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. */
