Ted,
I have played with many distros over the past five years or there abouts, and have settled on Gentoo myself for all of my home PCs.
The package management was my biggest draw, although you do have to work with source-compiles of your software in order to benefit from it (although you can install a number of packages in binary form such as Firefox, OpenOffice et al.) In my experience Gentoo's emerge and Debian's apt-get are best of breed as source and binary based package management respectively.
Admittedly I have never tried to upgrade an installation of Ubuntu in-place, Gentoo's upgrade path is not tied to any release timetable in quite the same way as newer packages simply move into the stable tree as and when they are ready - having said that there are the occasional gotcha's which have left me having to trawl through the wiki to discover the resolutions (eg. recently the library expat went from v1 to v2 which broke a huge wad of mostly multimedia apps on my machines - solution was eventually found on forums but was a lot of work to get done on 6 boxes http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-575655.html).
If you are interested in a more polished desktop OS and Gentoo pushes the right buttons, you could look at Sabayon (http://www.sabayonlinux.org) which is gentoo-based and seems to have done a nice job of taming it similarly to Ubuntu's work on Debian - they are also working to provide more binary versions of the gentoo packages which is great if you don't want to sit waiting for last nights updates to compile until lunch time ;o)
Hope this helps,
Jim
----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Harding" ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk To: main@lists.alug.org.uk; linux-users@lists.man.ac.uk; man-lug@lists.man.ac.uk Sent: Sunday, August 26, 2007 8:27 PM Subject: [ALUG] Ubuntu vs Gentoo [vs etc.]?
Hi Folks, Apologies to any who receive cross-postings!
I'm poised to install Linux on a newly acquired laptop. I've tried out the latest Ubuntu amd Gentoo live CDs, and both work nicely. (Indeed, with their common GNOME interface, there's isn't superificially much difference between them). However, I've formed a slightly happier impression of Gentoo (for reasons which I can't quite put my finger on -- its more of a "comfort" impression; also, the Gentoo live CD seems to have more stuff to try out than the Ubuntu one does).
I'd be grateful for any guidance from folks who have experiance of both, as to which may be the better one for long-term use.
I'm also planning to give PCLinuxOS a whirl, and maybe also Zenwalk, if anyone has comments.
Also feel free to advocate anything else! Essential are good support for Intel 945GM Integrated Graphics Controller (works with i810 driver), Synaptics touchpad with USB mouse as alternative (I hate touchpads, but this machine has no external PS/2 port ... ).
With thanks, Ted.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 26-Aug-07 Time: 20:27:47 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
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