Yet Another reason to use linux...

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 07:21:17PM -0400, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> More folklore and Debian snobbery. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and 
> Mandriva are perfectly coherent and useable distros. If you don't 
> want to spring for RHEL, you can use CentOS. If you start installing 
> packages from random repositories packaged by inexperienced or 
> clueless people, all distros, including the vaunted Debian, can have 
> problems.

Certainly people that start installing things using 3rd party install
scripts like the nvidia driver installer, and such, are just asking for
trouble.  If you fight the package management system by insisting you
know better, you will get what you ask for, which is a fight.

> That is not a typical scenario even in the Debian world. Oh sure, many 
> people claim this and I'm sure some of them even manage to do it as 
> easily as they claim but I'll bet if you looked closely, you would 
> find that a) it wasn't quite as easy as they claimed it to be, and b) 
> they limited their choice of packages to well-known, widely-used, and 
> official packages, not some "weird" packages from unofficial 
> repositories. In other words, they made compromises that many people 
> aren't willing to make.

Actually the machine has been through my use at university installing
all sorts of odd packages for languages I needed for a course, and I do
use packages from unofficial package archives (I wanted mplayer and
such).  Some unofficial archives are a disaster.  Many are very good.
Sometimes I have had to fix something, but it has been rare.

> The ability to do rolling upgrades without reinstallation is touted as 
> a virtue by Debian folks but I dispute it's value. I'd much rather 
> have the means of (re)installing quickly onto bare metal (or a 
> virtual machine) and be able to carry customizations forward with 
> minimal fuss. If you want to convince someone of the merits of 
> Debian, I think a greater win is debootstrap. I can create a new 
> Debian instance on our Xen hosting infrastructure in a matter of 
> minutes. To me, that is worth much more than being able to upgrade on 
> an ongoing basis. The former, I can script and repeat. Systems that 
> are continuously upgraded without reinstallation tend to accumulate 
> barnacles no matter how careful one is and when they go down, they 
> may not be as easy to replicate as one that was installed fresh a few 
> months ago. Rolling upgrades are more prone to breakage and are more 
> difficult to repeat whereas fresh installs are less prone to breakage 
> and are more repeatable.

Deootstrap is great.  But still I like being able to keep my system the
way it is an upgrade in place.  I hate starting over, since I have never
seen anyone have a complete backup of all their favourite settings to
restore on a new system to instantly have it the way they want it.  Some
are close.  Most of my machines now run raid1, since I hate having to
start over due to a disk failure (even as rare as they are).  I want to
use my system, not reinstall it.  I think microsoft, and to some extent
a lot of the linux distriutions have given upgrades a bad reputation.

> I develop apps using PyQt and PyKDE so I'm not likely to ditch KDE in 
> favour of Gnome's sub-standard UI and Mono's promotion of Microsoft's 
> agenda. To me, KDE isn't just the desktop manager. It is integral to 
> my software development processes. As I outlined in my previous 
> message, the resource utilization of the various desktop managers I 
> tried weren't appreciably different enough to justify switching. The 
> right solution to my problem of my formerly suitable but increasingly 
> hard-to-tolerate laptop isn't going on a quixotic quest to find The 
> Ultimate Desktop Manager/Windowing Manager that manages to supposedly 
> run (more like crawl) on 486/66 machines but to upgrade to a modern 
> machine.

Well i don't think X was ever great on a 486.  I still used it whenever
I needed to run a graphical browser at university (I guess at the time
if would have been navigator 4.77 most of the time).

I certainly don't think kde should be ditched, since it does keep
getting better.  And having to major desktops inventing features for
each other to copy seems to be doing a great job.

--
Len Sorensen
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