Re: Alternatives that don´t suck?

[Collins Richey]

On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 5:15 PM, Lonni J Friedman <netllama at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I can't stand Debian's religious zealotry, so that rules them out
> automatically (I have no patience for the iceweasel nonsense).

I learned long ago to ignore the religious zealotry in favor of the
benefits, and I pounce on the zealots when they raise their ugly
heads. There´s plenty of zealotry in Ubuntu and other distros as well.
As regards iceweasel, nothing stops you from running firefox or
swiftfox. My distro allows swiftfox as a standard choice once you add
the correct repos.

As regards the iceweasel fiasco, Debian was really left between a rock
and a hard place. They want to continue to support older releases in
stable, and mozilla did not want to allow that with Firefox branding.-
only the current release. The ice.... forks are truly an abomination.
The Debian maintainers aren´t quite up to speed with Mozilla code.

< Also,
> Debian's lack of a mature, coherent automated installation mechanism
> (for example kickstart, or even SUSE's autoyast abomination) is a
> major drawback.
>

Perhaps you should peruse the following site (including the Appendix)
before announcing the lack of coherent automated installation.

http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s07.html.en

> RHEL (and therefore the kernel that CentOS steals - and yes, they
> blatantly steal Redhat's work) kernel is too old for most modern
> hardware, and overall RHEL has such a ridiculously limited number of
> available packages that I'd end up spending half my time rolling my
> own.  If I need to go that route, I might as well use Gentoo.  I don't
> have the time to be building my own packages just to get everything
> that I need.

Too bad you chose the word stealing. RH packages and thus gains the
benefits of GPL software, and there is nothing untoward about CentOS
removing non-GPL RH additions and shipping the resultant FOSS to all
takers. That´s just the nature of Linux. You could just as well claim
that RH steals Linux software. Since CentOS is a community
organization, I´m content with their efforts.

As regards the kernel and package choices, you are correct. It´s
basically ancient. The main problem I have with the RH (and CentOS)
kernels is the practice of backporting tons of patches into older
kernels so that you can never really tell what kernel you´re running.

>
> SUSE is mildly tempting, except that they're run by Novell, who are a
> bunch of M$ collaborators.

Have to agree, but otoh I can´t stand SUSE. Ever tried to make sense
of the way they split up the Apache configuration?

>
> One thing that I neglected to clarify originally, as that I've been
> reasonably satisfied with Fedora up until 9.  9 has been nothing but
> problems.
>

You pays you money, you takes you chances.

-- 
Collins Richey
 If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
 of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.