Thoughts on Gentoo

[Kurt Granroth]

On Friday 08 September 2006 11:57, Kenneth wrote:
> As long as we're talking about distros, any Suse users?  I thought about
> trying it out too, but the 5 CDs intimidated me.  Seems like a lot just to
> test something out.

Yeah, I'm a big SUSE fan and have been for years*.  I've flitted between quite 
a few distributions throughout the years for all of my "just for fun" work 
but, with the sole exception of running Gentoo as my main office workstation 
for a few years, SUSE has always been my primary "go-to" distribution.

Why?  Because "it just works" better than any other Linux distribution.  It 
*almost* reaches the "OS X" levels of everything just working and, in the 
case of server based stuff, does a much better job than OS X.

If you have the bandwidth, then I recommend downloading the 10.1 DVD.  It's 
chock full of everything you'd need.  No DVD writer and you still don't want 
to get the individual CDs?  Well, just download the netboot image and install 
over the network.

Once it's installed, I recommend downloading the 'smart' package manager and 
adding a bunch of YUM, YaST, and apt repositories to keep SUSE current.  
Unfortunately, the built-in SUSE package manager for 10.1 sucks.

* Disclaimer: I used to work for SUSE so I'm more than a little biased.