[ale] Recommendations for my next distro?

[Jay Lozier]

I have not used Gentoo but my observation of Arch derivatives is that by
demanding more of the users they learn more about the system. Ubuntu, by
design, is geared to make life easier for the user and user learns less.
Users this less are comfortable using a more demanding distro than the
typical user.

I would look at two issues: how much the distro demands I know/learn and
how much time/effort am I willing to put in.

Rolling release distros, to me, are closer to what I want; an up-to-date
system across the board. But they currently are more demanding because
of their more aggressive update procedures.

On Sun, 2015-03-01 at 23:50 -0500, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> I work almost entirely with Gentoo now that I no longer run machines
> for other people; *my* standards tend to be higher ;) . I can and have
> done Gentoo on the desktop but my main eyeballs-on-screen relationship
> is with Apple OS X and most of the time, the machines I operate have
> Xorg going but are run pretty much headless and all X is remote.
> 
> I don't understand the comment "the maintenance cost is high;" the $
> cost is of course zero and as far as the maintenance effort, you can
> be as assiduous as you want to be and you can also automate anything
> you want. In my experience, institutionalized Linux systems are only
> doing a relatively small number of things anyway and therefore the
> number of packages you really care about keeping current may be only a
> handful. The one fairly recent time I've dealt with CentOS and tried
> to do the same thing on Gentoo to see where the gotchas lay, I
> discovered that a nice feature in a major upgrade of CUPS that made
> life a whole lot simpler was simply ready and waiting for me in Gentoo
> whereas trying to surgically do the same thing in current CentOS,
> while achievable, would have been a supportability nightmare for me
> and any who came after me. 
> 
> All I can say is that I build tough, fast, and highly controllable
> Gentoo machines. Life without Gentoo is not problem-free, but I recall
> vividly that there were entire classes of problems encountered when
> trying to do real work with CentOS/RHEL that simply were not part of
> my world.
> 
> On 3/1/15 7:59 AM, Calvin Harrigan wrote:
> 
> > I can second Gentoo.  It's a great place to learn.  But the
> > maintenance cost is high.  I currently only have one box running
> > Gentoo.  I've been using mint for about a year or so.  Great general
> > purpose distribution, it's based on ubuntu.
> > 
> > 
> > On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 5:49 AM, DJ-Pfulio <djpfulio at jdpfu.com>
> > wrote:
> >         On 02/28/2015 07:19 PM, Edward James Monson, II wrote:
> >         > Hi everyone,
> >         >
> >         >
> >         > I've been using various flavors of Ubuntu for about 5
> >         years, and I'm ready to
> >         > try something new. I'm fairly comfortable with the command
> >         line. I'm curious
> >         > what distributions people on this list use, and how they
> >         rate in difficulty
> >         > compared to Ubuntu. I'd also prefer to use something a lot
> >         of other people
> >         > use so I have more people I can run to for help. :)
> >         
> >         Depends on your goals for learning something new.
> >         
> >         http://blog.jdpfu.com/2011/11/05/learning-linux-easy-to-hard
> >         
> >         If you are in the US and want to be a Linux admin or
> >         programmer, centos or
> >         fedora would make sense.
> >         
> >         If you want to be a kernel dev, gentoo.
> >         
> >         If you want to learn the internals, just for fun, and
> >         constantly tweak things
> >         that break - arch.
> >         
> >         If you just need a distro for online banking - TinyCore.
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> > 
> > 
> > 
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