Re: Are we losing users to Gentoo?
Jon Kent <j_d_kent@yahoo.com> writes:
[...]
> What we need to accept is there is a (percieved??)
> problem, or problems, with Debian as it stands today,
> these being (mainly)
>
> Hard to install (rubbish obviously)
> Out of date (this _is_ true)
> Slow to update (this _is_ true)
> Hard to configure (depends upon your view-point)
Releases tend to be out of date. But that's a feature: releases need
to be composed of well tested stable packages. testing and unstable
have pretty up to date packages. So Debian is as up to date as you
want; the caveat being that for newer software, you'll need to put up
with some instability.
> The reasons I see people switch to Gentoo are :
>
> Its more fun
> Alot more up to date
> Easier to customise, down to which libraries you want
> to support
Presumably its up to dateness comes at the cost of less stability? So
probably people should compare Gentoo not with Debian releases
(stable), but with testing (or perhaps even unstable)? How do they
compare then?
> Gentoo is still hard to configure if you are only used to Red Hat or
> Mandrake, easy if you used to Debian, Slackware etc.
>
> IMHO Debian is too slow to put out new releases. I
> run testing to ages with no problems, ever. Sure on
> my unstable box things went south at times but I
> expect that and can fix it, but testing is very solid,
> as solid as, say, Red Hat.
Yes, possibly. Quite a bit of the problem seems to come with
preparing boot floppies, of all things.
Maybe there's some case for making a regular (once every couple of
months or so) "State of Testing" announcement, describing the major
features of testing, together with how to install it (either "install
stable release, then change /etc/apt/sources.list thusly, then do
"apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade", or perhaps actually preparing
a Knoppix ISO containing testing). On the other hand, maybe this
wouldn't be much use to anyone.
[...]
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