On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 12:19:15PM -0600, Josh Lawrence wrote: > So for those of you that participate in the suckless community in some > way: What do you run on your computer, and why? >
Debian testing on my laptop and Windows on my PC. Because I use my laptop for working and playing around with stuff, and for programming, and I use my PC solely for video games (it's about the one thing where Windows is still better than Linux). Anyway, regarding my choice of distribution: I've started out on SuSE Linux, but that basically killed itself when I deleted HAL (ah, nostalgia...) Since then I've shopped around a bit before settling on Debian, because: Plan9: When I heard about it, it was pitched to me (by the fine folks at cat-v.org) as the greatest OS since sliced bread. However, the fact that it wouldn't even install in a Virtual PC instance (the error message was "I/O error". Gee, thanks, that tells me exactly what to do!) quickly turned me off. Gentoo: I like the basic idea of compiling everything yourself, but since you can't change a few fundamentals, like the choice of libc or compiler, you aren't reaping all the benefits of that, leaving you only with the drawback of watching a complicated package install itself, taking bloody ages! (I wanted to install xmonad. I aborted after an hour, because of course it had to install ghc first.) Ubuntu: Didn't get it to work. I don't know what went wrong, and now I don't much care anymore. sabotage/Morpheus/sta.li: All great ideas, but since they're lacking the sheer manpower the major distributions boast, they can't possibly have the same library of packages. Now, I wouldn't mind if they had everything or even most of what I need, but they don't. Also, missing even a possible glibc support, it is unlikely for me to get Adobe Flash running in those distributions. Which is a shame because surfing youtube/blip.tv/etc. is most of what I do in my free time. Debian: Simple enough that you can install it on pretty much anything with a display, but boasting a huge package library so you can make your box as blinged out or as spartan as you like. It's a binary distribution, so package installations are fast, and unlike with SuSE I never really managed to break it. I had a brief infatuation with ReiserFS, back when you didn't get the "murderous performance" jokes for that, but when I learned that having another ReiserFS image in a file on your ReiserFS means that the most agressive fsck option would eat itself, and that your file system can be relied upon to get into that state with just a few poorly chosen power outages (a problem on a laptop that would have to run for hours without an AC connection), I switched over to XFS, which of course meant having to reinstall. Oh, and there was that one time where I tried to upgrade from 32 to 64 bit. I somehow managed to upgrade everything except libc, leaving the system irrecoverable. So, yeah, it's Debian, because I managed to have it run for years on end without breaking, no matter what crazy stuff I did with it. Ciao, Markus
