New Member

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
May be a quick history of my time on Linux. Originally I started out on 
slackware, mainly because of slackware containing speakup on its 
standard install CDs. Slackware gave a good base system and I got to 
like the way it did things. However slackware has got some problems, 
dependency checking is very weak, its not one of the distros commonly 
targeted by software developers so you sometimes have extra work to 
install some third party software and it lacked gnome. I had a bit of a 
look around trying a number of distros, ubuntu, gentoo and finally 
settling down with GRML (essentially debian with a few extra packages). 
GRML is very good as a LiveCD but it can become a bit much to maintain 
(its based on debian unstable, you have other packages from the GRML 
repository which can lead to conflicts, etc). Possibly if debian had 
more accessible install options I would say debian is very good (NOTE: 
my comment on accessible install relates to recommending it to those who 
may not have a hardware synthesiser or Braille display, the espeakup 
enabled disc Samuel made didn't seem to have the volume raised on my 
computer and I couldn't find a volume controll app to raise it).

Now for ArchLinux, they have many reasons on their wiki and a 
description of how Arch compares to other distributions. May be its my 
use of slackware and debian which makes ArchLinux nice to me. Things I 
like about it include, technical simplicity (its possible to make the 
package manager in Arch have a preferred order of repositories but 
simple to specify a package from a specific repository should you want 
that) and the flexibility it offers (one thing though in this bit I am 
unsure whether I like or not is that unlike debian it puts the whole of 
a software package in one package, eg. Arch only has a brltty package 
including development headers, bindings, etc where as debian puts each 
part of brltty in separate packages). Although gentoo may offer greater 
flexibility in how the packages are compiled I personally found very 
little gain in that compared to the time spent for it compiling the 
packages (NOTE: I am talking for desktop/laptop systems, normally 
compiling on their own processors).

Michael Whapples
On 03/14/2010 05:26 AM, trev.saunders at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> SO my current view on distros is the following.  I have two general use cases.
> Case 1:
> This is mostly servers, but also personal machines for other people and such where I want to do as little maintanance as posible.  I also want a stable basic system that general is fairly small.  FOr these system I use debian either stable or testing depending on exact needs.
>
> case 2:
> System which will be heavily customized to fit my exact needs.  For these systems I care about how things are configured, and am willing to put energy into configuring them.  For these machines I run gentoo, accept my laptop which will become a gentoo box soon.
>
>  From what I saw on the arch wiki it looks like arch is somewhere between these  two.  It looks like debian meets my need for a system I can setup and basically let run with the occasional update better with far less effort.  It looks like arch's use of binary packages will make it not customizeable enough for the machines I care about.
>
> An example of a system I want to setup and just let run is the mail openvz container on my server I want to set it up and just let it run.   Debian stable does a good job here it's fairly secure and I trust it  to run without my intervention, and only gets updated every couple months.  On that system I can deal with dependancies pulling x libs etc.
>
> On the other hand the hypervizer of that server runs gentoo, because there having x libs etc hauled in is far less aceptable because of security etc.  THis makes gentoo's use flags which alow me to control dependancies are very useful.
>
> So I'm curious what people like about arch especially over gentoo?
>
> Trev
>