[mythtv-users] Linux distros.

[Edward Wildgoose]

> >The two favourites from those in the know usually seem to be debian and gentoo
> >
> I use Debian since about 2 years and I am getting quite sick of it. 
> apt-get and debconf is nice, but "stable" is constantly too old and 
> "unstable" is unstable, you have to fix things about once a month, and 
> get about 30MB of packages each day, and I don't want that, I don't have 
> time for constantly fixing things.

[Note that I have no experience of Debian, however, lots of people seem to like it.  Personally I have only ever used Redhat and Gentoo...]

However, (for me) gentoo has a reasonable way of tackling the above problems.  Basically *all* versions of all packages are available through portage.  Some of these are marked unstable, and the default install ignores these.

What this means is you can do an "update all" type operation and it only grabs the latest *stable* updates to everything, however, if you have a need to grab an unstable package then this is quite straightforward and so you end up with a mix of stable and unstable (the three latest versions might all be marked unstable - you can even pick which release you want).

If something goes wrong, then it is easy to revert back to a previous version of the package.  The installer appears to know exactly which files are installed (like any good packager I suppose), and can completely remove the results of the install and apply the previous version again.  Dependencies appear to be handled extremely well too (like with Debian if you ask for a package it auto installs the (stable) version of all the dependent packages)

It's not perfect - I won't go into the details, suffice to say they are being actively worked on though.

The biggest theoretical gripe about gentoo is the compiling of all your packages.  All I can say is that for me it hasn't proved to be a *practical* problem.  If you have a network then you can compile once and distribute compiled version - basically it auto uses pre-compiled packages if they are available (kind of), it's just that the usual concept of a package in gentoo is a small text file describing where to get the source from and what the compile options are (ie works best if you have a decent net connection).  Also for the bigger packages, Mozilla, Open Office, you can get a pre-compiled version from gentoo.org.  Perhaps someone else also supplies pre-compiled versions of the normal packages as well - I dont know of such a place, but it's theoretically possible

I think for most hobbiest users gentoo might not be ready for the big time though.  Once you step outside of the "working" stuff it can quickly get complicated.  But for most enthusiasts I imagine that you will find it as much of a contender as the other main distributions.

Based on the comments in emails - I suspect a poll of this list might put gentoo and debian into the top 2 places?  Anyone want to run a poll?  (remember that's most "popular" in this list, not "best")