Choosing a distro, PPC style ...

[Byron Q. Desnoyers Winmill]

FWIW, this comments reflect  my *opinions*.  I'm hoping to find somebody
with sufficiently similar opinions to suggest a distribution which I may
like.

I have been using Debian on a PPC for three years now, and while it has
its good points, I would like to switch away from it.

The first qualification is obvious: it must be available for the PPC.
This is a consumer grade machine (ie. Apple), not a fancy server (eg.
IBM), nor an embedded thingy.

A default install must be reasonably light weight.  I abhor desktop
managers, have been known to use X11 without a window manager, and have
a nasty tendancy to use the console.

(No Yellow Dog, SuSE?)

A default install should contain basic programming tools: C is not my
friend, but I am stuck using it; gdb is my friend, because I'm stuck
using C.  I don't need anything more sophisticated than that.  Text
processors (notably TeX) must also be available as a package.

The package management system myst be sane!  I'm tired of hunting down
separate program, documentation, and development packages.  Maintainers
should also keep dependencies to a minimum.  I have never understood the
collection of tools shipped with Debian, and it was difficult to find
stuff in the one tool which I am familiar with (dpkg, dselect).  FWIW, I
have found NetBSD's ports collection to be sane, particularly since it
was easy to download binary packages.

(No Debian, Gentoo?)

I'm not partial to *BSD or Linux, but I have had trouble with NetBSD in
the past -- with respect to supported hardware.  (eg. upgrade a kernel,
and the hard drive isn't detected; video is OpenFirmware only, and
horrendously slow.)

(No NetBSD?)

Any suggestions, or is this a hopeless cause?

Thank-you,
Byron.
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