[plug] Debian .vs. Gentoo

[Brad Campbell]

Cameron Patrick wrote:

> 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.
> 

I'm probably pretty biased as I have *never* used any distro other than 
Debian and an embeded one I built from scratch.
My daily-driver laptop has not been re-installed in probably 5 years. I 
just keep copying the contents onto new machines as I upgrade.
I have run into the odd dependency problem with Debian, but never while 
running the stable distro, and nothing that could not be undone with a 
simple dpkg --remove. My /usr/local sometimes get crufted up and I 
simply backup what I need, blow it away and restore the backup. Thats 
only becuase sometimes I do silly things with various bits of source and 
let it run roughshod over my /usr/local. Nothing that can't be easily fixed.
This afternoon after my last tangle with Evolution before I went the uml 
route, I was seriously thinking of doing a re-format/re-install but 
sanity kicked in before I did. I simply fired up dselect and removed all 
the packages I thought I did not need anymore, then ran apt-get remove 
`deborphan` a couple of times to clean out the rest of the crap..
Easy, problems solved and another re-install/re-boot avoided :p)

Brad
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