On 29/12/11 10:35 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
On 29 December 2011 13:47, Toby Thain<toby at
telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
On 29/12/11 7:39 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
...
Distro choice in the 2nd decade of the 21st century seems to me to be:
Noob? Ubuntu. Expert?
Server:
Is someone else paying? Run RHEL. Otherwise, run Debian, unless you're
after a toy not a tool.
Desktop:
Ubuntu, unless you're really seriously opposed, in which case, Debian.
If you're not man enough for Debian (and I'm not), Xubuntu or Mint.
Thanks. Maybe others will find the summary useful.
Ahahahaha! Well played! :?D
But there was a question in there, perhaps implicit: why source-based
distros? What do you consider obsolete about them?
It's more difficult to get non-trivial setups working - unless it was
anticipated by the builder. Dependencies are very hard and unforgiving
in rpm/apt, while Gentoo releases many constraints by encoding
dependencies at a very fine grain level. After you've used it long
enough, it's something you miss. We use Fedora based servers at work,
and my ISP required me to use Centos, and pretty much any task is
complicated relative to Gentoo. And it *inevitably* results in packages
being more out of date then they should be, for a host of reasons,
either dependency related, or the age of packages in the particular
"frozen in time" repository. Rolling upgrades (Gentoo and, I believe,
Arch) don't have this infuriating time capsule quality.
Of course I am talking about servers, mainly. A lot of this stuff
doesn't matter much on the average desktop.
For myself:
I've tried various. Since abandoning Debian ~ 2002 (with few
regrets, judging by their Procrustean approach to packaging),
(?)
What do you dislike about .Deb? TTBOMK apt-get is /the/ most mature,
stable and reliable packaging tool there is.
I'm not complaining about the package format, exactly; more their policy
of twisting packages into the "Debian way". A good example would be Apache.
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.
[*Boggle*] I would require a quite spectacular justification if I were
hiring a sysadmin as to why to use Gentoo. I mean really Earth-shaking
stuff.
This pervasive fear in the industry of any tool that's not #1 or #2 in
popularity is what I was referring to earlier. It might be related to
the idea of "default thinking" referenced in this post:
http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/the-coming-zombie-apocalypse-small-ch…
As a sysadmin I would choose Gentoo over the frustrations of a system
that regularly blocks me from getting things done.
The pattern here is very familiar (it pertains to
programming languages as
well); the industry is frozen into anachronistic defaults and refuses to
learn from anything that doesn't happen to be the most popular choice. This
is probably not a huge issue for most/desktop Linux users, but some of us
who configure servers or development systems need more flexibility.
Oddly, I agree - but I'm not aware of anything better than
Debian/Ubuntu in this particular area.
It's only possible to make that statement if you haven't learned what is
different about Gentoo, which introduces a variety of *new* tools and
capabilities (see above re fine grained package descriptions). The
binary world - with the exception of Arch, I suspect - has hardly moved
an inch in the past 15 years, apparently assuming they are the last
word, and learning nothing. How can that be good for us?
--Toby
The most /interesting/ Linux is
GoboLinux but it's going nowhere fast in recent years, sadly.