On 30 December 2011 01:09, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
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.
I really want to understand this. Could you give me any examples, at all?
Dependencies are very hard and unforgiving in
rpm/apt, while Gentoo releases many constraints by encoding dependencies at
a very fine grain level.
Part of me wants to say "a dependency is a dependency; if you need a
library for something to work, then you need it, end of story" and
point out that disk space, even now after the Thai floods, is about 7?
pence per *gigabyte* and that you can fit an awful lot of OS into a
gig of disk. If you installed every single package in the Debian
repositories onto a single machine, the amount of disk space consumed
would cost roughly the same as a can of Coca-cola.
But by the same token, OK, I do sometimes get annoyed at packages
bringing in stuff that I don't want, and unnecessary software does
mean marginally increasing the attack surface of an OS, as well as a
slight increase in complexity. But really, I regard this as a very
trivial problem indeed, overall.
Occasionally it is annoying that Ubuntu does not include the latest
version of a program, although the problem is shrinking all the time -
for instance it now keeps up with Mozilla's new rapid release
schedule, which was for a while a real nuisance. But you only have to
wait 6mth between releases, and on a server, I am typically /very/
conservative with my update schedule, in any case. I only want stable,
well-tested software on my servers.
The idea of *custom-compiled binaries* with system-specific
optimisations that will almost certainly be subtly different from
every other user's out there, thus offering a myriad of potential
differences in behaviour or tiny incompatibilities with 3rd-party
vendors' binaries, drivers, or whatever, on a server, gives me the
screaming heebie-jeebies. It is the /absolute *last* thing I'd want/
on a server - it is very, *very* undesirable indeed, from my POV,
which is why I am, to say the least, curious as to why someone would
see this as something they /wanted/!
Gentoo's original argument was for performance. If a server is
suffering from poor performance, I'd put some more RAM in it, not
tweak the compiler switches and make new binaries! That is not merely
the last thing I'd do, it would be a sackable offence for any server
admin I was paying!
After you've used it long enough, it's
something
you miss.
I can, I suppose, believe that, although frankly, I prefer an approach
that maybe installs some stuff you don't need but just gets you a
working package with the minimum amount of mucking around.
We use Fedora based servers at work,
[*Recoils in shock*]
/Fedora/?! On a /server/?! Seriously? It's a sort of periodic alpha
release, it's not even meant to be stable!
and my ISP required me to use
Centos,
That seems very odd to me, but OK, as the free equivalent of RHEL, it
makes a vague sort of sense. I do see it on webservers and things.
and pretty much any task is complicated relative to
Gentoo.
I am not very familiar with modern RH-derived distros - I abandoned
RPM with a song of joy as soon as Ubuntu came out. Suddenly here was
an easy, quite accessible distro that delivered the powerful packaging
system that all my egghead boffin Debian-running friends had been
being superior about for nearly a decade. I never looked back and
would need to be crow-barred back into using RPM these days.
I do understand that it tends to dominate in the US and very
US-dominated areas, though, and in the commercial paid-support sphere.
If I was working as a Linux sysadmin, I expect I'd have to learn RHEL
or Centos and use it.
Happily, I'm not.
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.
Sometimes by whole months, yes. Can be a niggling irritation on a
desktop; actively desirable on a server.
Rolling upgrades (Gentoo and, I
believe, Arch) don't have this infuriating time capsule quality.
Or Debian Testing.
Of course I am talking about servers, mainly. A lot of
this stuff doesn't
matter much on the average desktop.
I've tried to address that.
>> For myself: I've tried various. Since
abandoning Debian ~ 2002 (with few
>> regrets, judging by their Procrustean approach to packaging),
Again, could I ask for examples of what you mean? I actively want to
understand this - I always want to understand more about why and how
people use Linux and FOSS, along with other practices and habits and
so on.
(?)
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.
I was typing on my phone, so was going for brevity. It might have been
better to say apt-get than .deb.
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.
If I wanted the most popular, I'd be running Windows!
No, it's not that, although 3rd-party support is an issue. No, it's
more that I want something stable, conservative, highly consistent
across different systems, that only changes gradually when it
absolutely needs to.
That to me seems the /reverse/ of Gentoo.
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…
I am running out of surfing time! I'll read that and come back.
As a sysadmin I would choose Gentoo over the
frustrations of a system that
regularly blocks me from getting things done.
Again, I'd point at Windows or Mac OS X if you want easy. The reasons
for Linux are stability, power, software, resources and support, ISTM.
Customisability is very low on the list on a server. So long as one
can remove stuff one doesn't want.
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?
Ubuntu came out 7Y ago - in October 2004 - and has turned the desktop
distro world on its head. It is rapidly driving other desktop distros
to extinction and several of the more interesting rival desktop
distros are Ubuntu remixes.
(E.g. Bodhi, the most significant Enlightenment-based distro in a long
time. Mint, which is doing more with GNOME 3 than anyone. Xubuntu, a
big booster for Xfce. Lubuntu, an interesting attempt at a modern
distro for low-end kit. Even Puppy Linux, the lightest-weight desktop
distro there is, has moved to an Ubuntu base. Damn Small Linux is
dead, sadly.)
It is the biggest thing to /ever/ happen to desktop/server Linux, has
massively increased Linux adoption and use, and it came half way
through your cited period of no change.
Meanwhile Ubuntu Server is making headway, too, although it is
technologically very conservative. I know people who prefer it to
Debian for servers, although I admit, not many.)
So, er, I have to disagree, markedly!
Now this is not to say that I think Ubuntu is perfect - it's not - but
your statement is demonstrably false, I think.
You do know the #1 site for Gentoo advocacy, don't you? :?)
http://funroll-loops.info/
;?)
--
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