[ILUG] Dell Poweredge - best distro

[cout at eircom.net]

Hmm perhaps some people are misspelling unnecessary boot bloat.

For control, use Gentoo, yes you might actually have to make some effort installing it and 'shock horror' use some money downloading source, but, can you really argue with the logic of having a system optimised with your favorite compiler switches and you the user/admin controlling exactly what 'gets run on boot' and what optimisations or lack thereof your binaries run with?

In the same motif, I like Slackware, true enough it runs 'more' default boot stuff than I would like it to do, however in comparison to Mandrakeised/Red_Head distros it has pithe few user friendly options to make life 'easy'.

Debian I found with 2.2r2 had a miasma of processes and daemons running on boot that I had never told it to run, yet it was arguably as difficult 'I use the term relatively' to setup as Slackware.

When I think of literally gigabytes of disk space used up in Mandrakised installs as opposed to utilitarian installs of the Gentoo/Slack genre I become phased slightly that people think their own 'technical savvy' so incomplete that they feel they must be nursemaided by a user friendly distro.

Perhaps some people like having their OS switch on stuff arbitrarily (on whim of the designers) for some future date that the 'features' might get used..... but in my opinion/experience for whatever that counts for, stuff that I have installed for such reasons or not bothered throtteling once I found my OS had turned it on almost invariably never gets used and thus is a waste.

Do I want to waste cpu cycles, disk space ram and sacrifice performance for no good reason other than 'I might use these features in the future'... you tell me.

Bod