I know I’m going to cop a beating on the Planet for this post, but here goes…
For a long time I ran a desktop system built on Gentoo Linux. A while back I tried Ubuntu, and I’ve been running that as my desktop ever since. Every now and then, though, I feel an inclination to pop back to Gentoo — usually it will be because of some package I want to be able to install, or later versions of packages that don’t make it into the usual binary-distro world without introducing “dependency hell” (I’m having this problem at work, with a distro based on RHEL 5.1 and hardware that’s just too new for it… Even if I wanted to build drivers from source, the libraries the drivers link against are too old as supplied, meaning I’d have to rebuild the libraries too, which probably means something else will be too old…).
I run Gentoo on both my “servers” at home. At the time I got my dual-Opteron, Gentoo was the only “free” distro around that had a x86_64 version ready to roll. When it came time to build my phone-and-TV server, it got Gentoo as well because it was the only way I could get the right combination of all the versions of code (Apache, PHP, Asterisk, MySQL, MythTV, ccxstream, etc) that I needed and have them all maintained in the distribution’s package management system (Debian has no ccxstream package, for instance). I don’t run Gentoo because I’m a ricer. Portage has the right package mix for me, and its ability to control the configuration of packages through USE flags gives me an opportunity to control the options that are enabled in the packages I install.
I have blogged previously about some hardware I bought that I haven’t been able to put to good use. I decided to give it another try by building a Gentoo system on it, because an ebuild for the bleeding-edge ATI driver that is supposed to support the graphics chipset in this clunker is in Portage.
Let me say, it’s been a while since I built a Gentoo system from scratch. You don’t even do it truly from scratch anymore either — the days of starting with a stage-1 tarball are over apparently, and stage-3 is always the way to go. Even so, this system took a whole weekend to get to the stage where I could log on and get a KDE desktop (to be fair though, there was a lot of kicking off an emerge, coming back to it a couple of hours later to find it had died ten minutes in, fixing the issue and restarting… so it wasn’t 48 hours solid time spent).
Unfortunately the ATI driver still doesn’t support XVideo on this chipset, so I still can’t use this board for its intended use as a MythTV frontend (I do have an old PCI nVidia 5200 card that, even though it’s at least three years old, I’m sure will run rings around this stinking ATI 1250). So the point of the whole exercise was, unfortunately, lost. But I did get a refresher in the amount of effort a Gentoo build would take.
After that weekend’s effort, I was a bit put off by the thought of building up an entire desktop system from scratch. When I thought about it though, my concerns were for nothing. The compiling? The kind of systems I’m building on (modern dual-core chips) will chew through compiling most software in a snap — heck, for simple packages I can install on a Gentoo system quicker than yumex can initialise its repositories. I’ve got running systems I can use as a model to get USE flags right, and my NFS-shared Portage tree means that I sync once and use everywhere (even downloading source packages happens only once).
Plus, now, I know Gentoo. Sure, APT on a Debian-based distro is nice, but I still am lost when it comes to the right dpkg command to locate what package provides a certain file, for instance. I get frustrated when something fails to build on Gentoo because some other package wasn’t built with the right USE flag, but I know how to fix that, and its fixed in a flash. Likewise for rebuilding some system library that causes a bunch of other packages to fail without warning, and likewise for the strange b0rkedness that happens in Portage sometimes when packages change versions (gnupg is a recent example). I know how to fix Gentoo when it breaks — I can’t say that with much confidence for other distros.
Some might say “use a distro that doesn’t break in the first place”, which is a fair comment. But if I have to choose between an occasional hiccup and missing functionality, then hand me the Eno (Pepto-Bismol, Tums, etc)… 😉
Which brings me to my dilemma — apart from the fact that I have crappy unaccelerated non-video graphics and I haven’t been able to run Compiz for ages (a problem that Gentoo wouldn’t solve for me anyway), Ubuntu isn’t really broken for me. There’s not a compelling reason for me to throw Gutsy out, and with Hardy around the corner there’s even less reason to switch right now.
So, I’ll wait. And watch. Having to work on more Red Hat systems at work is reacquainting me with their particular mojo, perhaps even enough to try Fedora. Also, I’ve just scraped together some parts to make an openSUSE 10.3 build for something work-related so I’ll catch up with things there (since I haven’t really seen a SUSE system as a desktop since SuSE Linux 7).
I love this about Linux — freedom to choose!
Crossed Wires 