What distribution will *YOU* switch to?

hardyb · Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2007 10:05 am Post subject:

Hug your local open source developer.
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NorthGoingZax · Apprentice Joined: 03 Dec 2002 Posts: 189

jrllop · n00b Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 21

I'd switch to ubuntu. (please don't kill me!)
Recently I was juggling some hard drives, something went wrong.
It wasn't Gentoo's fault in my opinion, just that I needed this machine up and running again quickly for my mom.
So I put Ubuntu on a secondary drive, and fix the Gentoo in the background.
Ubuntu has alot of preconfiguration that comes in handy when you want something that sorta works but don't have the time to put into it.
Meanwhile, I prefer Gentoo for long term installations because of excellent documentation and transparency.

allen · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 16

NorthGoingZax · Apprentice Joined: 03 Dec 2002 Posts: 189

Kasumi_Ninja · Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 9:12 am Post subject:

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

tanderson · Retired Dev Joined: 11 Apr 2007 Posts: 193

Kasumi_Ninja · Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 7:23 pm Post subject:

Kasumi_Ninja · Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 7:24 pm Post subject:

el_Salmon · Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 11:17 pm Post subject:

I have setup a Fedora 8 in my laptop recently because a filesystem corrupt issue. Installation was very well and look & feel is cool but problem arose when I try to use Static IP. Network Manager ignores my configuration and insists to use DHCP!

It seems a general problem not fixed in Fedora's Network Manager:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=172086
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=175123

NorthGoingZax · Apprentice Joined: 03 Dec 2002 Posts: 189

[quote="Aniruddha"][quote="NorthGoingZax"] And yes with Gentoo [u][b]you[/b][/u] are responsible for administrating you system. If you don't like that the only viable Linux alternative is to buy Suse Desktop / Redhat for around 400 euro's and stick with the supported packages (around 3000).

Man, 400 euros ! You got robbed ! Try here: [url]www.osdisk.com[/url] where you can choose from more than 2 distros for a few dollars, among many many sites , that offer the same thing. If you don't have time/bandwidth to download load them for [b]free[/b]. Yes, free![/quote]
This doesn't apply to Suse Desktop http://shop.novell.com/store/novelleu/DisplayCategoryProductListPage/categoryID.3422200

[quote]SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 - e-License

e-License - 1 Device - 1 Year Subscription
47.00EUR
e-License - 1 Device - 3 Year Subscription
116.00EUR[/quote][/quote]

It does apply to openSuse.

NorthGoingZax · Apprentice Joined: 03 Dec 2002 Posts: 189

Kasumi_Ninja · Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:04 am Post subject:

NorthGoingZax · Apprentice Joined: 03 Dec 2002 Posts: 189

steveL · Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2007 9:51 am Post subject:

Jeez you don't have to quote the whole thing when replying, y'know? ;p

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

Kasumi_Ninja · Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2007 3:44 pm Post subject:

steveL · Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2007 4:50 pm Post subject:

RazielFMX · l33t Joined: 23 Apr 2005 Posts: 835 Location: NY, USA

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

Simba7 · Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2007 6:41 pm Post subject:

I was using FreeBSD and OpenBSD for awhile on my servers because of the bloat/userbase of Linux before 2005. It works great for servers, routers, and firewalls but not that great for desktops.

After I bumped into Gentoo, I actually started using Linux. I found that I could:

1. Tweak the hell out of it.
2. Cross Platform. I run a PMac 6500/300 with Gentoo and it holds up nicely.
3. Not as bloated as the other distros. I tried Redhat awhile ago and a 2GB install was a bit large for me. Not to mention multiples of everything.
4. Better device support. I'm not a huge fan of NDIS Wrappers. I prefer Native drivers over (ugh..) Windows ones.
5. Ask a question and people ACTUALLY help. That's what turned me on to Gentoo and ticked me off about the other distros.

Gentoo is the best distro I've used and hope it sticks around for a few more decades.

I'm currently trying it out on my Heinz 57 Router Box (ya.. It does lots of things). It was running FreeBSD 7, but decided to give Gentoo a whirl. I removed the 6Gb FreeBSD HDD and threw in a 13Gb for Gentoo (10Gb for the Squid Cache). So far, it's doing quite well with Portage mounted as NFS.

I just wanted to say Thanks to the entire Gentoo Team and everyone that helps out. You guys (and gals) definitely kick ass.

Kasumi_Ninja · Posted: Sat Dec 15, 2007 9:34 am Post subject:

Kasumi_Ninja · Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2007 7:18 am Post subject:

richlion · n00b Joined: 02 Dec 2007 Posts: 27 Location: Mancheser UK

Hi All,

it's an interesting thread. I just wanted to add a few cents...

I am new to Getnoo, because I chose Sabayon. I browsed through at least 10 pages of posts and I have some similar feelings about Gentoo. To me it's a very good Linux distro. As a beginner with Portage - honestly .... it's a bit if a pain, although things seem easy, after all during the past 3 weeks I've so far:
- installed Sabayon 3.4f on an ETX3 / filesystem (my first insrtall on JFS was a total disaster and ended in a full reinstall).
- tried emerge --sync, had problems, so I removed rm -rf /usr/portage and the next run went fine.
- I learned some more about emerge, installed the new Firefox 2.0.0.11 and Thunderbird versions and some additional programs.
- now I am trying to fix the Konqueror 3.5.7 problem to run an upgrade, so I am running through some problems trying to upgrade it to the 3.5.8.
So in some cases Portage is simple, but when you start running into problems, that's where the pain begins.

As always, the problem lies in too many changes right from the latest stable release.

What I like about Portage is that we have to rebuild and recompile sources which gives us a very stable and well tuned system. This is the biggest advantage of the Gentoo system and no one will deny it. I think people who are looking into other distros (just a few weeks ago I used to be a Mandriva user) tend to forget this main thing. They will install a binary-based distro and they forget they have to keep their fingers crossed, because it's like with Windows:
- the system works with many default settings
- if the devices are not recognized, the system (Linux and Windows) run on some default drivers like nvidia instead of i915
- the system is pre-compiled to run on some 2000 types of machines, but doesn't work on the 2001-st.
Forgive me if I miss a point, I am not a guru.

The biggest disadvantage of Gentoo is that someone who was mainly Windows/Mandriva based has to learn quite a lot to make the system stable.

I will not state what distro I will choose, because I am in a process of discovering which one is really good. And the best will be the one which has all the basic software I need and my Konqueror will not crash after I finish watching a news stream on a web page, or I have to close down Amarok and restart Skype to get my microphone activated, because Amarok is blocking Skype and vice-versa. So far Sabayon to me is a good choice, but not the best. In the end it's the software that we need, next comes stability. Finally the fonts in the web pages and in Open Office, every time I install a Linux distro I have to tweak the system for a week or so, so the fonts are readable.

Here we get to a point, where we see that there are many expectations. Some people would like to have a distro that would give us the ability to learn, some use the Linuxes as server, so they will not bother about why Skype cannot get the microphone activated, because they don't need it. Gentoo is OK as far as I can see as a stable system, but still too many tweaks. There is another group of people that want to use a system and not spend too many hours tweaking and repairing the system. They use the system for basic multimedia things, communicating, etc. So in fact it is never easy to find the right distro because it is not simple to build such a system, that will work as everything. As long as I have been using Mandriva I always managed to run any new software updates, but I finally started running out of time and got tired, because every time I installed a new version of Firefox for security fixes, I ran into a problem, because many plugins would cease to work because I needed to link those magic .so files to the plugins manually. And here Gentoo i great again, because although I have to wait a few days to get the newest program version into the stable branch, in the end I just run emerge to update - I wait 3 hours to get it recompiled, but I am 100% sure it is integrated in the system.

At this point my Sabayon 3.4f is quite stable, although some things do not work as I expect. Why am I concerned? Because I need a distro I can install on another PC that belongs to another person. That person lives in another country and I only have 2 weeks during my vacation to install the system, which is easy in many disto's now. But what next? How am I supposed to give instructions like "emerge --sync" in a root console to someone, who doesn't know what a DOS command prompt looks like?

Now I am looking around to find a disto that has all the user needs, office suite, Skype, some graphical tools, web browsing, good security, a distro for watching movies, burning DVD's, etc.

Thanks to this thread and some suggestions I will try some other distros. Which one will win? Don't know yet.

Anyway, Gentoo has really one of the best documentation I have seen so far. Forums are great, there are really a lot of people who already helped me, so I may say "thank you all". I hope I will stay with Gentoo, also Sabayon guys have done a very good job, because I practically have 99% of software that works out of the box including wireless network and mounting USB drives. It would be a sad day if Gentoo would have to go to the archive section.

Regards,
Richard.
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