A bit late I realise, but I figured I would throw in my 2c.

We use Gentoo across the board as much as possible after moving from
RH/Fedora.

Gentoo appeals to me in that it works out of the box 99% of the time for the
common case, but can easily be changed to handle more advanced needs without
needing to abandon the package manager.

eg. A lot of distros ship bind without DLZ support (ie. loading zone data
from a DB like MySQL). Gentoo ships without it by default too, but it's a
single flag to turn it on. The binary package distros I've used would
require you to install bind from source, external to your package manager,
and hope to hell nobody forgets and installs the package.

This is where systems like RPM break down IMHO; you're on your own and have
to build from source as soon as 1) you need a newer version than is provided
officially, 2) you need a package not provided, or 3) you need a feature not
enabled by default. You now need to remember whether a package is installed
from source or from RPM. My experience is that all 3 of those options is
almost a guarantee with distros like CentOS where they are very conservative
about pushing new versions out (for good reason, considering they are
pushing the Enterprise aspect).

Another thing I like with Gentoo is that I can satisfy deps myself (eg.
ruby) and tell the package manager that it's provided already, and
everything just keeps working (with no risk of someone else trying to
install it over the top).

It also pleases me that I can install ImageMagick without it bringing in
every freaking X and Gnome library ever written (RH/Fedora, I'm looking at
you...).

That said, Gentoo certainly isn't for someone who doesn't have a lot of
experience with Linux, or generally just needs what the defaults give them.

Works well for us though.

All the best,
Jason

On 27 November 2010 18:43, Mikel Lindsaar <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi RoRoers,
>
> Quick survey, what is your current deployment OS of choice and why?
>
> Reason I ask is there is a lot of movement recently, my current deployment
> OS of choice is CentOS, but it is getting a bit long in the tooth and
> sometimes has interesting yum problems on updating software, I can get
> anything I want installed of course using direct installs, but would like to
> get a bit of feedback from our community on what you are using these days.
>
> For some reason, I look at Ubuntu as just a desktop OS, I know this is
> irrational, but I have been seeing more and more ubuntu installs on screen
> casts and the like, are people using this because they find it easier?  Are
> they (gasp) running the GUI on it in production?  What is the attraction
> here?
>
>
> Mikel Lindsaar
> http://rubyx.com/
> http://lindsaar.net/
>
>
>
>
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