Re: [PLUG] Source-Based Distribution Recommendation

[Richard Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

Jonathan DeMasi wrote:
> While I do not have any experience with those distros, I am a new Gentoo 
> user of only a few weeks.  I was just curious why feel that the quality 
> of the distro has gone down?

The politics level certainly has gone up of late (then again, maybe that 
is just because I follow gentoo-dev more than I used to).  I'm not sure 
I can really say that quality has dropped.  Perhaps the level of 
innovation has gone down a bit, but stability has tended to rise.  I 
can't remember the last time that some upgrade required massive 
system-wide rebuilds to keep things working, or that an update made it 
impossible to reboot.  In the more distant past those sorts of things 
were more common.

I think that if anything Gentoo has settled down and has become a bit 
mundane.  Maybe that's a good thing, maybe it is a bad thing.  In some 
ways it still is ahead of the curve - such as in USE flags which let you 
tailor your system quite a bit more than on other distros.  Gentoo is 
also close to implementing OpenRC (available in test) which has some 
chance of becoming the standard for init scripts.

On the other hand ubuntu has become the "default" distro these days and 
just about every open source instruction provides lots of docs and often 
package files for it.

If you avoid the politics on gentoo-dev I find it is still a pretty nice 
distro.

I'm certainly interested in feedback on the distro from "ordinary" users 
- I'm actually a gentoo dev (rich0 - part of the amd64 arch team and I 
maintain a few odd packages).
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