[ale] Need a better Linux distro

[Jeff Hubbs]

On 6/1/20 7:19 AM, Leam Hall via Ale wrote:
> On 5/31/20 11:50 PM, Jeff Hubbs via Ale wrote:
>> On 5/31/20 9:30 PM, Leam Hall via Ale wrote:
>>>
>>> Gentoo is interesting, but all my computers are old; second or third 
>>> hand. 
>>
>> As are all mine. Your point? :)
>
> It was mentioned that a Gentoo build on a low ram system would take 
> time, in the order of days. That's not something I'd find useful.

Low-RAM doesn't necessarily mean old or second/thirdhand or vice versa 
and the case I was referring to - a KDE desktop - is a little extreme 
because there are dependencies brought in by default that are huge (they 
are, however, avoidable but I haven't been so bothered as to pursue 
avoiding them; I can use my main Gentoo desktop machine while it's 
updating). Also, some of the most popular huge desktop apps like Firefox 
and LibreOffice have binary-only packages.

I've found that most of the dunking on Gentoo comes from people who have 
never used it or have just barely used it. Most of my heartburn with 
Gentoo, as someone who's used it for all kinds of things for years now, 
has to do with slot conflicts (where the package manager has a "slot" 
into which more than one package can be used to fill and there becomes 
contention for what needs to fill a slot) or packages that one would 
hope would be available as defaults but aren't. For instance, right now, 
RStudio is masked for amd64 and x86 (something you can unmask, but it 
turns out you have to unmask a whole wad of dependencies) but if I'm 
unhappy with that, I can contact the maintainer and ask what I can do to 
help (and I may do just that since I have hale and hearty 32-bit systems 
here).

So, "works for me" is what I have to say about Gentoo. And like I said 
before, there are whole swaths of problems that pepper this mailing list 
and numerous other lists and forums that just aren't part of my Linux life.