The perfect distro, what matters the most to you?

[Vogateer]

Something else about gentoo is that I've found is that the ebuilds, at least the few I've made myself, can be very easy to put together. So if you find something you want that isn't in portage, you can make your own without a lot of effort. Does any other package management offer that ease of addition to the package manager? Seriously, I just don't know much about .deb or the other package managers.

I need to try Slackware, along with Linux from Scratch, Suse, PCLinux OS, and a ton of other distros, just to try them. I still can't find any reason for another distro to pull me away from using gentoo as my main distro, though. There's only one bad thing about it that I can find, and that's the length of time to install packages because of compiling. If you don't mind that, and I obviously don't, then I can't find any other thing wrong with it. It's flexible, it's fast, it's easy to use, at least I think it's easy. I've found maybe two or three packages I wanted that weren't an "emerge" away, and I made my own ebuilds for a couple of those, instructions on building those ebuilds were provided courtesy of the brilliant gentoo documentation. It runs on x86, ppc, amd64, sparc and other architectures I'll probably never use. It is Rock Solid Stable. I really can't imagine a distro that is more configurable; use flags are just a beautiful, wonderful thing. I'll try others, but gentoo will always be my go-to distro.

[thetza]

Something else about gentoo is that I've found is that the ebuilds, at least the few I've made myself, can be very easy to put together. So if you find something you want that isn't in portage, you can make your own without a lot of effort. Does any other package management offer that ease of addition to the package manager? Seriously, I just don't know much about .deb or the other package managers.

The answer is a resounding no. Although FreeBSD/Debian/Gentoo share the crown for the raw number of packages/ports available, gentoo is definitely the easiest to extend.

[Judland]

Does any other package management offer that ease of addition to the package manager? Seriously, I just don't know much about .deb or the other package managers.

Pacman for Arch is a pretty easy system to create your own packages for. There's a process to it, but once you've done a few times, it only takes a few minutes to set-up.

[Gomer_X]

Something else about gentoo is that I've found is that the ebuilds, at least the few I've made myself, can be very easy to put together. So if you find something you want that isn't in portage, you can make your own without a lot of effort. Does any other package management offer that ease of addition to the package manager? Seriously, I just don't know much about .deb or the other package managers.

The answer is a resounding no. Although FreeBSD/Debian/Gentoo share the crown for the raw number of packages/ports available, gentoo is definitely the easiest to extend.

I'd disagree. If you can build a package from source, you can make an RPM without much trouble. There are automated tools to do it, and even from scratch it's not that hard.

[shopRatt]

I vote for "all of the above". I first started using Linux because I was curious and an professor of mind really got me into the "free software" way of thinking. I have been impressed with most of the distros that I have tried, and continue to tinker with others.

For me speed is not the most important thing, however it cannot be "ass-slow" like the spyware infested computer that I reformatted when I began using Linux.

I have been using Slackware on a spare computer for the last couple weeks, the only thing that is holding me back on using it full time is the package mangagement. I am still kind off a n00b so it takes me longer to figure out different tools until I get used to them. That is why I chose to run slack, so I would be forced to learn.

While all of them are important I think that stablility and flexibility are the most important. I like that Linux is stable and that I can download a base installation and add only the things that I want to use.

[gorkon]

I really like Fedora Core 5. It's a very good distro, but it's not without it's faults. My 2 criticisms of FC5 are:

1. yum is FRIGGIN SLOW!
2. Likes lots of resources.....runs slow on limited machines.

My Acer runs this really slow. Granted, it does only have 256 MB of ram (going to rectify that soon). Maybe FC5 will speed up after getting to at least 512 MB. We'll see.

[Gomer_X]

I really like Fedora Core 5. It's a very good distro, but it's not without it's faults. My 2 criticisms of FC5 are:

1. yum is FRIGGIN SLOW!
2. Likes lots of resources.....runs slow on limited machines.

My Acer runs this really slow. Granted, it does only have 256 MB of ram (going to rectify that soon). Maybe FC5 will speed up after getting to at least 512 MB. We'll see.

I've got a laptop with a 500 Mhz Celery and 192 megs of RAM. It runs FC5 with Gnome just fine. I hadn't planned on running X at all, but when I rebooted after install it came up in Gnome, and I couldn't believe how fast it was.

I've had a few SELinux issues on my main system, but speed and resource usage have never been a poblem. I'm pretty quick to strip unneeded services after an install, though.

As far as yum, you can always let it update while you sleep. Just turn the yum service on, and you'll never see it again.

[Tsuroerusu]

As far as yum, you can always let it update while you sleep. Just turn the yum service on, and you'll never see it again.

Or just install Smart

[CptnObvious999]

I agree with pretty much all Vogateer said. I have tried many distros and I always go back to Gentoo.

Portage by far provides the most packages that other distros can't such as nVidia binaries and Quake 4 etc because it uses a small script. This script is not too hard to create and provides a level of power no other package manager that I know of can touch. Once you learn how to work with Gentoo you are in complete control of everything which is awesome (although not for the n00bs) and you don't have to force packages and uninstall things that should not need to be uninstalled. I have not had many package conflicts I could not deal with on my own (due to the power of Portage and that most of the packages I will ever need are in Portage and not spread over many repositories). I am running *VERY* experimental software that no other distro offers and it is very stable. The community is also very big and they know a lot most of the questions I ask in the forum are answered in less than a half an hour. The compiling is Gentoo's only problem IMHO (and that is of course what everyone picks on it for) but I don't hate it and the speed bonuses are awesome. (I did a benchmark using Bashmark between SuSE 10.1 and Gentoo and Gentoo is about 2 times faster for Cpu, Integer and Memory r/w (cached), a little faster for Memory de-/alloc and Multithreading, and 5 times faster for Cpu, Floating point!).

Overall Gentoo has become my distro of choice it. Although it does have a steep learning curve it offers what most other distros cannot.

[Tsuroerusu]

I did a benchmark using Bashmark between SuSE 10.1 and Gentoo and Gentoo is about 2 times faster for Cpu, Integer and Memory r/w (cached), a little faster for Memory de-/alloc and Multithreading, and 5 times faster for Cpu, Floating point!

I'm calling bullshit on this one for several reasons:

1. You did a synthetic benchmark, and not a real life benchmark, it's kinda like comparing a single CPU to a dual core CPU, there is no need to do a synthetic benchmark, because the raw power of the CPU is always gonna be bigger because of the two cores, but in a lot of applications, it doesn't give you that much benefit, because how much faster can you surf the web?

2. I don't think it's that fair to compare a distro, which you specifically optimize to your particular hardware to a "distribution" of software pre-packaged, because it is two different ways of doing things, and they both have their pros and cons, it's like comparing Slackware and Debian (To honor Linc and Pat here), both have their advantages and disadvantages.

3. If you took all the source RPMs for SUSE (Or Fedora, CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise for that matter, are you with me here Gomer?) and recompiled them to match your specific architecture with the same optimization flags as you do in Gentoo, rebuild the ISOs and install that, I'm confident you'll get a similar result if a synthetic benchmark matters that much to you.

[CptnObvious999]

I did a benchmark using Bashmark between SuSE 10.1 and Gentoo and Gentoo is about 2 times faster for CPU, Integer and Memory r/w (cached), a little faster for Memory de-/alloc and Multithreading, and 5 times faster for CPU, Floating point!

I'm calling bullshit on this one for several reasons:

1. You did a synthetic benchmark, and not a real life benchmark, it's kinda like comparing a single CPU to a dual core CPU, there is no need to do a synthetic benchmark, because the raw power of the CPU is always gonna be bigger because of the two cores, but in a lot of applications, it doesn't give you that much benefit, because how much faster can you surf the web?

I was using the same hardware and it was using SuSE 10.1 x86-64 with a almost out-of-the-box configurations (I installed a few things but all of what runs in the background is default). On my Gentoo system I was using KDE 3.5.2 with Kerry(and the beagle daemons), Akregator, Kmail, Kopete, KGpg, KNemo, Superkaramba (with Aero AIO), KGet, MySQL, Apache 2, GNUMP3D, ivman, Samba, and Yakuake all running.

2. I don't think it's that fair to compare a distro, which you specifically optimize to your particular hardware to a "distribution" of software pre-packaged, because it is two different ways of doing things, and they both have their pros and cons, it's like comparing Slackware and Debian (To honor Linc and Pat here), both have their advantages and disadvantages.

I am merely saying that it is faster, I know the package management is different but it doesn't change the fact that it is faster. Everyone always says how stupid Gentoo is because you have to compile everything yet I am not allowed to say the benefits of this? It is OK to consider the negatives and not the positives of this aspect?

3. If you took all the source RPMs for SUSE (Or Fedora, CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise for that matter, are you with me here Gomer?) and recompiled them to match your specific architecture with the same optimization flags as you do in Gentoo, rebuild the ISOs and install that, I'm confident you'll get a similar result if a synthetic benchmark matters that much to you.

Yes but who does that when that would be more work than just using Gentoo/Portage and sharing with its advantages as a source based package manager?

[Tsuroerusu]

I did a benchmark using Bashmark between SuSE 10.1 and Gentoo and Gentoo is about 2 times faster for CPU, Integer and Memory r/w (cached), a little faster for Memory de-/alloc and Multithreading, and 5 times faster for CPU, Floating point!

I'm calling bullshit on this one for several reasons:

1. You did a synthetic benchmark, and not a real life benchmark, it's kinda like comparing a single CPU to a dual core CPU, there is no need to do a synthetic benchmark, because the raw power of the CPU is always gonna be bigger because of the two cores, but in a lot of applications, it doesn't give you that much benefit, because how much faster can you surf the web?

I was using the same hardware and it was using SuSE 10.1 x86-64 with a almost out-of-the-box configurations (I installed a few things but all of what runs in the background is default). On my Gentoo system I was using KDE 3.5.2 with Kerry(and the beagle daemons), Akregator, Kmail, Kopete, KGpg, KNemo, Superkaramba (with Aero AIO), KGet, MySQL, Apache 2, GNUMP3D, ivman, Samba, and Yakuake all running.

Go ahead and call me a zealot or something, but I still call bullshit on a synthetic benchmark like that, I have a friend who does everything he can to make his games run faster on Windows, and he does everything from using the 64-bit version to having all the latest stable drivers and stuff, and yet he's never winning a FPS deathmatch at a LAN party, because it doesn't make any difference in real life, because if you stress test something that from the very start is going to be faster, OF COURSE IT'S GOING TO BE FASTER FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!!!

2. I don't think it's that fair to compare a distro, which you specifically optimize to your particular hardware to a "distribution" of software pre-packaged, because it is two different ways of doing things, and they both have their pros and cons, it's like comparing Slackware and Debian (To honor Linc and Pat here), both have their advantages and disadvantages.

I am merely saying that it is faster, I know the package management is different but it doesn't change the fact that it is faster.

To some degree it does and to some it doesn't in my mind, sure Gentoo is faster, AFTER the compiling, but why is it? Because you're optimizing specifically for your CPU and architecture, for example on my machine I would be compiling for i686. With SUSE, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu or any pre-packaged distro, you're getting pre-compiled packages that are optimized to run on everything, and include generic optimizations, not specific optimizations. So here I don't think there's a fair comparison, but I could also go the other way around and say that SUSE is faster because I can install it in 45 mins. and have everything I need to use for web browsing, email, groupware stuff, office work etc. etc. installed right out of the box, and Gentoo is über slow because you have to compile, that is not a fair comparison either, in my opinion.

Everyone always says how stupid Gentoo is because you have to compile everything yet I am not allowed to say the benefits of this?

I'm not saying that Gentoo per se is stupid, I'm tending to say it's stupid to sit around for 24 hours to wait for KDE to compile, when you could install Kubuntu, Mepis, Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD, PC-BSD or DesktopBSD and have it all up and running at good speed in like 25 mins. or something like that.

It is OK to consider the negatives and not the positives of this aspect?!

Of course it is, did I say it wasn't?

3. If you took all the source RPMs for SUSE (Or Fedora, CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise for that matter, are you with me here Gomer?) and recompiled them to match your specific architecture with the same optimization flags as you do in Gentoo, rebuild the ISOs and install that, I'm confident you'll get a similar result if a synthetic benchmark matters that much to you.

Yes but who does that when that would be more work than just using Gentoo/Portage and sharing with its advantages as a source based package manager?[/quote]
For the same reason you want to use Portage, to have an optimized version of the distribution you choose to use, plus in the case of my example, you'll get all of SUSE's advantages having some really indepth management utilities available, like YaST's configuration systems for stuff like networking, X11 configuration, printer configuration etc. etc., that is the huge advantage of that, and you have additional binary packages readily available in case you don't want to compile SRPMs.

[CptnObvious999]

Go ahead and call me a zealot or something, but I still call bullshit on a synthetic benchmark like that, I have a friend who does everything he can to make his games run faster on Windows, and he does everything from using the 64-bit version to having all the latest stable drivers and stuff, and yet he's never winning a FPS deathmatch at a LAN party, because it doesn't make any difference in real life, because if you stress test something that from the very start is going to be faster, OF COURSE IT'S GOING TO BE FASTER FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!!

I have noticed a difference however with real world tests it is hard to know how much of a difference. All I have been saying is compiling has its advantages and I don't understand why you are arguing about this. You said that compiling does make it faster so what exactly are you arguing about?

To some degree it does and to some it doesn't in my mind, sure Gentoo is faster, AFTER the compiling, but why is it? Because you're optimizing specifically for your CPU and architecture, for example on my machine I would be compiling for i686. With SUSE, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu or any pre-packaged distro, you're getting pre-compiled packages that are optimized to run on everything, and include generic optimizations, not specific optimizations. So here I don't think there's a fair comparison, but I could also go the other way around and say that SUSE is faster because I can install it in 45 mins. and have everything I need to use for web browsing, email, groupware stuff, office work etc. etc. installed right out of the box, and Gentoo is über slow because you have to compile, that is not a fair comparison either, in my opinion.

Like I said before compiling is annoying, Ill say it again so it sinks in, COMPILING IS ANNOYING. I have said that from the start. Also the new LiveCD's are getting the GLI so it will install in around 30mins with most of the base desktop stuff but really how often do you install a distro?

I'm not saying that Gentoo per se is stupid, I'm tending to say it's stupid to sit around for 24 hours to wait for KDE to compile, when you could install Kubuntu, Mepis, Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD, PC-BSD or DesktopBSD and have it all up and running at good speed in like 25 mins. or something like that.

How often does a new KDE get released? not very often. I think the befits outway the compile times otherwise I might have stuck with SuSE, and Ill say it again compiling is annoying but if I think it is better than the alternatives why shouldn't I be able to compile?!

Yes but who does that when that would be more work than just using Gentoo/Portage and sharing with its advantages as a source based package manager?

For the same reason you want to use Portage, to have an optimized version of the distribution you choose to use, plus in the case of my example, you'll get all of SUSE's advantages having some really indepth management utilities available, like YaST's configuration systems for stuff like networking, X11 configuration, printer configuration etc. etc., that is the huge advantage of that, and you have additional binary packages readily available in case you don't want to compile SRPMs.

Personally I think that is more work than it's worth it. How often are you going to configure Samba or install a printer? I don't really find YaST to be that big of a benefit and heck you could just compile it with Gentoo right? as far as binary packages go, there are lots of binaries available, and I could always install an RPM or DEB package if I needed to (infact Portage uses an RPM to install Skype) and there are the BINHOST binary ebuilds and you can use distcc to make another computer compile it. Again I will say compiling is annoying but better than the alternatives IMHO.

[Tsuroerusu]

I'm gonna end this pointless discussion right here before any of us ticks off and start slinging everything out, like a "world flame war", you use what works best for you, and I will use what works the best for me. And until everybody, including my mom, runs Gentoo I will still believe that binary packages are the best solution, and you can feel free to believe what you want to believe, because that is what liberty is all about.

[thetza]

With the default install, Suse is the slowest and heaviest distro ever. It starts every daemon ever developed since 1994, the GUI is clumsy, and Yast makes me want to kick puppies. People keep mentioning alternative package managers and tweaking can make suse as fast as any other distro, but really, an experience user could make any distro look like any other.

And source distros aren't necessarily faster. I've installed Freebsd in both through binaries and source and the main difference I've seen are in boot time and performance under heavy network traffic. And Gentoo isn't noticably faster than, say, slackware during routine desktop usage. Though I'm a firm believer that at least X11 should be compiled from scratch, if you really want a faster desktop, just get more ram.

Go ahead and call me a zealot or something, but I still call bullshit on a synthetic benchmark like that, I have a friend who does everything he can to make his games run faster on Windows, and he does everything from using the 64-bit version to having all the latest stable drivers and stuff, and yet he's never winning a FPS deathmatch at a LAN party, because it doesn't make any difference in real life, because if you stress test something that from the very start is going to be faster, OF COURSE IT'S GOING TO BE FASTER FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!!!

thats because the danish are no good FPS's.