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On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 7:25 PM, bad apple
<ifindthatinteresting@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 14/12/11 08:51, Neil Winchurst wrote:
>
> 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
>
> Well, all of this is only my personal opinion, but for what it's worth:
>
> 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
Hi Mat
Thanks a lot for such a great post. I dont think I will ever know 10%
of what you do about computers.... but i cant help be a little
smug.....having recently installed my first Debian lol.
cheers roly :-)
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