Round about last week, I switched my desktop from Gentoo to Fedora. It took a few days to get everything the way I wanted. But it only took that long because I had lots of data to backup and (selectively) restore, and I only worked in the evenings. Fortunately, a "re-install" is way less painful than Windows, since all you really need to keep is your home directory. I just don't know how Windows users live through it, especially without all their programs in a convenient package manager. I can happily say I have never re-formatted Windows for any reason (and that's not because I don't used it).
I guess there are a few reasons for the switch. I'd say it basically boils down to the following three:
- Gentoo wasn't updating fast enough for things I wanted. I can't say whether this is a general trend, but at least for packages I wanted, it was slow, and I could see that Fedora was getting those updates.
- My computer is getting older and packages are getting bigger. It's not been too bad (except for god-awful C++ programs that use Boost), but I don't want to work my system so hard as it gets older.
- And the most important: I got lazier. Not lazy enough to install Ubuntu though!
I guess I'll see how well Fedora fairs. I've just got an audio bug or two to fix (already reported) and it should be good. Eventually, I should go see if my cx18 works, too.
1 comment:
If you don't get on with Fedora then give Sabayon Linux a try. It's Gentoo but with its own home-grown binary package manager called Entropy (Equo is the command line tool; Sulfur is the GUI), although you can still use Portage. You don't have to build packages yourself as the Entropy repository has the binaries. So you have the power of Gentoo with the convenience of a binary package distribution such as Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu etc.
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