The distros I currently use fall into the list you are not interested in. However, similarly to Rich, about a decade ago I used Gentoo as my main workstation OS for a good several years and loved the experience. The learning that I gained from it was invaluable. The enjoyment I got from building things from the ground up was excellent. Finding a kernel feature that I wanted to change and then recompiling the kernel was exciting. Sometimes I miss those days, but I am currently too entrenched in my current setup.
I have also used FreeBSD for web servers for many years and enjoy it. Jonathan On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 12:43 AM, Rich L <r...@dranek.com> wrote: > On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 12:43:26PM +0530, Dan Egli wrote: > >> I'm not looking to start a flame war here, but I am curious >> why everyone uses whatever distribution they do. I'd like to hear back >> from >> people, especially those not using things like Fedora or Ubuntu or Debian. >> > > I'm a happy Arch user for a few years now. For a few programs, I usually > need the latest version and back when I was on Ubuntu, that meant either > trusting someone's PPA or compiling it by hand. Arch is usually > bleeding-edge enough for me, but I don't think I've ever suffered any major > problems from that. > > Also, they have a great wiki [1] that I often refer to and occasionally > update. Their package selection is really large because even if it's not > officially packaged by Arch, there is a huge (but centralized) collection > of user-submitted packages (the AUR). > > I also really like the simple but powerful package manager (pacman) and > how easy it is to create your own packages. It's just a simple bash script > that follows some guidelines. I maintain a few packages that probably very > few people are interested in, but it's ridiculously easy to do so. (I find > the process to create a .deb much more complicated or at least poorly > documented.) > > > My personal favorite distribution has to be Gentoo. >> > > I used Gentoo for awhile about a decade ago and really really enjoyed it. > The only part I didn't like was the lengthy compilation times. I think they > tried to address this by including some binary packages for the worst > offenders (Firefox, OpenOffice, etc), but I don't think they do that > anymore, right? > > Coming from a background of Gentoo and Ubuntu, for me, Arch has all the > customizability and simplicity of Gentoo but the quick installation/upgrade > of using binary packages. > > [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Main_Page > > -- > Rich > > > /* > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > Don't fear the penguin. > */ > /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
