Yeah… Fedora has been slowly becoming my nemesis, mainly due to the mismanagement – or rather, the lack of management – of its repositories. If Fedora doesn’t adopt strong repo management at some point, it might as well stop calling itself a linux distribution.
I have been running a stable FC4 server for years, no complaints. But ironically, my undoing came about because I resisted the temptation to upgrade for long enough that eventually doing even the most minor security upgrade would be a huge repo dependency nightmare. A FC5 upgrade attempt was too much and I found myself with a dead server.
And Red Hat just seems to be getting more and more hands-off. I understand their logic, but who wants to volunteer to help with a distro that is still basically managed by someone else? It doesn’t make the best sense. And this bit me hard: I opted for a full Fedora 7 install from DVD, and found it had a severe kernel bug that allowed me to get through the installation and reboot into a completely trashed system that would give me a kernel panic before I could do anything… (and I am not alone…) I knew I needed to move away from it, and that was the proverbial straw…
If I hear one more ignorant person complain that gentoo is for ricers… do me a favor, try it or STFU. It gives you the most transparent access to your linux system, the way it was intended. Having a kernel tailored to your hardware is the way it should be. Using someone else’s binaries is like sharing underwear. (Man I’m feeling ranty!) And IMHO no other distro except perhaps Ubuntu is in the ballpark of gentoo’s stability, availability of new releases, and documentation quality. So just shut up, all you gentoo virgins. Besides, I can rice 183% if I want to! 😛
The server has been rebuilt and is mostly back up and running… someone talk me out of trying to run my own cyrus IMAP server before it kills me…
Still happily running Debian on my boxes 🙂 Mepis was fun, but Debian sticks with the stable stuff a bit longer.
Yep. Stable is everything. I started posting “don’t upgrade the server!” notes to myself everywhere. :>
I actually like Fedora’s “core” approach – the fact that they allow you, as the user, to stick with an older core until you’re ready to upgrade. If you go with the philosophy of upgrading to a core that is two generations old or so, you can probably do pretty well with it.
Gentoo has profiles, which are similar. They allow you to specify the architecture, type of machine (eg server|desktop), and release date (there are typically two or three release dates per year). However, that doesn’t keep you from getting newer packages once you’re up and running. For that, gentoo’s portage package manager allows you to specify e.g. that you just want the “system” set of packages updated, and gentoo keeps that set of packages well-maintained and stable.
I take it that by default, Debian keeps you on a slightly older release cycle. Is there a way to specify how old, so you can just get security updates and avoid newer features?
In the end, a linux distro is just like any other software – either it’s actively maintained and has a good QA cycle, or it eventually dies. With all the activity in the linux software space, it’s just amplified.
Wow, I just read the latest posts from the creator of gentoo and there are definitely some fresh politics going on. There has been a lot of developer turmoil in the past, and it’s sounding like it might get worked out soon… fingers crossed…