[CS-FSLUG] OS distro

[Josiah Ritchie]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 10:20 PM, Fred A. Miller <fmiller at lightlink.com> wrote:
> Keli of Coxsackie wrote:
>> agree!
>> So.. What is everyone's favorite OS distro?
>
> openSUSE.

WoHoo, a distro war. We haven't had one of those in awhile... years?

I used to be a die-hard Gentoo guy. It was my first favorite and I
still say it's the best way to truly learn what makes linux tick. I
think every serious linux guy should spend a couple years playing with
just Gentoo. Actually installing Gentoo, I hear, is much easier than
it was when I played with it. I'm referring to stage 1 Gentoo
installs, none of the starting at Stage 3 thing. Compile your own
kernel, bootstrap your own system, manually manage partitions and
configurations, file systems and modules and spend days, if not a
week, trying to get your first system up and fully functional while
you realize the massive amounts of little parts that all have to work
together and the huge amount of options to make for things as simple
as getting sound out of your soundcard or the appearance of your
screen. I owe a lot of my knowledge to Gentoo's excellent
documentation and actually traveling that journey with them. It is a
pilgrimage worth departing upon.

I use Ubuntu now mostly with many of the defaults. Gentoo makes me
appreciate the task that Ubuntu does to bring together such a solid
system. The defaults are easy, fast and sane. I install Banshee for
music and some other little things to keep life interesting, but I've
found my preferences have become defaults over the last few years so
my need to replace software has become less. Ubuntu does a great job
of making something that works on almost everything I deal with, but
still provide a flexible system. I use the Ubuntu Server distro on
servers also. Getting things up and running quickly instead of all the
tweaks and stuff that Gentoo or Debian bring is nice. You still have
to configure and so forth, but it's a good platform. I've never found
myself comfortable with an RPM based distro. I'm of the opinion that
RPMs were meant to be files installed manually and that any system
that hacks on the strengths of apt or portage is simply trying to be
what these tools really are, and failing at it. That said, I haven't
used an RPM based distro singe about 2002 with some minor exceptions.
Maybe they've improved but I tried for years to like them before I
moved to Gentoo and it never really happened. Therefore, I'm not
looking to go back to the agony and nightmare that RedHat,
Mand(rake|riva) or SuSE gave me. I did almost like Slackware for
awhile, but its package system, if you can call it that, just wasn't
enough. It was flexible, but maintenance of security packages and
keeping informed seemed like a hassle. Hmm... I ran Corel Linux for a
very little bit, have messed with some other distros also, but that
season of life has passed for me.

Well, I shouldn't write emails when I this tired... :-)

JSR/

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