[Techtalk] What distro?

[pat]

  On 10/3/2010 3:31 AM, Kathryn Marks wrote:
> Hi ladies (and gents)
>
> After a year and a half of refusing to fight with hardware incompatibility
> and Fedora (I've stuck with Fedora 10), I've decided to jump ship.
>
> I have a bit of experience with Ubuntu.  I'm not crazy about the whole sudo
> thing and I like yum over apt-get.  So what to try now?  Distros with
> LiveCDs preferred.  KDE definitely preferred.
>
I use Gentoo.  I stick to Gnome, but have many KDE apps running, and if 
I wanted, could have KDE window manager too. My computer doesn't have 
much memory so using WindowMaker instead.  My current KDE version is 4.45.

Why do I like it.  Because I can use stuff from other distros.  Apps of 
any package type are in /usr/portage/dists,
including .deb, .rpm and others.  Special binaries can be had from 
sun,(oops, nan intel

The package system is portage, which imho is the best and easiest to 
wrangle.  Have used them all in the past and portage trumps all.

And because I can choose to compile any/all apps I get the best 
compilation for my machine.
Also, I can just install prebuilts.  All is done with the portage 
command emerge and its various switches.

$ emerge --help gives just about any option.

gentools provides other easy utilities to uninstall, inspect depends, 
find broken packages, fix them, update.

# revdep-rebuild  alerts and repairs as you command it, generally or for 
specific libraries.

The only thing I can think of that isn't perfect is some upgrades can be 
complicated.  But they usually are anyway.

Maybe the be4st thing about it is that it makes sense.  Knowing why 
things work is important to me and smooths the way for flawless 
performance because I know how to fix it if it breaks.  Usually.

Oh yes, compiling the kernel.  Very easy to do after a few times.  And 
you get to know your machine, so can keep using the same .config with 
just amendments for new devices or kernel improvements.

Hope this helps, Pat