[ILUG] Suggestions for best 64 bit Linux distro?

[Dave O' Connor]

On Thu, 23 Jun 2005, Colm Buckley wrote:

> My, Gentoo users are defensive, aren't they?  I can understand people wanting
> to defend the decisions they've made, and to promote the systems they're
> familiar with, but some of the responses here have been frankly startling.
> You weren't Amiga owners in a former life, were you?  Hint : what works for
> you might not be a generally-good solution.

And what is it about Gentoo that gets certain, normally reasonable, debian
users frothing at the mouth. Really, I honestly don't care what distro you
use, I tried debian, it didn't suit. I tried gentoo, it did. why do you
care so much?

> My opinion - that source-based distributions are an utter and ludicrous waste
> of time - remains unchanged; I fail to see any significant benefits gained
> from compiling locally as opposed to centrally.  Certainly I don't believe the
> vaunted "10% performance increase", and even modest gains in runtime
> performance would be more than offset by the time spent compiling.  CPU cycles
> aren't free.  What if someone has 100 servers to maintain?  What about 10,000?

Sure, have that opinion, personally, I can see some of your points but I
also see that you're also talking rubbish about it in some places. Whether
that's because you're uninformed or because you're spreading fud is
something only you can clarify.

There's nothing stopping you compiling the packages as a binary package and
getting them from your own local repository if you do have 10,000 or even
100 machines.

> Portage is often cited as a Gentoo advantage, but every argument I've seen in
> its favour has been more than adequately answered by apt as implemented in the
> current Debian and Ubuntu systems.  On Debian/Ubuntu, I can have a new package
> installed, configured and running in *seconds* - for example, when securing
> Morrigan (the new ILUG server), I needed nmap to test what was visible on
> localhost versus on the public IP interface.  NMap wasn't installed by
> default, so the one-line command "apt-get install nmap" had it downloaded and
> running in less than ten seconds.  Packages which require configuration
> generally have sensible defaults installed, and a simple set of configuration
> options for the common cases.  Why should I switch to Gentoo?

As I said already, the last time I tried Debian certain packages were
missing (one of which I remembered last night was called kahakai, which
had a few rather nasty dependencies) The only distro which that ever
worked straight out of the box was gentoo.

> My advice : spend some time using Ubuntu, and experience what a *really*
> easy-to-install and easy-to-maintain distribution looks like.

I'm happy with the distro I'm using. Maybe when I get another machine I'll
give it a spin but for now gentoo does exactly what I want the way I want
it and I see no advantages whatsoever moving to ubuntu on machines that
are working just fine.

-- 
Doc

Support: "Okay, you know that little booklet that we sent with your router? Do you have that?"
Customer: "No, that looked like documentation so I threw it away."