On 26 September 2014 11:25, Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk wrote:
On 23 September 2014 17:59, Ewan Slater ewan.slater@gmail.com wrote:
As Laurie says, if you stick to the straight and narrow then .rpm systems are fine.
However [...]
Hi Mark
By this point I was expecting some counter arguments from rpm fans but as it appears they're either quiet or non-existent it looks like I'll
Only just read this conversation as I've been rather busy for a while. The fair answer is along the lines of 'all things considered' i feel - no distro is quite what i'd like. Plus one should bear in mind desktop or server use - learn a distro well was what Dr Jeep said to me when I first started using linux and I still agree with that.
I'm not an IT graduate so I am not basing my views purely on the technical side. i started with ubuntu with 6.10 in early 2007. I always thought it was the best but over the last couple of years I think they've gone downhill in various ways. There's lots to consider; package management, usability, 'polish', upgrading etc. I started with Synaptic and apt on the cli but have found problems. As for rpm dependency hell I think it's fair to say that is a thing of the past. Yum is slower but it 'chugs' through updating whereas apt is quicker. Apt still leaves orphan's i find although the addition of option 'autoremove' almost eliminated it. Aptitude is the best debian package management but that has its faults... too clever by half!
I have done a bit of distro hopping just to compare and most times I have come back to xubuntu (since 2010... never tried unity but wanted to avoid 'bloat and bling'). Centos may be good for a server but not so good for a desktop... it's a server distro and for that it's great. Their repos don't have a lot of packages that i'd like on a desktop. Debian is both but... i won't give my view for personal safety reasons!
Package management I like most is the modular one which helps make a distro more stable but the distros... have other problems e.g. like one-two person maintenance and if ill? Mint xfce had that problem. The main distros apart from Mint have the backup but that could have been remedied by now. salix is good, Vl is good but still the same problem.
Main distros are best regarding support. Six month upgrades I've got fed up with and found an annual upgrade about right for my uses. i dislike the attitude with 6 month releases - stick out 20th of the release month whatever... Ubuntu has been bad sometimes and Fedora 18 or 19 wouldn't even load from CD. ubuntu now only do updates for 9 months so one cannot miss out a release.... use LTS you may say - I found bugs in 12.04 which weren't sorted.
One gripe I have is most debian based distros use debian repos and thus 'sponge off them' which i don't like on principal. RPM use their own which I prefer. Suse, nothing against it but I didn't like the way their repos were set up.
Ubuntu appear to have dropped synaptic which I like (software centre is not my taste). Gslapt was close to synaptic and either is still my preference.
So what have I changed to for desktop use? The distro-hopper-stopper is it's nickname - it is rpm and v.stable so far. Also an annual release and few bugs so far. Another clue - synaptic for package management. Finally i've got a scanner to work... messed about on ubuntu for ages.
Thanks for the comments; it's nice to get a fairly clear cut response on something I figured might be far more divisive!
Hope that's fair! as for debian... safety reasons!!! But I'm moving away from Suffolk shortly so doesn't matter really.
james