What distribution will *YOU* switch to? (part II)

desultory · Bodhisattva Joined: 04 Nov 2005 Posts: 9410

Merged the preceding seventeen posts.

darkknight87 · n00b Joined: 08 Jul 2009 Posts: 7

I am stuck on gentoo... sure it takes a lot of time, but you can leave it unattended for most of it. When I first switched to linux, I read all I could about all the major distros. I wanted something that was powerful and that would help me learn linux along the way. LFS started looking pretty good until a friend of mine pointed out that package management would be a nightmare. I have seen some solutions for using portage with LFS, but I ended up going with gentoo... and I haven't switched. I love portage. I guess my opinion is somewhat biased; I have never really used any other distro. Gentoo has served me well.

Perkele · n00b Joined: 22 Apr 2005 Posts: 68

Ok I'm going to present a different view.

I used Gentoo for four years and deleted it to install Kubuntu.
Why, you ask? Well for startes, it took me several days to install Gentoo (compiling took the most time). I did that before I went to university, so had plenty of free time. Time I don't have anymore. So I installed Ubuntu in 15 minutes while having lunch and watching an episode of "Married with children". And literally everything ran out of the box.
On Gentoo, it took me two afternoons to get my printer running with CUPS. With Ubuntu, I plugged it in and 30 seconds later, I was printing.
And I'm not even going to start on my usb bluetooth dongle. Oh god, all these nights...

I still love Gentoo for teaching me everything about Linux. And I'm sure there are plenty great applications for it, but on my desktop pc at home while not being unemployed it simply became unusable. Sometimes I don't have the luxory to wait one or two hours for some software package to compile when I need to use it or to fiddle around with some piece of new hardware for days because I'm having deadlines.

NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2605

Merged preceding post into this thread. Thanks to nightmorph for reporting.
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regomodo · Guru Joined: 25 Mar 2008 Posts: 445

d2_racing · Posted: Thu Jul 30, 2009 11:48 am Post subject:

Maybe you should try to update your ubuntu boxes.

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

regomodo · Guru Joined: 25 Mar 2008 Posts: 445

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

I've been on Gentoo for quite a while - I believe my first install was 1.4 - before the 200x numbering started. I went with Gentoo for it's geek value, but have become happy for its reliability, stability, and up-to-date-ness. To be sure there are occasional headaches, like libexpat, but those are everywhere.

When my son went away to college, I equipped him with WinXP, because it seem appropriate to his major, but I left space on the drive for Linux, because that also seemed appropriate.

My daughter went away to college several years later, and things were different. I equipped her with Ubuntu, because the school was accepting and I felt she could manage it herself.

More recently my son's WinXP installation has finally rotted, so I set him up with Ubuntu in the previously-mentioned freespace, to begin data recovery prior to a Windows reinstall. So far he's just using Ubuntu.

Ubuntu has problems... My own experiences have been that Gentoo is more likely to work.
When we upgraded my daughter's box to Jaunty (9.04) she lost most of her sound. Apparently sound only works for flash - we've lost all sound in MythTV and Amarok. Besides that, Amarok dropped support for non-free fomats like mp3, and requires extra, not-well-documented steps.
My son can't play DVDs. (I don't know if my daughter can play them either, I don't know that she's tried.) Again, I know the solution is libdvdcss, but it's really unclear how to get that in Ubuntu. We found a .deb last night and installed it, and now he can play several "Star Wars" movies, but not "The Watchmen" - go figure. The only time I ever had problems playing a DVD on Gentoo I erased a cached key file, and all was well.

Don't know where I'd move, if I had to. Gentoo has really sold me on source-based distributions.
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hazza · Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2009 11:23 pm Post subject:

g.e.n.t.u.x. · Guru Joined: 21 Aug 2006 Posts: 410 Location: Berlin

i am coming from suse to gentoo and loved the hard work that teach me in being in thinking for the hole day. gentoo is hard

but all others let u stay in more dependencies as i want. i tried seperatly sabayon and kubuntu, cause my mother is using this at her system.

go on gentoo

gentux

Bill Cosby · Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 11:17 am Post subject:

NetBSD!

The problem being hardware support, and use flags.
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disi · Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 1:46 pm Post subject:

I don't know much about Arch Linux, but as far as I've seen it is "more about choice" than other distros. So if the Gentoo project is stops, I would switch to Arch... or LFS

What I mostly hate about other distributions is, that you get tons of software installed you don't even know of. Install Kubuntu and you have to use KDE to not break stuff, install Opensolaris and you want to use Gnome as your Desktop. Most of those OS tell you what to use.

Hey, cool there is an alternative to alsa, so lets switch the system to use oss4. Hey, you could use framebuffer instead of Xorg-drivers, lets got for it and rebuild the kernel with framebuffer support or even patch it easily to your needs. Hey, that filesystem looks faster/safer lets go for it and swap it. Hey, I got this machine with ARM/PPC/SPARC processor, let's install an OS on it. :idea:

//edit: one good example: http://wicd.sourceforge.net/download.php
Ubuntu: if you are using Jaunty... if you want the latest version... if you are...
Gentoo: emerge -av wicd
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Quick23t · n00b Joined: 07 Aug 2009 Posts: 66 Location: Phoenix, AZ

If forced to switch from Gentoo I would use Arch. I run Gentoo, Arch and my own Rpath based blend on my rigs now. I like my systems lean and clean, although I tend to stray off the beaten path quite often. Portage gives me the flexibility I need to be able to run my own packages in the manner I see fit, while still being able to maintain them easily by quickly modifying the ebuild in a local overlay. pacman (Arch) gives me this as well.

Kingoftherings · Guru Joined: 04 May 2008 Posts: 328

I'd probably use Arch or Slackware, and maybe Fedora. But Gentoo will be my main distro for the foreseeable future.

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

use slackware, and be carefull. Don#t let the distro do the partitioning for you. ubuntu can fuck you up that way very hard.
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travlr · Apprentice Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 158 Location: USA

Gentoo, my first linux distro will stay my linux distro.

I tried using suse and (k)ubuntu but I found out that they definitely have their short comings too.

Especially if you deal with developing, and using other version control sourced software.

Not to mention when you need to get into configuring or finding good documentation another distro dosen't cut it for me.

So I've resolved myself to learn all I can about what makes this distro tick, and to submitting patches and ebuilds for both my needs and to give back to a great community.

I'll eventully become a gentoo dev.

d2_racing · Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2009 9:47 pm Post subject:

Right now at work, we plan to use CentOs or Red Hat to monitor the network with snort.

So maybe, I will need to get my Red Hat certification one day. Since it's not M$, then I'm good with it

So, I will need to run Centos on my work box to experiment.

labrador · Guru Joined: 04 Oct 2003 Posts: 316

Debian is solid. No surprises. It doesn't have the issue of ancient package versions and kernels it once had. I don't use Linux as a hobby system. I have other things to do than to work on Linux in itself, so I want an OS that stays out of the way and isn't "interesting". I've been using Debian since 2005 and I'm not coming back to Gentoo.

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

rafo · Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2009 10:30 pm Post subject:

For my personal needs I see no reason to leave Gentoo. However, recently I have been looking for a "Just Works" distribution that I can recommend to others. Most likely there are several distributions that would do, and the best choice depends on the list of requirements that you have. My list goes:

My best bet so far is PCLinuxOS (release 2009.2).

One thing I have learned is this: When you start trying out a binary distribution you may think that installing and configuring will be fairly quick compared to a Gentoo install (no lengthy compilations). Well, I found that I spent quite a lot of time finding my way with every new distro; perhaps not all that different from what it takes to set up a Gentoo installation from scratch...

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

KDE3 is available - and will be, in a sunset overlay.

If you want to keep it around, help maintain it.

That simple.
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Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males

I identify as a dirty penismensch.

mrbig4545 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Jun 2004 Posts: 124

Sorry guys, I'm already on my way to switching all my machines over to arch. It makes me sad and I feel I need to tell you lot why since I've been using *only* gentoo for as long as I can remember. My main reason for using gentoo is customization, and arch offers me that, albeit not at the same level, although thats also pretty good as most things just work

Anyway, arch offers me everything I need and I don't need to wait ages for things to install, I do miss the gentoo way of doing things though.

So thats that, its weird, kinda like moving house! anyway, peace

d2_racing · Posted: Tue Nov 24, 2009 5:17 pm Post subject:

No problem, see you soon, you will be back

Punisher · n00b Joined: 26 Feb 2007 Posts: 21

When apache die with a segfault in an update or the server don't boot because the new kernel is buggy, you'll cry.