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On 14/12/11 08:51, Neil Winchurst wrote:Well, all of this is only my personal opinion, but for what it's worth:That is very interesting. I used kubuntu for many years but now I use Mint. Is that any better, even though it is based on Ubuntu? Thanks Neil Ubuntu used to be awesome - for the good years (8.04 - 10.04) it was my go-to distro of choice, and I personally ran it everywhere. I installed it for friends, family and customers almost by default as it was clean, efficient and modern: basically good old Debian, but with a friendly face and less intimidating for non-experts. Unfortunately Shuttleworth at some point (10.10) went from benevolent dictator to ignorant tyrant and set about destroying all the goodwill he had earnt from the community with unfinished and rushed releases, bizarre default software selections and culminating with the unity/gnome3 debacle. As yet we still have stuff like Wayland replacing Xorg to laugh at when it arrives. I mean Ubuntu is still usable, but all jokes ("Ubuntu is ancient African for 'can't configure Debian'...") aside, it's at least as much work to configure it to a bearable state than a vanilla Debian install now which kind of defeats the whole point of it. Users used to sit in front of their new ubuntu installs and get on with it, now they sit in front of unity and think "what the hell is this crap". It takes me forever to hack a new 11.10 install into any semblance of usability and I have to add/remove a whole litany of software, configure PPAs, get rid of Unity, tweak gnome-shell, remove overlay-toolbars and that hateful apple-esque global menu... It's just not fit for purpose any more. Mint does seem to be better in some aspects - it is essentially just an ubuntu respin after all and suffers from most of the same faults. The latest version 12/Lisa is not a bad effort at all but mostly they're slapping band aids on gaping flesh wounds: gnome 2's MATE fork and MGSE are both solutions looking for a question. They're immature fixes for problems that shouldn't be there in the first place and that is not a good criterion for picking an OS in my book. I get the impression that the massive upsurge in Mint users and popularity is less that Mint is awesome and more that it's just slightly less crappy than Ubuntu. For example, if you check the release notes/errata for every Mint release they always screw up with major bugs in the installers - just look at the current 100% cpu usage bug in MATE. Mint is always waiting for yet another .1 revision... Distro choice is now back to the old days of linux where there is really no clear or default option any more, especially for personal, non-enterprise systems. The RPM based systems are no better - OpenSuSE suffers from too much legacy Novell brain death, mono-based crap, Microsoft association and random capitalisation. YaST also still royally sucks and the milestone releases are dangerously unstable. Mandriva is such an easy target I'd feel bad for even bothering to insult it (urpmi: really?) CentOS currently has serious staff/leadership issues and lags way behind the parent RHEL distro (Scientific linux is a less crippled alternative though). RHEL itself is actually rock solid, if conservative, but most of us probably don't want to pay for licenses at home. Fedora is probably the main competition to Ubuntu but doesn't have such a thriving ecosystem or userbase and has the double-edged sword of maverick developers (like Poettering...) pushing radical features like pulseaudio, systemd, firewalld and so on into trunk - some of this stuff is great, but fedora core loves new and weird over mature but stable to it's own detriment sometimes. The potential "the journal" syslog replacement and 'rationalisation' of the standard Unix filesystem (contrary to the LSB standards) are probably good examples of fedora going a little bit too far. I don't think I've ever known an OS that requires as much adaptation for sysadmins between releases as fedora, and as they do two releases a year that gets old real fast. Fedora breaks my scripts a lot. So what's left, realistically? Without picking random entries from distrowatch, there's always Gentoo or Slackware as old standbys: problem is that both are really for old, grizzled "get off my lawn" type hackers. Either would terrify a casual or new user. Arch is the new Gentoo with it's smug advocates turning the forums into basically a single big "STFU RTFM N00B" which is a pity, because it's actually quite good. However, before long in Arch, Gentoo or Slackware it's not going to be long before you're going to need to install non-standard packages and that will involve a trip into respectively AUR, ebuild overlays or slackbuilds, all of which are a pain in the ass. They will make you wonder why you're not just manually building from source tarballs at this stage and why you are spending more time maintaining your OS than actually doing any work in your OS. That's fine if you like that sort of thing (I do), but there comes a point when it just gets ridiculous and completely unfeasible for anything other than an expert's personal machine for bragging rights (checkout my 3.2.rc7.git-broken kernel, woohoo!). Just enable the "testing" repos in pacman or the testing keyword in Gentoo's /etc/make.conf to experience the pain of rebuilding your OS twice a day. Personally, I think the One True OS™ has always been, and will probably always be Debian GNU/Linux. It's three release flavours cover everything from ultra-stable and boring to terrifyingly unstable and bleeding edge which covers all end user requirements. The multiarch support is fantastic (although I miss the deprecated PA-RISC/Alpha support already) and the standard repos have almost any package you can think of. Anything extra can usually be found in a third party apt repo or trivially built from source (packaging debs is a breeze too). Apt/dpkg/dselect are hands down the best package management tools I have ever used on any system, ever. All software is Stallman-approved "Free" rather than merely opensource "free" which is of little practical interest to users but philosophically important to me. From server clusters to nokia phones, there is nothing Debian can't do, and do well. If all choice was removed and the entire world had to consolidate on a single OS it would suck, unless it was Debian, in which case it would probably be a very good idea. I like Debian so much it's the only system I'd donate my time and money to, and have done so. For what it's worth, there are other systems I like: OpenBSD is fantastic, but not for the inexperienced or weak of heart (to admin: a well setup machine is easy for the user). I compile rolling releases on a very fast workstation and distribute/upgrade them onto mostly weak laptops and desktops where it excels. For network infrastructure jobs it's peerless and bulletproof - if done right - which is *not* trivial. Solaris is the most advanced OS on the planet by a mile but now Oracle own it, all bets are off sadly. OpenIndiana is a solid fork however and you get all the goodies like dtrace, zfs, smf, zones as normal. I don't know if I could recommend Solaris to anyone who doesn't already know they need it though - certainly it will confuse the hell out of and probably defeat the casual linux user looking to defect from ubuntu or whatever: you also need seriously powerful hardware to get the most out of it (4+ cores, at least 8Gb of RAM, SSD & 4+ minimum disks for zfs, etc: it doesn't really come to life until it's on monster workstations or full-size servers). I used to love VMS and Irix and still use them both, but could hardly recommend them anymore for obvious reasons. Similarly, in the enterprise AIX is awesome (SMIT should be in all linux distros) but you're hardly going to run that at home unless you've got a RS/6000 or P-series Power-based monster to hand. I also really like Bell Labs' Plan 9 research OS although it's the most confusing system in the world. Not something you are realistically going to get much work done on, unless you're a genius specialising in OS development. Well, sorry for the essay, that somehow got a lot longer than it was supposed to. That might have something to do with the two trashed Mac workstations sitting next to me awaiting recovery and complete rebuild and I *loathe* everything Apple, which is probably why I've spent most of my afternoon prevaricating on mailing lists rather than working. Would welcome any responses, particularly as distro choice is suddenly a hot topic again. Cheers, Mat |
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