[wuug-list] [Windsor Board] blabj: Re: New member -- What's your distro?

[Windsor Board]

Author: blabj
Username:  (mailwn.dainty.ca)
Subject: Re: New member -- What's your distro?
Forum: The Kernels-And-Shells Department
Link: http://www.windsorboard.com/read.php?6,715,722#msg-722
Approved: Yes

For home, back in mid 90's I started with slackware, then went to redhat, to mandrake, to gentoo, and most recently to kubuntu..  quite happy with k/ubuntu in general - as things generally just work without fiddling - and my kids love it.  Although being not to too familiar with the debian build system makes it a little painful to generate packages from source (eg. moblock), especially if you don't know how to play with dependencies.

KDE is my preferred DE (3.5.5 and 3.5.6 have significant improvements over 3.5.2 which is standard in alot of distros), as its highly configurable and konqueror rocks with its wide range of kio slaves (vnc, fish/sftp, svn, etc).  The kiosktool configuration framework is excellent for enterprise deployments, and is in fact what we are using at work.  gnome's gconf is just too painful.

I also am looking forward to KDE 4 - but unfortunately the initial 4.0 release will be primarily a library/API release with only a barebones set of apps (kdepim guys don't think they'll have anything ready in time)... likely will only be 4.1 before it becomes "usable" as a real DE.

At my workplace servers are primarily gentoo based to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the systems.. just introduced an ubuntu server as a LAMP platform - was quite impressed.. great for single purpose headless systems.

Gentoo is great, except when you run into a major upgrade, like moving from 2.4 to 2.6 kernel - or from Xorg 6.8 to modular Xorg 7, or a gcc bump.. you definitely need either a VM or a test machine to try these upgrades before potentially breaking a working system - at least for production servers.

Arch sounds interesting - might give it a whirl.

BJ.