On Dec 29, 2011, at 8:47, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
For myself: I've tried various. Since abandoning
Debian ~ 2002 (with few regrets, judging by their Procrustean approach to packaging),
Gentoo's far and away the one I prefer, especially for any non trivial server
configuration. Binary distributions don't work for me (I use these as well when I
don't have a choice); as far as I am concerned the concept is almost obsolete. I
should try Arch though.
I like Debian when I need to bring up something small quickly (precisely because of the
binary packages; on embedded machines, it just takes forever to compile things).
For my own server, I like Gentoo because of the flexibility of package configuration
(especially when it comes
to IPv6, which is in flux here); way back when, I got it running fine on PowerPC, but that
was probably also around 2002.
I've found Ubuntu to be nice for desktop use, thought only because it has the easiest
time keeping up with my AMD graphics drivers. I've had to use Red Hat and its
derivatives at work simply because we have customers who require it because someone wrote
down that it was required long ago. I left Red Hat as a distro for my own use long ago,
mostly because of RPM.
Of course, I mostly run NetBSD on my power macs these days, though I'm increasingly
questioning why; it's gotten abysmally slow on my OldWorld machines. I don't think
they ever got ppc64 working very well, either, so Linux would probably be the clear winner
for a G5.
- Dave