that configuration layouts etc. do change, but im still cursing the moon every time it happens, go figure.

All in all, i miss Gentoo the way it was back in the days. (perhaps i am romantisizing the past?)

I feel that Gentoo is a Great distrobution that slowly is moving/merging in multiple directions, all at the same time, just slowly tipping over, making an arghh, into an Gnorr, and then into %**&#)*$!!,
then again, ive been here for quite some time now, and this all might just be me.

Oh, my new systems is planned to be Slack, with vmware running my Gentoo servers on top. Even thought this still is in the planning phase.

Kind Regards,
Infected

Kasumi_Ninja · Post by **Kasumi_Ninja** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 11:24 pm

One thing Debian has got right is it's internal organization. With Gentoo I worry sometimes about forgotten bugs and ebuilds that are not marked stable after the testing period. I try to do my part and bother the devs on bugzilla

. On the other we shouldn't forget Gentoo is really young. Where Debian is our granddaddy (+/- 10 years olders). We have enough time to learn and improve and that makes me optimistic

.

ll4e · Post by **ll4e** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 12:11 am

After the system has been running for some time, and as every sys-admin with respect for themselves, you update and keep your systems current, this way you (ie portage) tend to fill your system with updates and packages (dependencies), and after some time, on multiple systems, you tend to loose track.

Just being curious, but why would you install updates besides the absolutely necessary ones? (security-related) Or even if you only install those, do you still think the system gets bloated? I do recognize your remarks though..

arcterex · Post by **arcterex** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 6:05 pm

NaturalRandom wrote: I'm sorry for having doubts on Gentoo. I was just being irrational and moody. I just came from trying debian. Deleted within 15 minutes. Although you have a valid point with having the computer compiling at night, I can't do that, because my computer is right next to my bed(and there is nowhere else in the house to put it) and the humming prevents me from sleeping. I'll start installing Gentoo x86 tomorrow afternoon. Lesson learnt.

EDIT: I forgot to say. Although I can't compile before sleep, my workaround for compile time is that I update every saturday, as I read my weekly batch of bookmarks(I hoard quite a few of them during the week). It doesn't affect the perfomance of my browsing at all.

Hey NaturalRandom, just out of interest, why did you delete debian so quickly? What was it about it that you didn't like so much?

Personally I'm considering jumping to Ubuntu for almost the same reasons that I came to Gentoo from Debian. Up-to-date packages (or at least, ubuntu will have a new release in april to correspond to the latest gnome offering) and a fairly decent system. I am liking the idea of a distro that holds my hand a bit, not because I am not a skilled linux admin, but because at least for my home desktop, I really want to spend more time getting stuff done and less dealing with packages, recompiling, etc. I know that I have the choice to not emerge sync every day, but having the ability there... well, I am just tempted too much to play with it

Also at work we use almost exclusively debian, so while I LOVE portage and it's ease of bumping builds etc, it'd be nice to have the same system both at home and work.

Of course, my initial foray into this went quite horribly when I tried an upgrade this last weekend onto some new drives. The install procedure for the latest ubuntu test is still definately for devs or people that want their machines to work all the time only: http://arcterex.net/blog/archives/2007/ ... _that.html I found it quite annoying that I spent so much time trying to save myself time

So we'll see how it goes when Feisty is released and I have another chance to see how easy it is.

Syntaxis · Post by **Syntaxis** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 7:41 pm

jerann wrote:I have also found that Debian's installation procedure is insane - the install CDs never work for me (I get known issues which aren't answered on their forums)

What are these "known issues", and where are they documented (I assume this is what you mean by "known")? Also, what do you mean by "their forums"? There are three ways in which to actually bring an issue to the attention of the debian-installer developers:

1) File a bug - copy and paste the email template, modify it to taste and fire it off. It will be then be filed against the installation-reports pseudopackage in the Debian Bug Tracking System, and the BTS will also forward it on to the debian-boot mailing list which the debian-installer devs keep an eye on.
2) Pop into #debian-boot on OFTC and post a description of the problem together with a polite request for assistance. Downsides: no public record (any dev not online at the time you post won't even be aware that you have a problem) and you might have to wait a while for someone to respond. I can't see any reason to favour this over sending an email to the BTS as above, but YMMV.
3) Send a description of the problem together with a polite request for assistance to the debian-boot mailing list. Option 1 is preferable to this in every case (since your email will then open a bug report at the same time, and using their template will make it far less likely that you forget to include all relevant details) - AFAICS mailing debian-boot directly should be seen as just a backup for those incredibly rare instances when the BTS is down or broken.

jerann wrote:so I end up doing a cross-install from Knoppix which is not properly documented on Debian's site

I'm not sure this is a valid criticism - the Gentoo documentation doesn't cover installation from any of its derivative distros, either. Nor should it, IMO.

cotcot · Post by **cotcot** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 9:29 pm

I do not have intention to switch, although I follow a couple of other distros. This more to check out with what distro I can let my kids start. Most likely sabayon.

desultory · Post by **desultory** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 4:20 am

Syntaxis wrote:
jerann wrote:so I end up doing a cross-install from Knoppix which is not properly documented on Debian's site
I'm not sure this is a valid criticism - the Gentoo documentation doesn't cover installation from any of its derivative distros, either. Nor should it, IMO.

Actually, there is official Gentoo documentation, in the form of The Gentoo Linux alternative installation method HOWTO, which provides instructions for the installation of Gentoo from other distributions, including those derived from Gentoo.

timeBandit · Post by **timeBandit** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 4:48 am

I thought I might have been headed for OpenSuSE--I have it installed for test-driving in a spare partition right now--but I'm finding some rough spots. So far, YaST is the most labyrinthine and Wal-Martish package manager I've yet seen on Linux, and as for the replacement GNOME menu...well, there's a real love/hate thing developing there.

So here I stay.

Kasumi_Ninja · Post by **Kasumi_Ninja** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 3:47 pm

timeBandit wrote:I thought I might have been headed for OpenSuSE--I have it installed for test-driving in a spare partition right now--but I'm finding some rough spots. So far, YaST is the most labyrinthine and Wal-Martish package manager I've yet seen on Linux, and as for the replacement GNOME menu...well, there's a real love/hate thing developing there.

So here I stay.

I am about to remove openSUSE 10.2 from my girlfriends laptop. It really is horribly slow. And package management is a nightmare.

RaZoR1394 · Post by **RaZoR1394** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 10:47 pm

Gentoo feels to me like that custom car that never gets finished and keeps falling apart thus I often find myself trying other distros still I often dream about finishing it. Currently I'm using Fedora. It has a weird problem with the load spiking every now and then but I think it may be fixed. My only wish is to get my vr glove, and my virtual laser keyboard working. I would easily walk over dead bodies for that.

Last distro before that I tried was Suse and I agree with the above post completely.

Lloeki · Post by **Lloeki** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 10:06 pm

Two days ago, I switched to Arch Linux. Really enjoying it.

/dev/random · Post by **/dev/random** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 1:31 am

I switched away from Linux all together. I use OS X now.

goom · Post by **goom** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 12:59 pm

Kind of difficult to say. I've been using gentoo for quite a long time. What made me stick to gentoo most of the time was the community. Hardly one question has not been answerden. Every problem solved. That's pretty cool imho.
Anyway I consider installing fedora core 6 in the next few weeks. Just wanna give it a try. We use RedHat here at work (not at this station, but the "main" one) and I get along with it quite well.
For my server gentoo is the online choice. Once a cool and stable installation state was reached it runs and runs and runs and runs.
I'll get a new server soon and will make a new installation w/ openvz for webusers etc. But for that one i don't know the OS now. I'll have to think about it.

What distribution will YOU switch to?

Back and forth

Re: Back and forth