Favorite Distribution

This weekend, <sarcasm> since I had SO many things to get done </sarcasm>, I went through a reload of my laptop due to an attack of a “I’m tired of constantly compiling” feeling that occasionally comes with running Gentoo Linux. Admittedly, that is the one part of the entire thing that drives me nuts. Not as much the part that it takes a couple days to get a machine up and running, it’s more the days when they update something like err_com, which results in half of your network related app’s dependencies being broken. Its times like this that I really start to wonder if I’m wasting my time with Gentoo.

On the flipside, the main reason I go with Gentoo is the fact that I have full control of the system. While I could care less about how high I can set my optimization value to gcc before things break; My OCD in Linux falls more towards the applications I use and their latest revision. I want KDE at it’s newest release, and I want to use specific apps for specific tasks (and if it’s not in the portage tree, I want to be able to hand compile without having to worry about if I have every danged -dev package loaded). Especially when it comes to the apps that have functionality stripped from binary distro’s due to legal or GPL related issues.

The issue that I have with all the binary distro’s lately is that … is it just me or does everyone else have as many issues with their package repositories? I tried both (k)ubuntu, and half their apt-get repository isn’t even working right now. While I may be weird, I want to have both kde and gnome loaded, and with both of those releases I could not load the non-default DE due to issues in the repository. Then, after having many hours of pleasure goofing around with that, I popped up the Fedora Core 4 installation. After three attempts to even install the system, all failing half way through with anaconda / python errors, I looked at where I was and realized that maybe all that compiling really wasn’t a waste of my time after all. Even when I had the distro’s installed it was like pulling teeth to get the system setup the way I wanted. While I realize if I fudge around with it long enough, I’ll get it working eventually… but I guess maybe I have more patience with running one command and walking away knowing that it should work (98% of the time), than poring all of my time into accomplishing nothing.

Others considered or tried: Simply Mepis (old KDE), Mandriva (let’s not even go there), S.u.S.E. (slow machine, bloatware), Debian (ditto on the package issues, especially with how KDE seems to always be broken in unstable), and Slackware (still slow on the package uptake).

Either way, back to Gentoo I go… I’ve had my fun with binary dists for the month.

Update: I continued my rampage of trying binary distributions, because with how busy things have been lately I just haven’t had the time to keep running emerge updates on my laptop… Especially with the limited connectivity. As a result I did find that Fedora Core 4’s error was in relationship to it reading my partition table. While it’s still an unexcusable bug, I found that if you remove all linux partitions BEFORE you start the Fedora Core 4 installation, it’s less likely to lock up as it’s trying to format for the install… Still a stupid error either way. Once I had that up I was slightly impressed by how much Fedora Extra’s and FreshRPMS has improved. While still frustrating that certain things aren’t readily available, maybe it will be a happy medium as to how much time I spend working to get certain specific issues resolved, as opposed to rebuilds of KDELIBS because a library changed…