Currently, I am a Gentoo Linux user. It is a great distribution for
people who want fine control over their system. I enjoy being able to
just emerge whatever_program. However, I am getting a little tired of
having to compile every little obscure library for a point update. So,
I guess you could say I'm in the market for a new distro.
I have used Red Hat (not Fedora), Mandrake, and Gentoo. Of all of
them, I enjoy the control I have with Gentoo. I guess I'm looking for
a distro that will allow me to obtain the latest xorg or gnome or
firefox without having to go through a three hour compile session. RPM
is not suitable for this, as I know from experience. Red Hat and
Mandrake are very picky about dependencies making an upgrade of gnome or
kde nearly impossible. One ends up in the RPM equivalent of dll hell.
apt-get seems well suited for my needs. That is why I am posting to this
debian list. However, when I browsed the package repositories on
debian.org, I was disappointed. The stable repository is woefully out of
date. The latest unstable gnome is version 2.6, and xorg is not even
listed. Is it possible to easily have a debian install with the latest
gnome 2.8 and xorg 6.8.1? I did see a debian-based distro called ubuntu
that has gnome 2.8 out of the box. However, their faq says that one
should not mix mainstream debian debs with ubuntu debs. So, that distro
would preclude me from taking advantage of all of the packages in the
debian repository. So, does anyone have advice for this situation? Am I
asking the impossible of the current state of debian?
Thanks for any insight.
Robert Brinson
"The solution to any problem -- work, love, money, whatever -- is to go
fishing, and the worse the problem, the longer the trip should be." –
John Gierach