[Sussex] Merry Festive Season

[Steve Dobson]

Angelo

On Wed, Dec 29, 2004 at 11:47:00AM -0000, Angelo Servini wrote:
> I must admit I am really tempted to install SuSE, as my current
> Gentoo installation seems rather a lot of bother to keep up with.
> Is this a "good" move or should I persevere with Gentoo?

Before any of us can advise there are two questions that you need
to answer:

  1). What are you looking for in a Linux distro? and

  2). What is the "bother" in Gentoo?

I could give you the "Use Debian" response, but if what bothers you
about Gentoo is the frequency of having to upgrade to fix (security)
bugs, then Debian isn't going to solve this, and I suspect no distro
will as security updates are part of life.

If what bothers you about Gentoo is the time needed to compile 
everything, then just about any binary based distro (Debian, Fedora,
SuSE, Mandrake, ...) will do.

The really good thing about Debian is the polices that drive the
file system layout.  Config files are always found in /etc.  The 
application binaries will always be in /usr/[s]bin.  Nothing is put
in or touched in /usr/local unless I put it there.  These features
make it easy for *me* to admin my Debian systems.

The downside of Debian is the time between releases, and the fact
that you're running "old" code.  But if I need an app's feature
that isn't in the version packaged by Debian then I can always go
out and compile it myself.  I don't have to do that a lot, so mostly
Debian has very little overhead for me.

But your needs *will* be different, and so is what you're prepared
to do overcome the shortfalls of the distro.

Steve