Should i get Linux???

[Hero999]

That's a fair point but choosing a distribution forces you to stick with one system. If Ubuntu supported Feroda and Slackware packages and vice versa then it wouldn't be so bad.

 

[Marks256]

That's a fair point but choosing a distribution forces you to stick with one system.

That would be nice, but people normally release the source with the program, so if a program is needed on another platform, it is pretty simple to compile from source. (once you figure out how... it took me a while... )

 

[Hero999]

That's true but not all software is open source and compiling a large program like The Gimp or OpenOffice.org would be a b1tch.

 

[UTMonkey]

My choice of distro was entirely based on what works with my hardware.

I have a laptop which is only 6 months old, there are distros out there that have real problems coping with laptop power management technology and dont even get me started on graphics drivers!

Tinkering behind the scenes of a Linux installation is ok - but I just dont have the time to learn those types of skills, I would love to see Linux as a True desktop OS alternative but at the moment there are 2 distros that are real contenders for that market but sadly they still have some way to go.

Fedora and OpenSuSe! they worked with my laptop out of the box, every other distro I tried (and there were a few!) complained about GFX, Power Management and my SATA drives.

All the best

Mark

 

[Styx]

That's true but not all software is open source and compiling a large program like The Gimp or OpenOffice.org would be a b1tch.

gimp... pfff

genlop gimp -t
 * media-gfx/gimp

     Fri Dec 15 15:58:42 2006 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.3.13
       merge time: 7 minutes and 54 seconds.

     Thu Jan 25 13:39:50 2007 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.3.14
       merge time: 7 minutes and 25 seconds.

     Sun Feb 11 09:10:19 2007 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.3.14
       merge time: 6 minutes and 39 seconds.

     Tue Apr  3 20:23:47 2007 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.3.15
       merge time: 6 minutes and 54 seconds.

     Sat Apr 28 13:15:11 2007 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.3.16
       merge time: 7 minutes and 24 seconds.

     Thu May 10 00:31:33 2007 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.3.16
       merge time: 7 minutes and 44 seconds.

     Thu Jun 14 19:24:52 2007 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.3.18
       merge time: 12 minutes.

     Thu Jul 26 18:45:41 2007 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.3.19
       merge time: 13 minutes and 19 seconds.

     Sat Aug 18 20:00:08 2007 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.4.0_rc1
       merge time: 7 minutes and 37 seconds.

     Thu Sep  6 18:28:01 2007 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.4.0_rc2
       merge time: 13 minutes and 36 seconds.

     Fri Sep 28 17:12:33 2007 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.4.0_rc3
       merge time: 8 minutes and 43 seconds.

     Wed Oct 24 19:52:16 2007 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.4.0
       merge time: 8 minutes.

     Thu Nov  1 21:26:16 2007 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.4.1
       merge time: 7 minutes and 47 seconds.

     Mon Dec 31 19:30:43 2007 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.4.2
       merge time: 8 minutes and 48 seconds.

     Sat Jan 19 13:36:00 2008 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.4.2
       merge time: 7 minutes and 34 seconds.

     Tue Jan 22 19:15:34 2008 >>> media-gfx/gimp-2.4.3
       merge time: 5 minutes and 59 seconds.

time varies due to live system (and I browse the web while my gentoo system updates, so if a damb flash site comes up, the stupid plugin saturates one of my cores)

Openoffice however... that took 9h to compile on my old 2.4GHz P4 and even today on my Core2 2.4GHz it still takes 3h. Prob is it is a spagetti code POS and it is soooo delecate, use the bin from upstream

Any distro can use other distro's packages. not that hard

Redhat, Fedora, Suse, Mandrake are all built around the RPM container format (and then have some tool to manage dependancies... yum..)

Debian,*Buntu,... are based around DEB for the container format (and then have some tool to manage dependancies... apt-get)




NOW any distro can use the container, I mean RPM is at teh end of the day a tar.gz file with some metadata, DEB is just a tar.gz file with some metadata and some post-install scripting capability

IF I wanted to use an RPM on a debian-based distro I can either apt-get install rpm && rpm -i the_package.rpm (problem is rpm expects infomation in the rpm database abt dependancies) OR use rpm2tgz and just unzip it and drop the files where needed and deal with dependancy via yr distro

Likewise for say Fedora I can use Alien to change a DEB package to a pure tar.gz file and unzip it into my tree


in Gentoo we ruitinly use rpm2tgz when upstream ONLY provides *.rpm packages (adobe for instance) and then via the *.ebuild deal with the system layout and dependancies


it aint as bad as it is made out to be



There was an attempt to make universal package format BUT debian were really stubborn and really kept putting it down and redhat just didn't even bother looking at it (autopackage iirc). It may come about again at some point but it isn't that much of an issue

 

[Styx]

There is: http://www.packagekit.org/ and **broken link removed**

but again it is dependent that the major binary distro's use it.

YES the binary distro add their own patchset but they can can add -FC8 to the name to disctiguish