Re: [ltp] Periodic distro question
Personally I'd have to say that basically Linux has gotten HUGELY more
complex than it used to be. I remember back in the days of the 0.99 series
kernels, when Yggdrasil was THE only "distribution" and then Slackware came
along and everyone thought that was complex and unwieldy!
The point is, back then Linux fit on about 12 diskettes and it was 100%
tarballs. There were only something like at most 100 "packages" and most of
those were pretty basic stuff. Now even Slackware must have upwards of 1000
packages, and Mandrake 8.1's BASIC install is 2049 RPMs.
Even this wouldn't be so bad if that was where complexity ended. The problem
is we ask our systems to be so much more flexible nowadays than ever before.
I have an A20p for instance, and I expect it to work reliably in the office,
at home (on my home LAN), and on the road connecting to things via the net
using dial-up. I've got USB devices that appear and disappear, CD-R/W and DVD
drives that can added or removed, PC Cards, wireless LANS that come and go,
etc etc etc. There must be dozens of different possible configurations my
system routinely finds itself in. Thats not even to mention all the
possibilities of suspending at the office and resuming when I get home or
whatnot.
The answer my friend is that you are just going to have to live with it. ALL
the distros are complex. Given the open source nature of Linux and the way
distros are put together its not ever going to be possible for them to button
all this stuff down into one tight little box the way MS tries to with
Windows either. Notice, they TRY to, and they have always failed even so!
Same with Apple. MacOS and now the new OS X are just as ugly and complicated.
My bet is that someday each hardware will simply have its own specific
distribution built by the hardware vendor from a common "core" and you will
just go to whomever you like to have core functions updated. Even so the
config things will remain.
It would be nice (and it may happen) that Linux will get some sort of more
advanced conventions on configuring all the subsystems together. That would
be nice, but I won't hold my breath.
On Wednesday 27 March 2002 06:23, Tom Allison wrote:
> I guess this is really just a vent/rant but...
>
> I am a current user of Debian.
> I picked it from Slackware because I was in favor of a faster install
> process than slackwares. Of course I had fewer questions in Slackware
> because I was always RTMing. Debian makes it easier to not do that.
>
> I also picked it because the defaults were more secure (than other
> options at the time) and it was an excellent choice for getting
> notebooks configured with apm & pcmcia.
>
> But there are a few specifics that are really bothering me and now I'm
> wondering if there are not other distros which would keep me happy.
>
> ALSA, or any realiable sound support is probably the one thing that
> has never worked on this IBM A21m.
>
> At this point I'm actually thinking of going back to SlackWare or
> possibly looking into RedHat because of the extensive bloat that
> Debian has shown and the latency of the distributions.
>
> One thing that I'm really frustrated in right now is that the Debian
> Stable is whoefully behind everything else on the internet.
> Technically, I cannot run the XFree 3.3.6 that is provided.
>
> But migration to Testing has resulted in a cascade of updated
> packages, many of whom overwrite my existing configurations. This
> really pisses me off to no end. Combine this with the continued
> abstraction levels of Debian and it is now getting harder to use
> Debian and understand other distributions as well. This niche
> specialization may have won arguements with Debian, but it's at a high
> price with respect to interchangeable configurations. I may be able
> to fix something on Debian, but not on any other distro.
>
> Is this a common digression between the distros?
>
> I know that years ago, when I used Suse, I saw the same level of
> abstraction creeping in and promptly dumped it when I was unable to
> keep anything configured with the Suse Configurator. I don't know how
> this has changed in the three years.
>
> RedHat had a similar problem. Slackware was just very hand-rolled.
>
>
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