Re: Alternatives that don´t suck?

[Lonni J Friedman]

On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 5:01 PM, Collins Richey <crichey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

If you can ignore it, that's great.  I choose not to.

>
> < 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

Thanks for proving my point.  Your example is exactly what I was
thinking of when I stated that Debian has no coherent automated
installation mechanism.  Debian is severely flawed as long as it
requires a specific server daemon just to get the OS installed.  I'm
talking Solaris jumpstart flawed.

>
>> 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.

Unless you're building your own from the pristine kernel.org source,
that applies for every distro.  They all apply crazy patches all over
the place.  Some are worse than others, but its always there.  Gentoo
might have an option to use the kernel.org unpatched source, but i'm
fairly certain that's  not the default kernel.

>
>>
>> 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?

Yes, there is that whole convoluted mess too.  My current dealings
with SUSE are mostly limited to dealing with their XML based
auto-install abomination known as autoyast.  That alone brings
un-ending grief as they break backward compatibility in every new
release.

>
>>
>> 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.

Sure, but that's the case with everything other than RHEL & SLE these
days.  Fedora took a huge quality dive in the 9 release, and its the
first time that I seriously started to consider alternatives.
However, as I noted, the alternatives aren't stellar either.


-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand https://netllama.linux-sxs.org