What distribution will *YOU* switch to?

[Dralnu]

<snipped>

This might be a pain, but you might could build your laptop's system in a chroot on your desktop (to keep settings and whatnot consistent), and then have your laptop SSH in, download/install the packages, and call that good. You might could manage this with a few scripts, and keep your system updated fairly easily.

Sounds interesting where can I find more info?

Trial and error. I'm fairly sure it can be done, but I don't know of anyone who has done it before, and had uploaded a HOWTO to do it. There are various SSH howtos in the Gentoo Wiki and f.g.o iirc. As for the scripts, THAT would be the hard part I would imagine. Some of the work involved with this would/could be tedious (handling a script to chroot into a specific place, THEN execute another script within the chroot. The scripts to download, build bins, then open up for an SSH would be the easy part. Then you have to exit out of the chroot (I think this could be done fairly easily as well).

To attempt something possibly easier, you could go in, have the system reboot into another install (instead of chrooting), where you run an init script to start the whole proccess, reboot the system into the original OS (killing uptime, if you care about that), then mounting the other OS (or the relevant parts) into the main OS, then emailing you that updates are avalible, and possibly throwing in what there is, how big they are, ect.

Few possible ways to do it, but you'll have to find someone who knows more about handling chroot then me (which I think would be the easier of the two methods. The second is kind of asking for problems fwiw)

[ugus]

Due to the high compilation times, i have already switched to ARCH LINUX on my laptop. I must say that i am really suprised positively. Arch Linux is small, fast and easy (the boot time is even faster than gentoo). It would be really very nice, if Gentoo could provide the binary packages too.

With some packages there are also alot of problems with stability from what I understand.


Honestly, I'd love to see what would happen if Gentoo and Arch were to work together. Both seem to have somewhat similar goals, and if you mix the i686 bins with Portage and (maybe) work on mixing the two package managers (strip Portage down to handle just binaries, which should be fairly easy). That could be interesting

Mixing the two package managers would be dream . But i think, in gentoo case it should not be a big problem to put the binary versions of the packages in portage too. I do not know why gentoo does not want to provide binaries .

[ugus]

Due to the high compilation times, i have already switched to ARCH LINUX on my laptop. I must say that i am really suprised positively. Arch Linux is small, fast and easy (the boot time is even faster than gentoo). It would be really very nice, if Gentoo could provide the binary packages too.

And there are almost no packages available

I think, almost all of the important packages are available. Moreover, as in gentoo, you can compile the packages which are not in package database.

[Dieter@be]

1 I have no experience with buildpkg
2 i don't know how to set up an ftp server

This might be a pain, but you might could build your laptop's system in a chroot on your desktop (to keep settings and whatnot consistent), and then have your laptop SSH in, download/install the packages, and call that good. You might could manage this with a few scripts, and keep your system updated fairly easily.

Sounds interesting where can I find more info?

Wait a minute.. setting up an ftp server is too hard for you, but you'd go for a solution like that?

(no offense intended)

[desultory]

Wait a minute.. setting up an ftp server is too hard for you, but you'd go for a solution like that?

Why bother configuring an FTP server?

On the build system, set FEATURES="buildpkg" (in /etc/make.conf), emerge -e world to build the base packages, emerge any additional software for the client, install thttpd (www-servers/thttpd) and use it to serve "${PKGDIR}/All" from that system. Using the default settings of PORTDIR and PKGDIR, thttpd could be invoked with thttpd -d /usr/portage/packages/All/. Note that the build system could easily be in a chroot.

On the client set PORTAGE_BINHOST="http://buildsystem/" (in /etc/make.conf) and emerge -eG world.

Note that all of the USE flag and package mask settings would be dictated by the build system, the settings on the client should be ignored by portage. Additionally, the build system would need to be updated before the client could be properly updated.

[moAlleyCat]

Mixing the two package managers would be dream . But i think, in gentoo case it should not be a big problem to put the binary versions of the packages in portage too. I do not know why gentoo does not want to provide binaries .

Because of USE-flags.

[Kasumi_Ninja]

1 I have no experience with buildpkg
2 i don't know how to set up an ftp server

This might be a pain, but you might could build your laptop's system in a chroot on your desktop (to keep settings and whatnot consistent), and then have your laptop SSH in, download/install the packages, and call that good. You might could manage this with a few scripts, and keep your system updated fairly easily.

Sounds interesting where can I find more info?

Wait a minute.. setting up an ftp server is too hard for you, but you'd go for a solution like that?

(no offense intended)

It isn't because it's to hard. I never have done it before and thats because I have never found a good tutorial for vsftp .

[Dralnu]

Due to the high compilation times, i have already switched to ARCH LINUX on my laptop. I must say that i am really suprised positively. Arch Linux is small, fast and easy (the boot time is even faster than gentoo). It would be really very nice, if Gentoo could provide the binary packages too.

With some packages there are also alot of problems with stability from what I understand.


Honestly, I'd love to see what would happen if Gentoo and Arch were to work together. Both seem to have somewhat similar goals, and if you mix the i686 bins with Portage and (maybe) work on mixing the two package managers (strip Portage down to handle just binaries, which should be fairly easy). That could be interesting

Mixing the two package managers would be dream . But i think, in gentoo case it should not be a big problem to put the binary versions of the packages in portage too. I do not know why gentoo does not want to provide binaries .

Lets see...

USE flags, LD_FLAGS, CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS. That with all the packages would pretty much be worth as much as running

while true
emerge gcc
end

when your system starts. If Gento DID supply bins, it would be restricting the control the user has over the system, and in the end Gentoo would become Debian-updated. Using Arch Linux trees and handling the packages they have would be almost the same in a way.

[Dralnu]

1 I have no experience with buildpkg
2 i don't know how to set up an ftp server

This might be a pain, but you might could build your laptop's system in a chroot on your desktop (to keep settings and whatnot consistent), and then have your laptop SSH in, download/install the packages, and call that good. You might could manage this with a few scripts, and keep your system updated fairly easily.

Sounds interesting where can I find more info?

Wait a minute.. setting up an ftp server is too hard for you, but you'd go for a solution like that?

(no offense intended)

Its funny. I come up with these kinds of ideas, yet have no where near the knowledge to actually do them...

[ugus]

Mixing the two package managers would be dream . But i think, in gentoo case it should not be a big problem to put the binary versions of the packages in portage too. I do not know why gentoo does not want to provide binaries .

Lets see...

USE flags, LD_FLAGS, CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS. That with all the packages would pretty much be worth as much as running

while true
emerge gcc
end

when your system starts. If Gento DID supply bins, it would be restricting the control the user has over the system, and in the end Gentoo would become Debian-updated. Using Arch Linux trees and handling the packages they have would be almost the same in a way.

Yes, i see, the binaries would restrict the control over the system... Maybe, a new version of Gentoo, Gentoo-Light supporting only binary packages, would be an alternative . Every one can choose, what he/she wants to use, binary or source code version

[Suicidal]

I have tried quite a few; ubuntu, opensuse, fedora. I find their lack of customization disturbing, especially with fakeraid or software raid.

In my last job I had one very powerful server whih ran gentoo and I had a chroot image that I did all of my building on, which also built the packages

then I had make.conf /etc/portage and /usr/portage shared via rsync.

when it was time to update my machines I updated the image which built the packages;

I then synced all of portage to the other machines and did a quick painless binary update;

worked better than any other distro I have used since.

[Rabbi Hillel]

Holy shit!

I thought my gentoo already got the hell out of my poor 1Ghz pIII with 378mb.

But as I installed a new gentoo-patched kernel (2.6.20-r5) this morning and turned on some tweaks it even got faster! Everything is smooth - especially beryl.

I think if g-d would have to choose an OS he (or she) would choose gentoo.

[Kasumi_Ninja]

Wait a minute.. setting up an ftp server is too hard for you, but you'd go for a solution like that?

Why bother configuring an FTP server?

On the build system, set FEATURES="buildpkg" (in /etc/make.conf), emerge -e world to build the base packages, emerge any additional software for the client, install thttpd (www-servers/thttpd) and use it to serve "${PKGDIR}/All" from that system. Using the default settings of PORTDIR and PKGDIR, thttpd could be invoked with thttpd -d /usr/portage/packages/All/. Note that the build system could easily be in a chroot.

On the client set PORTAGE_BINHOST="http://buildsystem/" (in /etc/make.conf) and emerge -eG world.

Note that all of the USE flag and package mask settings would be dictated by the build system, the settings on the client should be ignored by portage. Additionally, the build system would need to be updated before the client could be properly updated.

If I understand correctly '/usr/portage/packages/All/' is the locations of the precompiled binaries? I like your idea, I can also mount that directory as an NFS share .

[Kasumi_Ninja]

I have tried quite a few; ubuntu, opensuse, fedora. I find their lack of customization disturbing, especially with fakeraid or software raid.

In my last job I had one very powerful server whih ran gentoo and I had a chroot image that I did all of my building on, which also built the packages

then I had make.conf /etc/portage and /usr/portage shared via rsync.

when it was time to update my machines I updated the image which built the packages;

I then synced all of portage to the other machines and did a quick painless binary update;

worked better than any other distro I have used since.

Your post is for me a perfect example of the essence of Gentoo. The possibilities are so vast and diverse that it takes time to comprehend Gentoo at such a level that you can make the right choices for different situations. I never thought of this possibility and I think a lot of people will benefit from it of you contribute the steps you take to sync multiple machine to the Gentoo wiki or even the official documentation.

[desultory]

If I understand correctly '/usr/portage/packages/All/' is the locations of the precompiled binaries?

You understand correctly.

[nirax]

i will swithch to Ubuntu.

i dont know when but im quite sure the day is not far away.

Currently the only things holding me back are:
- my system is perfectly configured
- i have no time at all for a reconfiguration (even under ubuntu)
- i still have some nerves left (or occassionally even the joy to tweak / try stuff out)
- from old suse days im very sceptical about version based distros. (they used to break on distro-upgrades).
- im a fan of the gentoo program versioning system (complete system is (should) be up to date.

For me gentoo could not decide what they want. The audit is splitted between
- elitists which enjoy it differentiating semselves over the masses
with their OS choice and configuration.
- power users
- occasional users with interest for os insights
and so on

Gentoo shows no clear direction in which they want to go:
- getting k1k4zZ 3litist even more manually fixing ebuilds, fixing code, setting bugs through users
- beeing a source-driven user-friendly distribution ?
- beeing faster (until 2004 gentoo defined itself also over performance on the main page)
- beeing more stable (with the current manpower no one talks anymore about gentoo on servers.. and there is a good reason why)

When i switch to Ubuntu it will be because:
- i have no time at all for this hassle. I have a life and working 12 hours the day at least in the IT business, and coming home tierd i really like to update my system without having to read the forums for possible emerge errors, blocks. Sometimes it just has to work without any tweaking. (Im still a huge "fan" of baselayout changes (yes even running dispatch-conf afterwards) )
- overall the ebuild quality got worser since 2004. maybe its only my feeling, but it seems also less developers are working on gentoo, and those who are have to care now of at least two very popular archs (~x86/~amd64 if you didnt guessed)
- i will still be able to tweak / compile the parts which are possibly important for me to optimize
- installing Ubuntu for my wife on her notebook took 15 minutes, and afterwards everything worked out of the box. you know what i said: WOW !! i could not belive it. i was prepared for some hours chipset and wireless research and configuration, but hey, the only thing we had to change was using the binary graphic driver and the resolution.
And she already could start using the system productive.
Do you think she would have enjoyed "learning" all customize and tweaking stuff gentoo would have to offer ?
- Would i still enjoy that ?
- Actually even if i still want to stay in touch with some of the lower level parts of linux i want to be in control when i want to tweak a system-part for fun and what im interested in. Having emerge blockers, unresolved dependencies and so on are not that kind of tweaking stuff im still interested in. Freedom of configuration and such should also include functionality. It should mean that you have the freedom to search your own problem if you like, not vice versa.
but this directly also lead to
- general gentoo product Quality lowerd. Leading to these "unforseen" errors.

So if you want to make gentoo better
1) determine your target audience
2) determine your target [dekstop/server/source/stable/instable/supertweak/elitist/whatever]
3) make that target clear
so no misunderstandings will arise and less people will be frustrated.
frustration only raises where expectations differ.

this guy here brought it also very clear (read all his posts, because his first is a little p*sed off) to a point. But reading the reactions on it shows clearly why this distribution lacks a clear product target definition.

to give a short background about me:
i grew up using computers, was one of the first Fidonet BBS in germany (running DOS than OS/2), started linux with suse 5.x. While im not a linux guru im not considering me a newbie. If i run into problems which anoy me i know a lot of other people will run into much heavier problems. Although im a project manager now and no longer on the first line of fire, i used to use several gentoo servers prodcutively as Test Engineer for inhouse and customers test-setups.
(this turned out to have been a bad choice btw. Sys-Admin team which took the systems over later, gave up trying to have the updated, after they ran into several emerge problems and such. The servers run now on debian)

[Kasumi_Ninja]

i will swithch to Ubuntu.

i dont know when but im quite sure the day is not far away.

Currently the only things holding me back are:
- my system is perfectly configured
- i have no time at all for a reconfiguration (even under ubuntu)
- i still have some nerves left (or occassionally even the joy to tweak / try stuff out)
- from old suse days im very sceptical about version based distros. (they used to break on distro-upgrades).
- im a fan of the gentoo program versioning system (complete system is (should) be up to date.

For me gentoo could not decide what they want. The audit is splitted between
- elitists which enjoy it differentiating semselves over the masses
with their OS choice and configuration.
- power users
- occasional users with interest for os insights
and so on

Gentoo shows no clear direction in which they want to go:
- getting k1k4zZ 3litist even more manually fixing ebuilds, fixing code, setting bugs through users
- beeing a source-driven user-friendly distribution ?
- beeing faster (until 2004 gentoo defined itself also over performance on the main page)
- beeing more stable (with the current manpower no one talks anymore about gentoo on servers.. and there is a good reason why)

When i switch to Ubuntu it will be because:
- i have no time at all for this hassle. I have a life and working 12 hours the day at least in the IT business, and coming home tierd i really like to update my system without having to read the forums for possible emerge errors, blocks. Sometimes it just has to work without any tweaking. (Im still a huge "fan" of baselayout changes (yes even running dispatch-conf afterwards) )
- overall the ebuild quality got worser since 2004. maybe its only my feeling, but it seems also less developers are working on gentoo, and those who are have to care now of at least two very puplar archs (~x86/~amd64 if you didnt guessed)
- i will still be able to tweak / compile the parts which are possibly important for me to optimize
- installing Ubuntu for my wife on her notebook took 15 minutes, and afterwards everything worked out of the box. you know what i said: WOW !! i could not belive it. i was prepared for some hours chipset and wireless research and configuration, but hey, the only thing we had to change was using the binary graphic driver and the resultion.
And she already could start using the system productive.
Do you think she would have enjoyed "learning" all customize and tweaking stuff gentoo would have to offer ?
- Would i still enjoy that ?
- Actually even if i still want to stay in touch with some of the lower level parts of linux i want to be in control when i want to tweak a system-part for fun and what im interested in. Having emerge blockers, unresolved dependencies and so on are not that kind of tweaking stuff im still interested in. Freedom of configuration and such should also include functionality. It should mean that you have the freedom to search your own problem if you like, not vice versa.
but this directly also lead to
- general gentoo product Quality lowerd. Leading to these "unforseen" errors.

So if you want to make gentoo better
1) determine your target audience
2) determine your target [dekstop/server/source/stable/instable/supertweak/elitist/whatever]
3) make that target clear
so no misunderstandings will arise and less people will be frustrated.
frustration only raises where expectations differ.

this guy here brought it also very clear (read all his posts, because his first is a little p*sed off) to a point. But reading the reactions on it shows clearly why this distribution lacks a clear product target definition.

to give a short background about me:
i grew up using computers, was one of the first Fidonet BBS in germany (running DOS than OS/2), started linux with suse 5.x. While im not a linux guru im not considering me a newbie. If i run into problems which anoy me i know a lot of other people will run into much heavier problems. Although im a project manager now and no longer on the first line of fire, i used to use several gentoo servers prodcutively as Test Engineer for inhouse and customers test-setups.
(this turned out to have been a bad choice btw. Sys-Admin team which took the systems over later, gave up trying to have the updated, after they ran into several emerge problems and such. The servers run now on debian)

You seem to have some good ideas. Why don't you stay with the Gentoo and search for ways (e.g. file bugreports) to make a contribution instead of simply leaving? This is an opensource project which cannot exist without effort from the users themselfs.

[RazielFMX]

i will swithch to Ubuntu.

i dont know when but im quite sure the day is not far away.

Currently the only things holding me back are:
- my system is perfectly configured
- i have no time at all for a reconfiguration (even under ubuntu)
- i still have some nerves left (or occassionally even the joy to tweak / try stuff out)
- from old suse days im very sceptical about version based distros. (they used to break on distro-upgrades).
- im a fan of the gentoo program versioning system (complete system is (should) be up to date.

For me gentoo could not decide what they want. The audit is splitted between
- elitists which enjoy it differentiating semselves over the masses
with their OS choice and configuration.
- power users
- occasional users with interest for os insights
and so on

Gentoo shows no clear direction in which they want to go:
- getting k1k4zZ 3litist even more manually fixing ebuilds, fixing code, setting bugs through users
- beeing a source-driven user-friendly distribution ?
- beeing faster (until 2004 gentoo defined itself also over performance on the main page)
- beeing more stable (with the current manpower no one talks anymore about gentoo on servers.. and there is a good reason why)

When i switch to Ubuntu it will be because:
- i have no time at all for this hassle. I have a life and working 12 hours the day at least in the IT business, and coming home tierd i really like to update my system without having to read the forums for possible emerge errors, blocks. Sometimes it just has to work without any tweaking. (Im still a huge "fan" of baselayout changes (yes even running dispatch-conf afterwards) )
- overall the ebuild quality got worser since 2004. maybe its only my feeling, but it seems also less developers are working on gentoo, and those who are have to care now of at least two very puplar archs (~x86/~amd64 if you didnt guessed)
- i will still be able to tweak / compile the parts which are possibly important for me to optimize
- installing Ubuntu for my wife on her notebook took 15 minutes, and afterwards everything worked out of the box. you know what i said: WOW !! i could not belive it. i was prepared for some hours chipset and wireless research and configuration, but hey, the only thing we had to change was using the binary graphic driver and the resultion.
And she already could start using the system productive.
Do you think she would have enjoyed "learning" all customize and tweaking stuff gentoo would have to offer ?
- Would i still enjoy that ?
- Actually even if i still want to stay in touch with some of the lower level parts of linux i want to be in control when i want to tweak a system-part for fun and what im interested in. Having emerge blockers, unresolved dependencies and so on are not that kind of tweaking stuff im still interested in. Freedom of configuration and such should also include functionality. It should mean that you have the freedom to search your own problem if you like, not vice versa.
but this directly also lead to
- general gentoo product Quality lowerd. Leading to these "unforseen" errors.

So if you want to make gentoo better
1) determine your target audience
2) determine your target [dekstop/server/source/stable/instable/supertweak/elitist/whatever]
3) make that target clear
so no misunderstandings will arise and less people will be frustrated.
frustration only raises where expectations differ.

this guy here brought it also very clear (read all his posts, because his first is a little p*sed off) to a point. But reading the reactions on it shows clearly why this distribution lacks a clear product target definition.

to give a short background about me:
i grew up using computers, was one of the first Fidonet BBS in germany (running DOS than OS/2), started linux with suse 5.x. While im not a linux guru im not considering me a newbie. If i run into problems which anoy me i know a lot of other people will run into much heavier problems. Although im a project manager now and no longer on the first line of fire, i used to use several gentoo servers prodcutively as Test Engineer for inhouse and customers test-setups.
(this turned out to have been a bad choice btw. Sys-Admin team which took the systems over later, gave up trying to have the updated, after they ran into several emerge problems and such. The servers run now on debian)

If you really want leave... at least go Fedora over Ubuntu. The just works feature of Ubuntu is just a facade, as it doesn't just work when you start leveraging all you learned in Gentoo. I was very happy with Ubuntu on my laptop until I tried to do things that weren't in the package management system of Ubuntu, or wanted newer than was considered 'safe'. It now runs Fedora with a 2.6.20 kernel and all sorts of custom settings and tweaks. There are alot more RPMs out there than DEBs, and building RPMs for the 'from source/not supported' stuff I have round to be easy and painless, which means everything I run is controlled via the package management system.

It's not gentoo, and I'm dealing with that (My desktop is, and as far as I can tell, always shall be Gentoo), but all in all its a bad little distro once you trim the fat out of the default things they want to install (I allowed most of them, just turned them off 'services' once I got it up and running).

Anyway, back to the fact you are leaving, I have to agree with Aniruddha, there is no reason to leave Gentoo. It is only as good as its community (as is true with all open source). If you don't have the time to dedicate yourself to it completely, a dual boot system is always a nice thing...

[opentaka]

RPMs are just disgusting, thus, only debian family is my option

[nirax]

@Aniruddha from Amsterdam. Btw congratulations to live in such fine town. I hit Amsterdam quite often lately, but the route only leads to WTC building. At least the view is great from there. (But always to the wrong side if you ask me

Thanks for appreciating some of my feedback on that matter. Actually i try to give a contribution to gentoo already by writing why i consider leaving (it was a dev although retired which asked for it at the beginning of this thread). I also made some smaller testing contributions like this one in the past but to be realistic i think besides writing occasional bug reports i have no time to actively develop gentoo further.
I understand completely what opensource consists of as we actively contribute to open source on some global projects also at the company im working for.

However@home my requirements are simply a little different and while i still like many parts of gentoo (that is why i am not just quitting) i seeit going the wrong way lately.

@RazielFMX
Thanks for the tips regarding Fedora. I will definately tweak a little around on my wifes ubuntu installation or just install an ubuntu 7.x under vmware on my gentoo machine to determine how much is jsut fassade and how much usability is really behind it. What pleases me though is also the general manpower behind these distributions.
Imagine the dev and QA power behind Debian passing code base to Ubuntu which again has very strong dev and QA support.
So far as i said it looked very good. you could concentrate on productive tasks and you could tweak around when you were up to.
How good it will be able to support more critical elements which are working very fine under gentoo like

• - nested gentoo32 in gentoo64 chroot
  - vmware workstation
  - binary nvidia/opengl/wine running WoW perfectly
  - bluetooth headset for Skype / TeamSpeak
  - Different Filesystems for different mount points (like Reiser,XFS,ext3, ext2) depending on purpose
  (ok i could live with ext3 nowdays i guess)
  - distributed compiling (distcc)
  - customized builds from scratch
  - full svn support/anjuta/eclipse
  - possibility to upgrade programs no matter of current distro version if newest version is required for some reason
  - strong community

[d2_racing]

I'm testing Debian 4.0 Stable version, and after 20 minutes of installation I had a working KDE and I installed the rest for mplayer,alsa,audacious.

This thing works pretty well.

I never thought that I would say that

[Kasumi_Ninja]

I'm testing Debian 4.0 Stable version, and after 20 minutes of installation I had a working KDE and I installed the rest for mplayer,alsa,audacious.

This thing works pretty well.

I never thought that I would say that

I am curious if you continue to use Debian as your main OS and if so if you would give us an update about your experiences in 1-3 months.

[bmartin]

I have tried quite a few; ubuntu, opensuse, fedora. I find their lack of customization disturbing, especially with fakeraid or software raid. [...] I then synced all of portage to the other machines and did a quick painless binary update; worked better than any other distro I have used since.

Funny, I've tried the same three distros... kind of, openSUSE's not quite the same as SUSE used to be. I started on SUSE (back in the day), went to Fedora, then Ubuntu. I vaguely remember SUSE, suffice it to say I wasn't that impressed with it; it treated me like a child and I could never get my garden variety network card to work properly. I was on Fedora for about 3 years; it was slow, but very easy to use, and the RPMs were always quite up-to-date. Ubuntu was very usable, but the universe DEBs often lag behind current software versions. I often compiled software myself or located a third party repo to get the newest version, and doing an apt-get update started taking a while to contact all of the repos.

I plan on sticking with Gentoo for a while; I want to learn the ins-and-outs of GNU/Linux. I like configuring things by hand. I like knowing what's installed on my computer. I like the idea that everything is compiled specifically for my architecture with no support for Gnome or KDE, which I don't use. I like the idea that I can have a profile specifically for a server if that's what I plan to use.

For others, I recommend Ubuntu. The community support is great, but most of the people don't understand what's beneath the hood. One of the reasons I switched to Gentoo was that I've seen the kind of support they provide; when I have some weird, obscure error, I often find the solution by using Google, and it's quite frequently on a Ubuntu or Gentoo forum.

A lot of people have come to me asking what distribution to switch to. I always ask them what they need it for, and Ubuntu has always sufficed. A few repos and GPG keys get most people set up for everything they want. I've played around with NVIDIA and ATI cards and had a lot of success getting Beryl to run on most computers. I don't know whether or not I'm happy that Beryl is a popular reason to make the move.

If I decide Gentoo's not for me, I'm going right back to Ubuntu. I store my files in my home directory and /usr/local/ to make migration from one distro to another a cinch.

[Kasumi_Ninja]

@Aniruddha from Amsterdam. Btw congratulations to live in such fine town. I hit Amsterdam quite often lately, but the route only leads to WTC building. At least the view is great from there. (But always to the wrong side if you ask me

Thanks for appreciating some of my feedback on that matter. Actually i try to give a contribution to gentoo already by writing why i consider leaving (it was a dev although retired which asked for it at the beginning of this thread). I also made some smaller testing contributions like this one in the past but to be realistic i think besides writing occasional bug reports i have no time to actively develop gentoo further.
I understand completely what opensource consists of as we actively contribute to open source on some global projects also at the company im working for.

Good to hear that I was stating the obvious to you . To bad your route only leads to the WTC, In the near vicinity there is lots to do though! Be sure to check out Vak Zuid* (great terrace during summertime) and the Beethovenstraat (best shops of Amsterdam).

*Website: http://www.vakzuid.nl/

[Dralnu]

I'm testing Debian 4.0 Stable version, and after 20 minutes of installation I had a working KDE and I installed the rest for mplayer,alsa,audacious.

This thing works pretty well.

I never thought that I would say that

Odd. I tried Debian Stable on another machine, and so far I hate the blasted thing. The package manager doesn't make any real sense to me (yes I read the man pages. Yes I read the --help option), and is about as annoying a scientist who proclaims they are open minded.

Glad I won't be using this thing myself.