I started out with Gentoo, maybe 10 years ago. It was the coolest thing, but later realized that I was spending a lot of time compiling everything and wanted these magical things called "binaries" instead.
So I switched to Ubuntu - Warty Warthog! I loved it because it was a minimal distro that was very useful and fit on a single CD. (I neither had lots of internet nor CDs available to me at the time.) Also, I never knew which options to select for a Fedora Anaconda install. So many packages - what do I want??
Then I tried Mint. It was neat, I guess, but never seemed appreciably easier than Ubuntu. I was hoping for an easier experience doing things like playing MP3s and displaying patent-protected GIF files, but I dunno, I never really got into it.
I did, however, get into the Cinnamon window manager!
Today I begrudgingly installed Ubuntu 12.04. It's more or less the only distro that anybody supports - you can get directions to install $foo (driver, software, Steam, what have you) on Ubuntu but other distros are hit or miss. And Ubuntu is more or less as updated as I care to be, a guarantee that I don't know I can get with other distros.
Mind you, I don't really like ubuntu nowadays. I'm not into Unity, I'm not into paid-results-in-system-search, and as a power-user, I was really unhappy when the switched from init scripts to upstart. But the community has widely adopted it as a 'standard' platform for their software, so, well, here I am.
as a power-user, I was really unhappy when the switched from init scripts to upstart
Why? Personally, I much prefer the declarative configuration over the lengthy SysV boilerplate, and there's always pre-start and such if you want to insert some shell code.
By the way, may I suggest Debian Sid/Unstable? Most of the commands and package names are the same (for obvious reasons ;), it has a rolling release (so you're always up-to-date) and it's still on SysV init scripts.
At the time they made the switch, there was not much documentation or support for upstart. All documentation on the internet was (is?) for init scripts and runlevels.
For example, I wanted to take some old hardware and set it up as a server. Easy - just change init to runlevel 3 (no display) and boom, there you are, headless linux.
If I wanted to do that in ubuntu, I still wouldn't know how, to be honest. I guess I'd have to reinstall it with ubuntu server? Do we even have single-user mode any more?
(I learned sysadmin from "the armadillo book" [1]. I feel like most of the concepts are identical, but the tools are so different now. all I want to do is run a new script on boot. why do i want upstart??)
all I want to do is run a new script on boot. why do i want upstart??
Frankly, if all you wanted was that, you could just stick the script in the kernel init= parameter, no need for Upstart or SysV ;)
Both of them are daemon management applications, and frankly I don't think it makes much sense to optimize for the "running script on boot" versus sanely managing daemon startup.
That said, at least on Ubuntu the SysV infrastructure is still called (as an Upstart job), so you should still be able to stick something in /etc/rc.local.
Alternatively, you can just write an Upstart configuration file:
"I started out with Gentoo, maybe 10 years ago. It was the coolest thing, but later realized that I was spending a lot of time compiling everything and wanted these magical things called "binaries" instead."
I'm using Gentoo and I don't really notice this, but that's probably because my needs are fairly minimal and I take the approach of "if it's working, don't change it". Unless I happen to upgrade to something that requires a new version of a library that then breaks other things that were linking to it, setting of a chain of forced recompilation, I don't really spend much time compiling at all. (Amortized time compiling, in light of the library issue just mentioned, might still be high.)
Curious what other Gentoo users' perceptions of time spent compiling is.
You have to compile quite a lot just to keep up on Gentoo. If you don't, your system will fall out of sync with the packages that are in portage, and trying to install new software and keeping your system running will be painful at best.
In my opinion, this is Gentoo's greatest weakness. I don't really see a way around it, however, short of the Gentoo team somehow getting the resources to mirror every version of every package in portage.
When installing a new gentoo system, you basically let it compile overnight.
When something was broken - let's say X11 wouldn't start - the first thing you'd try is "re-emerge X." 2 hours later, the display is still broken and only later do you realize you had xorg.conf misconfigured.
(I think all of the auto configuration for displays is great, by the way. But on the occasion it doesn't work, I wish I could just edit xorg.conf, but of course that doesn't even exist any more because everything is autodetected by default.)
I loved the idea of USE flags, until I realized that they were just a wrapper around ./configure options.
Same here, around 8-9 years ago... on a laptop. Things would break all the time for me and it was hard to even use any vanilla kernels on it. It taught me most of my basic linux skills, and the forums were a treasure of information (before they took a dive, not sure how they are nowadays). I often had to boot Knoppix (livecd) to fix things.
It was a distro that invited a lot of experimenting and tweaking.
I've been running opensuse as my main distro now for a couple years. Great kde support, very stable, gets the job done. For servers I gravitate towards CentOS.
Oh yeah, gentoo's documentation was, hands-down, the best on the net at the time for getting your stuff to work (say, ndiswrapper for getting wireless working.) Their guides didn't really rely on gentoo-specifc features because gentoo doesn't really have features beyond portage, which more or less wraps gcc.
I just spent a few minutes looking through the gentoo doc again. Makes me really excited how good the community doc was - this is how it's done! [1]
So I switched to Ubuntu - Warty Warthog! I loved it because it was a minimal distro that was very useful and fit on a single CD. (I neither had lots of internet nor CDs available to me at the time.) Also, I never knew which options to select for a Fedora Anaconda install. So many packages - what do I want??
Then I tried Mint. It was neat, I guess, but never seemed appreciably easier than Ubuntu. I was hoping for an easier experience doing things like playing MP3s and displaying patent-protected GIF files, but I dunno, I never really got into it.
I did, however, get into the Cinnamon window manager!
Today I begrudgingly installed Ubuntu 12.04. It's more or less the only distro that anybody supports - you can get directions to install $foo (driver, software, Steam, what have you) on Ubuntu but other distros are hit or miss. And Ubuntu is more or less as updated as I care to be, a guarantee that I don't know I can get with other distros.
Mind you, I don't really like ubuntu nowadays. I'm not into Unity, I'm not into paid-results-in-system-search, and as a power-user, I was really unhappy when the switched from init scripts to upstart. But the community has widely adopted it as a 'standard' platform for their software, so, well, here I am.