Re: [PLUG] Source Distro Recommendation

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

On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 3:41 PM, Casey Bralla <MailList@nerdworld.org> wrote:
> I had been an avid Gentoo user, who then switched to Funtoo.   I gave up on
> the Gentoo world in resigned disappointment due to the poor stability (even in
> the "stable" version), and moved back to pure Debian.  (With Gentoo developers
> up to their hips in "udev" forking, I expect this instability to get even
> worse over the next year.)  [Sorry, Rich!]

Gentoo developers are actually pretty split on the whole udev thing,
and only around six are really spending time on it.  It seems unlikely
that the forked udev will be the default anytime soon - I suspect it
will never be the default.  It will just be another option just as
systemd is a reasonably well-supported openrc alternative, and if you
want you can use dracut instead of genkernel to build an initramfs.
There are a lot of misconceptions about the udev fork - in Gentoo any
developer can start a new official Gentoo project on nothing more than
personal initiative - I could create an official Gentoo X11 fork if I
wanted to tomorrow, and insofar as I (or others recruited by me)
supported it, that would become another option alongside x11.

I've found that stability on Gentoo has generally been better in
recent years, but I'm fairly tolerant of the odd disruption here and
there.  It likely will never be quite as predictable as Debian or
Ubuntu.  Gentoo is more about choice than stability or polish.  It is
pretty hard to polish things when you don't even know what package
creates all the device nodes or if the kernel supports loadable
modules.

> I've looked at Sorcerer, SourceMage, and LunarLinux.   None of them seem as
> well developed as Gentoo/Funtoo.
>
> Does anyone here have any experience with any of these?

Obviously I'm a bit biased, but I think you'll struggle to find
another source-based distro that is remotely comparable to Gentoo,
other than one of the Gentoo derivatives (Sabayon is probably the most
polished of these).  Source-based distros just aren't that popular in
general, so there really isn't a market for creating new ones from
scratch.

Best of luck to you, however.  If you really want something a bit more
polished I'd probably suggest Sabayon, but like Ubuntu you'll find
that it isn't quite as open-ended.  It does support falling back to
source-based packages, but since it is largely a binary distro
obviously you can't just swap out a newer version of some core library
like you can with Gentoo.

Rich
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug