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posted by
janrinok
on Wednesday July 08 2015, @10:16PM
from the get-the-fire-extinguisher-ready... dept.
from the get-the-fire-extinguisher-ready... dept.
I'm wondering what Linux distros my fellow soylentils use, and why.
I myself have loved Fedora since version 7, and never cared much for Debian systems. My desktops either run Fedora or a source-built XFCE system. What distros do you use, what architectures, and why do you use them? Are there any distros you wish were still around?
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rage today, and it will set the pace tomorrow.
-- Franklin K. Dane
(Score: 5, Interesting) by hash14 on Thursday July 09 2015, @12:34AM
There's not a lot of choice left anymore, is there? Thanks Lennart.
But in change there is opportunity. Prior to Gentoo, I was using Debian and because I want things as stable as possible, I never changed anything major under the hood. But Gentoo forces you to build much of the system yourself, and in the process, I've learned so much about several aspects of the system.
Let's start with Portage: being able to tweak package options as they're being installed is awesome. Whereas in Debian you would need to provide separate packages for, say, gtk vs. kde, of if you want to build something without gnome support, a simple option in /etc/portage makes that simple (in fact, this makes it really simple to blacklist systemd ;-)). `equery uses` to get a description of all options, what they do, and the dependencies it might pull in and you're good to go.
Then you have to configure the base system from scratch too - whereas in other systems I would use the installer to configure the filesystem, Gentoo again makes you do it manually, so you learn how to build and configure LVM, choose GPT vs. MBR, etc. And of course, you can't forget to select the appropriate kernel options (genkernel is always there too, but it's pretty nice being able to customize a minimal kernel). And it was also the first time I've built an initramfs, and now I actually understand what it is and how it's used (you'll have no choice but to get familiar with that the first few times you get kicked into busybox because the kernel failed to load ;-)).
Finally, you get to choose your own system utilities like the logger, cron daemon, etc. OpenRC is quite nice as well - does its job and stays out of the way, just as I want. There are so many things to learn that it's nice to have an init system which is simple to configure and doesn't require too much effort to make things work correctly.
So far, I've installed it on three machines. You make a few mistakes along the way, but you learn from them and the last one went almost perfectly smoothly for me.
As for XFCE, it just always gets better and never gets bloated. 4.12 has added some awesome effects - nothing over-the-top, but using the compositor to highlight windows while alt+tabbing is a huge usability boost. This is what really makes the XFCE team so great - simplicity while focusing on usability, and nothing bloated or excessive. It truly is the Unix philosophy applied to the Desktop Environment paradigm.
All told, the systemd-pocalypse hasn't destroyed everything yet. I just hope that eudev manages to keep up when kdbus gets merged. But the gentoo community seems very strong, and I might find some time to contribute myself if I can get ahead on my other projects.
(Score: 1) by rob_on_earth on Thursday July 09 2015, @09:02AM
The only reason I got into Gentoo was its support for 64bit AMD back in 2007. Everything else sort of supported 64bit but mainly 32bit and good luck with 64bit. As Gentoo built everything from scratch it could always target my actual architecture. Used it ever since. Allows me to run what I want when I want how I want , which is what I need from a distro.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @04:48PM
I started with Gentoo around the same time, and for almost the same reason: I wanted to install one distro across two different boxes, an old ppc machine to use as a file server and an AMD64 desktop. Gentoo was the only distro I found that supported both.
And the ppc file server is still going strong - while the desktop is rarely powered up.
(Score: 2) by http on Friday July 10 2015, @06:34AM
Try debian for cross platform. Admittedly, jessie is having some growing pains on ppc (re: nvidia), but wheezy (currently oldstable) is fine.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.