Dist-hopping experimentation time!

[Matt Graham]

From: Eric Shubert <ejs at shubes.net>
> If you haven't jumped into virtualization yet, I would certainly do so. 
> It will make your dist-hopping experience much more pleasurable.

Running a distro in a VM won't tell you anything about how well that distro
handles real hardware.  It'll show you a bunch about the distro, of course, so
you might say "I hate the package management system," or "I can't deal with
the {ancient/unstable} versions of $FOO it provides," or stuff like that.  But
you could totally use VMs to winnow out all the distros you don't like, and
try 2 or 3 of those that remain on actual hardware.

> Sabayon looks interesting.

When I last looked at Sabayon (1.5 years ago), it was wildly unstable, lots of
stuff would break if you updated anything, and that made it a royal PITA to
get ordinary things done.  Maybe that's less true now.

I'm using Gentoo, because it doesn't second-guess me, and it makes it quite
easy to install evil binary-only things if I want.  Thing is, compiling
everything from source is less advantageous now than it was 6 years ago, since
CPUs are faster and there's not as much difference between CPU instruction
sets as there used to be.  Having all the development headers for everything
already makes it much easier to compile (whatever) from
freshmeat/sourceforge/your own twisted imagination though.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see