Flutterby™! : So should I give up on packages and 2012-11-03 17:11:10.620675+00

So should I give up on packages and

2012-11-03 17:11:10.620675+00 by Dan Lyke 6 comments

So should I give up on packages and compile everything from source, or is there a good distro for Linux that has current software?

Yeah, I want something where when a cow-orker says "Hey, have you seen Yeoman?", it's quick and easy to install and play with, not a "oh, now I have to decide between packages and source for Node.js and all of its dependencies" nightmare.

Over the course of my career I have written one or more schedulers, filesystems, device drivers, memory managers, bootloaders, compilers, linkers, loaders, debuggers, GUI toolkits, text rendering engines, virtual machines, text editors, and even a command shell. Whenever I get too frustrated with the seemingly endless time-wastage that is Linux, or the seemingly never-ending trend toward consumer lockdown that is the Apple ecosystem, I just think about the fact that I could, in fact, design and implement my own complete multitasking operating system from scratch, and I console myself with happy thoughts about all the ways I would improve on the current mess.

This fantasy, if played out long enough, eventually shades into a serious reckoning of the work that would be involved. I've spent almost four years just building one single programming language compiler & support library... (http://www.radian-lang.org/) so I think we can reasonably expect that building a whole OS, while possible, would consume the rest of my working life. And so I shrug my shoulders, sigh, and get back to dealing with the mess that is unix, and the even bigger mess that is everything else, because at least it all actually exists, and does useful things most of the time.

I'm a linux n00b, trying my yearly install and I'm running xbuntu. Everything seems like it's up to date. I have it setup like my mac.

#Comment Re: made: 2012-11-04 12:14:41.759302+00 by: meuon [edit history]

Unity on Ubunu 12.04 was given a more than fair trial run. I learned to hate it. I tripped across Bodhi Linux, which is 12.04 LTS with Enlightenment and have been enjoying it. I find myself right clicking on other desktops wishing for the short favorites apploication menu (that Enlightenment has). But I'm an atypical user, usually just using: xterm, Firefox and Chrom, Skype, Evolution. Sometimes I'll use Gimp, DeadBeaf, VLC and LibreOffice. I don't drag and drop files very often...

I've been running Ubuntu 12.04LTS. Initially most geospatial software was hard to come by. But it's not an issue anymore. There's an advantage to running an OS that's widely used. Most software shows up in the repos pretty quick and you can still go to source when you need. I've actually used 11.04 for servers quite a bit with no real issues.

I'm getting along on Debian Squeeze on most of my machines right now, biding my time until Wheezy goes stable. I compile a few development tools from source and install Chrome from Google's repositories, but in general it's not too bad. Still, this obviously doesn't really answer your "current software" question.

I think a lot of people are running Wheezy already; it's been in testing for a bit, which should mean it's less scary than unstable.

I put Mint on a spare laptop here the other day. There are maybe some issues with the number of places it has advertising referral crap added to the browser and so forth, but it seems like a pretty solid gloss on Ubuntu, and the installer is really slick. I would definitely recommend the Xfce desktop these days if you're looking for something solidly in that "gut-standard desktop environment that just works" zone Gnome used to occupy.

I haven't run a recent Ubuntu anywhere in a while, although some reports suggest it's re-stabilized since the outright disaster that was 11.04.