DigitalDuality
9th January 2009, 09:33 PM
I've been distro hopping every couple of months or so for years. But I think I can finally stop here. Fedora 10 64 bit seems quality. There's a few hitches but nothing I can't live without. Rather than going on in a rant in paragraph form.. I just thought I'd give a short run down about why.
Ubuntu
I've used Ubuntu, every version since 5.10. It seems no matter how hard they try, or how many neat features they have or how strong the community is, they always have some serious package breakage of something that once worked before.
Ubuntu upgrades have torn my system to shreds on more than one occasion even when I stick with software from official repositories.
I have a highly secured Ubuntu. RSA key based machine I use on my network. It's purely to ssh to in order to get into the network for quite a number of people. When the Debian random number generator bug flew downstream, it created a ton of work for me.
There might be a vast amount of software and a lot of helpful people in their community but I just feel the number of people looking for help vs those qualified to give it is easily a 1 to a 1000 ratio. When it comes to desktop usage, there's normally some blog or wiki or official doc to follow. When it comes to the server, not so much.
Too often does Ubuntu push beta software on it's users, be it firefox, pidgin, openoffice, kde, etc.. and that in itself becomes problematic
They're just making somethings too simple. UFW and GUFW are great examples. I really feel people should have to learn their OS at least a little bit in order to have the know-how to keep it secure. Otherwise we're going to run into the problems Windows has, where the major "bug" is sitting between the chair and they keyboard. It makes for a great newbie distro, but I jsut can't see myself sticking with it any longer.
I got a new 22in monitor for christmas and for the life of me I could not make fonts look correct in Ubuntu. Even after a reinstall. No other distro gives me this problem.
Gentoo
Great learning experience, unfortunately I don't have time to compile software every time i want to try something new.
Also, their Gnome pulled down from emerge is buggy.
Arch
Great distro, like Gentoo, but with half the time spent. Great community.
I found too many packages a real pain to install. It's nice i learned how to build from source and all, but sometimes a binary somewhere is the solution i'm looking for. Redhat and debian based distro's have that. Gentoo and Arch don't. And sometimes the package you're looking for just isn't in the repo's no matter how good they may be. Though I quite like pacman.
OpenSuse 10, 11, 11.1
Always well polished looking
far too often their official and community repositories don't have specific software I'm looking for (openbox for example).
I've rarely if ever found their community helpful.
I don't particular support mono, moonlight, or the MS deal. I can look past it I guess but it just makes me feel uneasy.
I've had more dependency problems installing apps on OpenSuse than I have any other distro
They try reinventing the wheel too much with Yast. There's perfectly good tools already included in Gnome to do a lot of the functionality Yast does
Yast and zypper have seen speed improvements in their repository manager, but I still feel they are far too slow.
Their installer forces me to install on a disc that i don't want to install on, so i always have to turn off the computer, unplug the discs i want saved so only the disc i want my os on to be left.. then do the install, reboot, and manually change the menu.lst file for grub's boot order. This has happened with every install, on every version of Suse I've ever tried.
I know it's easily changed, but I've never been able to stand their customization of Gnome. They were a great KDE distro, unfortunately I don't feel there's such a thing anymore since KDE 4x has come out.
with fedora, everything just works. I have some complaints about Gnome and Linux in general (Network Manager, Pulse Audio, the new GDM) but it really has nothing to do with Fedora itself. I'm quite pleased with my version 10 experience. Fonts look great, no problem with multimedia, having SELinux is great, it gives me a platform that makes it easier for me to memorize many Redhat specific commands (i'm studying for the RHCE), the install went smooth, most of the packages i'm looking for are in the repo's (except the 64 bit nvidia driver from rpmfusion). Nice boot time, nice community.
I think i'll finally stay someplace a while. :)
Ubuntu
I've used Ubuntu, every version since 5.10. It seems no matter how hard they try, or how many neat features they have or how strong the community is, they always have some serious package breakage of something that once worked before.
Ubuntu upgrades have torn my system to shreds on more than one occasion even when I stick with software from official repositories.
I have a highly secured Ubuntu. RSA key based machine I use on my network. It's purely to ssh to in order to get into the network for quite a number of people. When the Debian random number generator bug flew downstream, it created a ton of work for me.
There might be a vast amount of software and a lot of helpful people in their community but I just feel the number of people looking for help vs those qualified to give it is easily a 1 to a 1000 ratio. When it comes to desktop usage, there's normally some blog or wiki or official doc to follow. When it comes to the server, not so much.
Too often does Ubuntu push beta software on it's users, be it firefox, pidgin, openoffice, kde, etc.. and that in itself becomes problematic
They're just making somethings too simple. UFW and GUFW are great examples. I really feel people should have to learn their OS at least a little bit in order to have the know-how to keep it secure. Otherwise we're going to run into the problems Windows has, where the major "bug" is sitting between the chair and they keyboard. It makes for a great newbie distro, but I jsut can't see myself sticking with it any longer.
I got a new 22in monitor for christmas and for the life of me I could not make fonts look correct in Ubuntu. Even after a reinstall. No other distro gives me this problem.
Gentoo
Great learning experience, unfortunately I don't have time to compile software every time i want to try something new.
Also, their Gnome pulled down from emerge is buggy.
Arch
Great distro, like Gentoo, but with half the time spent. Great community.
I found too many packages a real pain to install. It's nice i learned how to build from source and all, but sometimes a binary somewhere is the solution i'm looking for. Redhat and debian based distro's have that. Gentoo and Arch don't. And sometimes the package you're looking for just isn't in the repo's no matter how good they may be. Though I quite like pacman.
OpenSuse 10, 11, 11.1
Always well polished looking
far too often their official and community repositories don't have specific software I'm looking for (openbox for example).
I've rarely if ever found their community helpful.
I don't particular support mono, moonlight, or the MS deal. I can look past it I guess but it just makes me feel uneasy.
I've had more dependency problems installing apps on OpenSuse than I have any other distro
They try reinventing the wheel too much with Yast. There's perfectly good tools already included in Gnome to do a lot of the functionality Yast does
Yast and zypper have seen speed improvements in their repository manager, but I still feel they are far too slow.
Their installer forces me to install on a disc that i don't want to install on, so i always have to turn off the computer, unplug the discs i want saved so only the disc i want my os on to be left.. then do the install, reboot, and manually change the menu.lst file for grub's boot order. This has happened with every install, on every version of Suse I've ever tried.
I know it's easily changed, but I've never been able to stand their customization of Gnome. They were a great KDE distro, unfortunately I don't feel there's such a thing anymore since KDE 4x has come out.
with fedora, everything just works. I have some complaints about Gnome and Linux in general (Network Manager, Pulse Audio, the new GDM) but it really has nothing to do with Fedora itself. I'm quite pleased with my version 10 experience. Fonts look great, no problem with multimedia, having SELinux is great, it gives me a platform that makes it easier for me to memorize many Redhat specific commands (i'm studying for the RHCE), the install went smooth, most of the packages i'm looking for are in the repo's (except the 64 bit nvidia driver from rpmfusion). Nice boot time, nice community.
I think i'll finally stay someplace a while. :)
