Submission + - where is linux?
deathguppie writes: "I am at a crossroads. I have been a Linux user since 1996. My first distro was Slackware, it literally took me a month to figure out how to connect to the internet through my 56k modem. I moved quickly trying to find the distro that would just work. I tried Red Hat linux.. then found the promised land in Mandrake. Mandrake was good to me for a few years. I had KDE that gave me all of the productivity I was looking for and each release was worth every bit of the $30 I spent on the box set.
Then right around 2002 it seemed to fall apart. Things didn't work. My usually robust and reliable distro failed me miserably and the answers for my problems were not forthcoming. I went back to slackware, courted Suse for a while, fell utterly short on what I needed with Debian and when fedora came out again couldn't meet my combination of hardware/software requirements.
Then I found Gentoo. It was a mess, it took forever to install, had a million broken packages and hardware drivers. Through it all it seemed to keep it's promise however. There was always a way to make it work. The years went by, and I could figure out almost any problem, even if it did take some effort. I found myself spending more time using applications than tweaking the system and fell in love with Blender, and the Gimp. Suddenly I wanted to work on projects that did not involve Linux so much but just used it the way it was intended to be used. As an operating system.
About a year ago Gentoo started to have problems. Ebuilds became dated more and more of them seemed to go into the package.mask file, and even more seemed to not build properly. Upgrades became a real mess. I don't know if it had anything to do with the hierarchy issues that the foundation faced, but I know that things just seemed to take more and more time to deal with. I needed something that would "just work".
Round about this time Dell computers decided to offer a Linux based desktop distro and through all of the hype they actually offered some systems that made some monetary sense. I made the jump and bought one. I had never used Ubuntu before and based on my experience with Debian in the past I knew that it at least had a very solid foundation.
It has been about 8 months since then. I must be honest, feisty fawn had it's own little issues but Gutsy Gibbon has been a binary base distro failure in my book. How many of you have had your Gnome desktop start losing it's widgets, and then start to degrade to nothing like it was a poltergeist?
I have. Some things work really well, like the initial setup. The nvidia drivers, and any dvd capable player seems to be strangled by political bias within the dev team, but that is not anywhere near the biggest issue. Things just don't work sometimes, and (besides office software) some of the most successful desktop Linux applications out there have only basic implementation, if any.
So I'm looking for a new distro. Something that will "just work". I need it because I'm tired of working so hard to get a system that will do what I need it to do.
Here is my list of requirements.
1. real time kernel: I need to be able use sound applications to their fullest, and I need my network and video drivers to work with it.
2. development environment: I work with game engines I need to be able to build source for any unsupported codec, or library at a whim. Jhashaka, Verse.. all the stuff a film/graphics person needs.
3. Support for proprietary or questionably legal software: I don't care about the politics.. no I really don't. I just want it to work.
4. support for odd hardware: I want to use the same system for all of my computers. I want it on my desktop, my laptop.. everything.
5. Easy Samba setup: ya, I can get it to work, but it's a pain, and I have several systems and os's to deal with, and I want fish (ssh), and ftp through a browser.
While I know this is near to impossible I'm thinking that the Slashdot crowd is as close to the know as anyone.. so what's your thought what would you use??"
Then right around 2002 it seemed to fall apart. Things didn't work. My usually robust and reliable distro failed me miserably and the answers for my problems were not forthcoming. I went back to slackware, courted Suse for a while, fell utterly short on what I needed with Debian and when fedora came out again couldn't meet my combination of hardware/software requirements.
Then I found Gentoo. It was a mess, it took forever to install, had a million broken packages and hardware drivers. Through it all it seemed to keep it's promise however. There was always a way to make it work. The years went by, and I could figure out almost any problem, even if it did take some effort. I found myself spending more time using applications than tweaking the system and fell in love with Blender, and the Gimp. Suddenly I wanted to work on projects that did not involve Linux so much but just used it the way it was intended to be used. As an operating system.
About a year ago Gentoo started to have problems. Ebuilds became dated more and more of them seemed to go into the package.mask file, and even more seemed to not build properly. Upgrades became a real mess. I don't know if it had anything to do with the hierarchy issues that the foundation faced, but I know that things just seemed to take more and more time to deal with. I needed something that would "just work".
Round about this time Dell computers decided to offer a Linux based desktop distro and through all of the hype they actually offered some systems that made some monetary sense. I made the jump and bought one. I had never used Ubuntu before and based on my experience with Debian in the past I knew that it at least had a very solid foundation.
It has been about 8 months since then. I must be honest, feisty fawn had it's own little issues but Gutsy Gibbon has been a binary base distro failure in my book. How many of you have had your Gnome desktop start losing it's widgets, and then start to degrade to nothing like it was a poltergeist?
I have. Some things work really well, like the initial setup. The nvidia drivers, and any dvd capable player seems to be strangled by political bias within the dev team, but that is not anywhere near the biggest issue. Things just don't work sometimes, and (besides office software) some of the most successful desktop Linux applications out there have only basic implementation, if any.
So I'm looking for a new distro. Something that will "just work". I need it because I'm tired of working so hard to get a system that will do what I need it to do.
Here is my list of requirements.
1. real time kernel: I need to be able use sound applications to their fullest, and I need my network and video drivers to work with it.
2. development environment: I work with game engines I need to be able to build source for any unsupported codec, or library at a whim. Jhashaka, Verse.. all the stuff a film/graphics person needs.
3. Support for proprietary or questionably legal software: I don't care about the politics.. no I really don't. I just want it to work.
4. support for odd hardware: I want to use the same system for all of my computers. I want it on my desktop, my laptop.. everything.
5. Easy Samba setup: ya, I can get it to work, but it's a pain, and I have several systems and os's to deal with, and I want fish (ssh), and ftp through a browser.
While I know this is near to impossible I'm thinking that the Slashdot crowd is as close to the know as anyone.. so what's your thought what would you use??"