OT: linux dists and such (Re: Off Topic Telnet problems)

[Brian K. White]

On Wed, 2009-03-18 at 03:03 -0400, Fairlight wrote:

> I guess I'd rather just stick with OpenSuSE.  It's still a pretty well
> designed product until Novell gets their meathooks on it.

Sorry for perpetuating an OT thread, but, well all filepro users need a
good OS to run fp on, and that is somewhat of a moving target that could
use renewed discussion from time to time.

opensuse is suffering a bit of a slump in quality control with 11.0 and
11.1, but it's not bad enough to be worth the disruption of switching
distros and it's mostly in bs that doesn't affect me luckily.

Example: people are complaining about kde4, and some people have even
reported lockups and crashes, but they were all involving kde4 or compiz
or proprietary binary video drivers, or beagle killing performance
maintaining stupid search indexes, all stuff I don't even have installed
since I always install only the minimal text-only option.

I don't know whether to say this means opensuse is still good because
who cares if the gui is broken? or merely that I'm lucky that I don't
happen to use the bad parts of a bad distro.

The installer can be frustrating when it comes to boot loader management
in conjunction with software raid, and only now with 11.1 does it
finally create a GPT disklabel for large drives. Unfortunately it merely
does so automatically and doesn't offer any controls other than to
remove it, except it doesn't actually remove it so having a knob that
doesn't work is even worse than having no knob. But so far these can all
be dealt with manually using only the tools available right in the
ramdisk  on the mini iso for net installs.

I think all it is is the result of an experiment to switch to a 6 month
release cycle, which they have already decided to abandon as a bad idea.

So, I can't fault them for trying something as long as they quickly made
a reasonable decision based on the results of the trial. opensuse no
longer uses zmd for another example.

I definitely like using their build service to maintain, build, and
distribute my own packages for multiple distribution versions and
platforms. And now they are almost ready to bring a similar service on
line for entire customized distributions, basically a web front-end for
kiwi. That will be sweet.

The different dists still have their different strengths it seems.
I have been using ubuntu (and xubuntu and eeebuntu) for some personal
machines and generally I find that dist better for desktop performance
and end-user convenience with hardware detection and dealing with things
like mamanging wifi and otherwise always-changing net connections on
laptops. There is a netbook variant of eeebuntu (sounds redundant I
know) that boots off a usb stick that is just hands down the sweetest
thing for that.
I take that same stick and boot an actual eeepc, which is a given, but
also a viao tz, and one of those brand new vaio p-series things that
look like an oversized checkbook or a zagat book. It's about as
hardware-magical as knoppix, but is more end-user friendly and meant to
be used as a desktop not as a diagnostic and repair tool.

My only problem with ubuntu for servers is simply that ubuntu is still
new and I don't want to get everyone all trained on the details of that
dist only to have it change or disappear in a couple years. A less
critical dislike is the lack of good text-based sys admin front end like
yast. I don't care too much about that since I do everything by
operating on the various config files directly anyways, but I do value
the existence of a "reference", and a front end which I can tell others
to use safely, and for that front end and reference to be available
without any gui available. But I see no technical or philosophical
problem with ubuntu. I haven't had any stability problems, every program
I want is available pre-built or compiles without incident. I just don't
like that it's all driven by one dude who could change his mind or run
out of money or suffer some form of legal or financial coercion etc...

Probably these days it's a false assumption that a company or
organization that has been around a long time is less likely to
disappear or change greatly/gratuitously, but what else can you go on?

-- 
bkw