[plug] Debian .vs. Gentoo

[Cameron Patrick]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 08:03:03PM +0800, William Kenworthy wrote:

| I really learnt linux when I did my first gentoo install, despite years
| of Mandrake and Redhat, I found I had only scratched the surface.  If
| someone with linux experience comes up, I would say try gentoo (do a
| binary install if time worries you) and learn

Agreed.  Slackware is (or at least used to be, or is claimed to be)
another option on the "really learning stuff" front but Gentoo does even
less for you.

| Forget redhat these days.

Yup. :-)  Mandrake really doesn't look bad, but the glitzy interface has
its quirks.  The little I've seen of SuSE seemed more polished in that
respect.

| debian gives me the horrors.

*shudders*  *backs away slowly*  :-P  

| They say stable really is stable, but to get the thing to work on
| anything modern you have gotta start installing lots of stuff that is,
| shall we say - suspect

That depends - if you're running a server, Woody should work with most
modern hardware, although possibly requiring a newer kernel.  Modern
graphics cards, printers, scanners, cameras and other such things will,
as you say, require newer versions of other packages too, which can
cause dodginess.

| (e.g., on distroday 1 debian actually had a later kernel than gentoo
| coz the stable was so far out of date!)

For the record, the one in stable is 2.4.18.  That's not exactly out of
date, and fetching and installing a new kernel on Debian is generally
no more painful than it is on gentoo.

| I have seen a few dead/deadish debian systems and they do seem more
| prone to dependency hell than release disro's like mandrake and
| redhat.

I shall have to disagree with you here.  Admittedly my experience with
Mandrake and Red Hat is close to nonexistent, but I've had very little
problems with Debian's dependencies, even running unstable with the
occasional unofficial package here and there (e.g. mplayer et al from
marillat).  Running Debian, I also feel that no matter how badly I mess
up packages I can always get rid of them and put the old (working)
versions back if necessary - a feeling I didn't have with Gentoo.

| Mind you, I moved from Mandrake to Gentoo coz at least I can fix it when
| things go wrong: binary distros always end up with me reformatting and
| starting again after about 6 months of "whats happens if I do this ..."

For me, I find the reverse to be true.  My gateway at home has been
running essentially the same Debian system since it was first installed
about two years ago - before Woody was released.  It has been constantly
upgraded since then, both hardware and software wise, and is still
running fine.  There's an ungodly mess in /usr/local and /etc - but
that's my doing, not the distribution's :-)

My foray into Gentoo, on the other hand, lasted about a month or two
before I gave up.

Cameron.

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