<p><br> On Sep 11, 2012 5:29 PM, "Nikos Chantziaras" <<a href="mailto:realnc@gmail.com">realnc@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br> ><br> > On 11/09/12 01:12, Alan McKinnon wrote:<br> >><br> >> On Mon, 10 Sep 2012 14:46:14 -0700<br> >> Chris Stankevitz <<a href="mailto:chrisstankevitz@gmail.com">chrisstankevitz@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br> >><br> >>> Gentoo is the best distribution I have used (I haven't used too many:<br> >>> ubuntu, fedora, gentoo). I love the USE flags. I love watching (and<br> >>> questioning) what is going to be installed. I love emerge.<br> >>> Supposedly gentoo lacks being able to have a system "just work"<br> >>> without thinking about anything. But in my experience on linux, this<br> >>> simply isn't the case anywhere. With ubuntu, for example, I had<br> >>> trouble with sound and ethernet cards that I could never figure out...<br> >>> and the kind of answers I get on their forums drive me insane ("my<br> >>> uncle once said that his cousin typed this magical command and it<br> >>> worked fine for a little while so maybe try that").<br> >>><br> >>> And what's the deal with these "major release versions" of the other<br> >>> distros? Why do that?<br> >><br> >><br> >> They are binary distros so they have no choice. For the duration of<br> >> that version's life, all the packages shipped must all work together<br> >> and that is only possible if the ABI does not change.<br> ><br> ><br> > Arch Linux is a binary distro (by default, at least) and it seems to have gotten this right though.<br> ><br> ></p> <p>Strangely enough, I never managed to deploy Arch production servers. Always got stuck in staging, after I tried setting up some packages, they always end up not working. </p> <p>It was most likely a fault of mine, not knowing the proper incantations and druidic maneouvres required to run it properly... but I was impatient, and was already *very* familiar with Gentoo, so I switched gear completely. Within 24 hours -- most of the time taken by my obsession of 'remerging the world using graphite, 3 times', I got me a properly running staging server (and it got pushed into production after two weeks). </p> <p>The beauty of Gentoo, IMO, is that I know exactly what is going on in my servers. Entering the shell, I can figuratively feel the pulse of the beast.</p> <p>In my current employment, I have to sadly say that I'm no longer using Gentoo. The OS spec is set by the guys in the 'Application' Sub-Department, and they invariably ask for either CentOS or Ubuntu... which I might add, are all working well. </p> <p>Again, I'm not bad-mouthing Arch, but for me it's an unsatisfying middle ground between true rolling release distro (Gentoo) and versioned binary distro (Ubuntu, CentOS). Of course, YMMV, but after my experience, I'd settle at either end of the spectrum, not in the middle. </p> <p>Rgds, <br> </p>