Re: Redhat (and moving to other distros)


Subject: Re: Redhat (and moving to other distros)
From: James Zuelow (e5z8652@zuelow.net)
Date: Tue Nov 04 2003 - 18:29:25 AKST


On Mon, 03 Nov 2003 13:02:49 -0800
"Mac Mason" <macmasta@ak.net> wrote:

> And it's faster than all hell, too.
>
> ~Mac~

Mac,

This is why Gentoo is catching on with the developer/hacker/tweaker crowd, but I do not think it will ever make much of a general user distribution. The comment made in the third link (which you probably already have in your inbox, given that it is a Gentoo list) points out that not a lot of people *really* know what all the compiler options do, or what affect they may have on a compiled binary.

The Gentoos of the world are very, very important for the Linux community. They let not-so-experienced people learn more about how the system works, and how to make it better. However there's more to Linux than hacking. Some people just want a good system that works and doesn't cost two week's pay per machine.

Anyway. It's all good. RedHat pulling support from their personal offerings so they can concentrate on a state or municipal government near you? Excellent. You want a boxed set at Fry's? That's what Mandrake is for. Good thing they survived bankruptcy, because a big chunk of their competition just left the field, and they need to fill it. You want a free (beer AND speech) distribution that just works? Debian, although dying to some, is quite vibrant and runs on platforms that NetBSD doesn't. You'll always find people who like one distribution over another for some reason. People even like SuSE's YAST2 for some wierd reason. (Personally I'm hoping Novell replaces it with something like iManager.)

Cheers,

James

*************************************************************
From Debian Weekly news:

Debian faster than Gentoo? Matt Garman [2]wondered why his C++
program ran dramatically slower when compiled on a Gentoo machine than
when compiled with Debian Sid. He later [3]reported that recompiling
the Gentoo C++ libraries with less aggressive optimization flags (-O2
instead of -O3) eliminated the speed difference. Matt also [4]added
that Debian and other distributions are conservative, but set up by
very experienced people.

 2. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/50924
 3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/50973
 4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/50953
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Tue Nov 04 2003 - 18:29:28 AKST