I've decided to abandon Gentoo due to continued frustrations caused by portage and the project/community in general. I hope this change is temporary because I have a lot of love for Gentoo. It breaks my spirit to say I'm calling it quits.
Now I have to decide what to migrate to. I've narrowed it down to three choices: Arch, Debian, and Sabayon. I'm leaning toward Arch since it seems to be similar to Gentoo in some ways: highly configurable, optimized, but it also gives you the option of installing from binary instead of source, a big plus for sweeping update days that include firefox, gtk+, and kdelibs.
Debian I have always wanted to try out for an extended period, although I'm not sure it's bleeding edge enough -- the repositories, to my (limited) knowledge, lag a little further behind than I'm used to. But Debian is stable and configurable.
Sabayon is only on the board because the idea intrigues me; to build a Gentoo-based distro that uses a new package management system and introduces binaries, the idea sounds like the best of all worlds. Almost too good to be true. I hesitate since I'm not sure how mature the project is.
If anyone has an opinion, please tell me. I'm waiting for a lull to format and reinstall. I have no experience with Arch, Debian, or Sabayon, so all input is welcome.
16 December, 2008
Decision finally reached
5 comments:
Try Arch, you will never regret it.
WRT Debian: If you like bleeding edge software, check out Sid. The testing version (Lenny at this date) isn't quite as bleeding edge.
Depending on your use of the computer, remember that Debian also does not even offer the slightest support for non-FOSS projects.
Thanks for the feeback. That's a good point with Debian -- I do use non-FOSS software (nvidia prop. drivers, cisco vpn, vmware...) but that can all be compiled from source without too much hassle.
@Carl, is Sid stable? For a work OS, it has to be stable enough for 8+ hours of day-to-day use.
If you are considering Debian Sid, why not try Xubuntu (Xfce), Kubuntu (KDE), Ubuntu (Gnome) or one of the other Ubuntu derivatives.
You get the Debian package system and stability along with the option of installing non-free software (Adobe Reader, ATI/nVidia drivers, etc).
Michael: You do ask a good question, and the answer is simply that I'd like to stay away from the *buntu distributions for now. There's nothing wrong with them, in fact I love how they're very visible and are attracting many new Linux users. My long time Gentoo cohort switched. I just want to do something a little... different. Also, and it's a trivial point, I don't use Xfce, KDE, or GNOME, so I'd rather start with a clean slate.
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