Penultimate Reality

Lately, I’ve been playing around with Debian sid in a virtual machine (VirtualBox is now my virtual machine of choice) for reasons that are entirely beyond me. That said, it looks like it could be potentially useful as a desktop system. I only worry about what kind of breakage I might experience. It’d be nice to get some feedback on perhaps some best practices for maintaining a sid-based system. But I guess you might want some background first…

I’ve become increasingly bored with maintaining my Gentoo machines. This culminated with me reinstalling Ubuntu on my laptop a few weeks ago, At this point, I don’t even notice except that I am no longer repeatedly compiling packages every day. The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that package versions are sometimes a little outdated (which is to be expected, given Ubuntu’s six month update cycle). This led me to examine what versions of packages are in the sid repository of Debian. As it turns out, it’s quite updated, with new versions of packages appearing very quickly. It’s led me to believe it might be all right for a desktop system.

My desktop system is rapidly becoming obsolete, and it slowly feels slower and slower as time goes on. (It’s using an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ which was originally purchased in late 2002.) Keeping the copy of Gentoo I have running on it up to date is increasingly becoming a dull procedure, and given my penchant for micromanagement… In any case, I’m slowly coming around to consider installing Debian on it, though I don’t know if I want to risk breaking it. After all, it isn’t broken, and I intend on replacing it within the next year. Maybe I just play around too much…

I could always just install Linux from Scratch. That’d be great for a laugh.

(By the way, if any of you happen to be looking for shared web hosting, consider buying from me at www.calindora.com. Why, you ask? I got tired of seeing hosting companies (probably dishonestly?) offering 600GB or 34TB or whatever amounts of disk space they’re claiming to offer these days. I feel bad for anyone who actually intends to try to use all that space.)

As a long-time Gentoo user, I notice that every time I try a new distribution for a short while (in this case Ubuntu), I find myself eventually with an urge to switch back. It never takes more than a month, really. It’s kind of strange, but I suppose I’ve become attached to Gentoo in some weird way. The short of it is that I started feeling the urge again today. (My desktop and server still run Gentoo, so they’re not even an issue. But then there’s my laptop.)

Don’t get me wrong. Ubuntu is a fine distribution, and everything I said in my previous post still stands. It just never quite feels quite right, however. The straw that broke the camel’s back in this case was that I went to install a particular game and the version in Ubuntu’s repositories was slightly old. I know the newer version will be available in just a few short months, but there’s something comforting about being able to access what I want almost immediately in Gentoo.

It’s looking increasingly likely that I’ll make the switch back to Gentoo in a day or two, but there will definitely be a few things I miss about Ubuntu. First, upgrades so far have been a breeze. There haven’t been that many, but they installed quickly and simply. I’ve never experienced a major upgrade, however, and I’m not sure I ever want to. One advantage of Gentoo in this respect is that the upgrades get spread out a bit instead of thrown all at you at once. You have time to explore each upgrade as it comes in, with whatever new features it happens to bring. With the Ubuntu way, thousands of packages will be upgraded, and I’ll have very little idea just what changed. The system may completely change under me with no transition. It’s an unsettling feeling.

Also, NetworkManager has been nice, but Gentoo’s networking isn’t completely awful, and actually works reasonably well at this point. I’ll also miss not having to configure a kernel. It’s not difficult, but there are a lot of options, many of which I have little need to see.

Other than that, there isn’t much I’ll miss about Ubuntu. When it comes down to it, both Ubuntu and Gentoo are Linux operating systems and the differences are less important than one might think. The one point that Gentoo has going for it is that I’ve never switched away because it didn’t feel right; only to try new things.

Maybe I’m wrong, but at least I won’t feel so unsettled.

Up until recently, all three of my machines (a virtual server, a desktop, and a laptop) have all run Gentoo. With the release of Ubuntu Gutsy, however, I thought I’d give it a try on my laptop, to see how much it’d improved since I’d last used it. The major selling point was that I could use the alternative installer to fully encrypt the disk, which I had been doing under Gentoo. (The last thing I need if my laptop is stolen is for the thief to have easy access to my data.)

To sum it up briefly, I see no reason that the laptop will ever migrate back to Gentoo, unless Gentoo improves its desktop integration experience. Ubuntu’s been stable (with one caveat), the wireless network support has been great, and most of my major media playing concerns have been taken care of. In short, it’s an excellent desktop experience, and it saves me a bit of time going through the updates each morning. The large upgrade every 6 months will take a few minutes to go through and see what’s new (I still have that micromanagement bug). We’ll see how things go over the next few months, though.

I’m still not ready to transition my desktop. While it would probably work fine, I really rely on some of the applications it runs, and I’m not particularly interested in the downtime. That said, I can’t think of any real reasons to keep it running Gentoo, other than the reasons stated in my popular post on why I use Gentoo. So, I suppose I’ll transition it at some point, perhaps. But perhaps not.

My only major gripe about Ubuntu at the moment is that the desktop effects are rather unstable with my NVIDIA card. I can almost certainly make the thing freeze very quickly by using compositing effects. I hope the nouveau project successfully gets a good open-source driver for NVIDIA cards soon, because using the binary blob just leaves issues like this unsolved for the most part, which is a shame, because some of the effects are actually useful, and not just eye-candy.

In just a few years, Ubuntu’s gone from new kid on the block, to a coherent, simple-to-use desktop experience that the most technophobic person could use. I’d wholeheartedly recommend it over Windows to a new user.

As many stories have reported in the past few days, it looks like Dell is going to offer Ubuntu on select machines. In general, I think I like this move. I’m not sure if they’re going to offer any additional distributions, but at the very least, offering a Debian-derived system, as opposed to an RPM-based one strikes me as a good thing. From what I’ve seen, upgrading between major releases is far easier on Debian-derived systems, with RPM ones requiring essentially a reinstall, though you get to keep your data in most cases.

In any case, I’ve felt for a while that Ubuntu offered the best hope for a mainstream desktop Linux, despite its shortcomings. It’s by no means perfect, but Windows isn’t either. With Dell preinstalling it, they’ll be able to at least make sure the appropriate drivers are installed, which is probably the most difficult part of getting any operating system running. For now, most users will inevitably end up with Windows, simply because it’s almost expected in many cases. I maintain, however, that for completely beginning computer users who are unlikely to play the latest games, learning Ubuntu is no more difficult than learning Windows, and these users are the prime target of any desktop Linux initiative. I only hope that in the coming few years, a Linux distribution (not necessarily Ubuntu) can become the default, and Windows can be relegated to secondary status. After all, desktop Linux is improving rapidly, and Microsoft is going to end up with more of a fight than they’d like.

The next step is, of course, that Microsoft will finally open-source some version of Windows. Sure, it seems unlikely, but that’s my ultimate prediction.

Today was perhaps a big day in the open-source world, with at least two major releases that I’m aware of. The Mozilla project released version 2.0 of Mozilla Thunderbird, their premier e-mail application. Perhaps the bigger story, however, is that Ubuntu released version 7.04 of its popular GNU/Linux distribution.

As far as Thunderbird goes, the release is sort of lost on me. I’ve been running betas and release candidates for at least a month or two, so I can no longer recall what the major changes were for me. Since I tend to use it as little more than a glorified IMAP client, I don’t necessarily use a lot of the more interesting features like spam detection or message tagging.

I installed Ubuntu last night in a virtual machine, and I’m becoming more impressed with the distribution with every release cycle. It’s definitely a very polished system, and one of the first things I noticed was the restricted drivers manager. Since the virtual machine doesn’t require any restricted drivers, I didn’t have the opportunity to try it out, however. Even so, the six month lull between major releases is perhaps the biggest reason I would stray away from Ubuntu personally. I know backports can help somewhat with that, but especially with major libraries, that doesn’t help so much. Maybe I just need to lose the bleeding-edge mentality. Nonetheless, it’s an impressive release, and I expect it’ll only continue to get better. I’ll probably be staying with Gentoo myself for now, but I’m certainly open to change.

Over at arsgeek, there’s a brief article on some things you might experience when transitioning from Windows to Linux. I traveled that road myself a few years ago, and I can relate to some of those experiences, many of which might trip up the person considering switching operating systems, or at least dabbling. I’d like to talk about a couple of those in particular, and then I have another one to add to the mix, that sort of sums up the whole process. I’d suggest you read the article over at arsgeek first, so you have some idea what I’m talking about.

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Just a few days ago, as I’m sure many of you are aware, GNOME 2.18 was released. It was somewhat interesting for me since it was the first release since 2.6 that I didn’t follow obsessively. Instead of aggressively installing betas and release candidates (that almost always caused crashes of various types), I simply avoided the development cycle altogether, and noticed the release came a lot faster in my mind. I haven’t yet installed the beast, since I’m waiting for it to be included in ~x86 in Gentoo, but if the release notes are any indication, I’m not going to be very impressed.

Maybe I’m just romantically remembering a past that wasn’t as glamorous as it really was, but it seemed that previous releases had new features, new applications, and other interesting developments. This time around, the release notes start out with rather vague improvements, like “personal security”, perhaps a warning in itself. If there were groundbreaking improvements, you’d think they’d at least be mentioned specifically. Next we find out there are a couple of new games. Well, that’s an improvement, I guess.

Next we finally get to the list of actual improvements. The killer GNOME 2.18 feature that was deemed worthy of the first bullet point?

Tomboy, the note-taking applet, helps you to keep better track of your most important notes by pinning them, making sure they will always easier to find.

Now, Tomboy’s a great application and I use it daily, but seriously? This is the top improvement? Maybe the editing was just bad. Continuing down the list, we finally do see some real improvements, but nothing stands out. I’ll just have to wait and see if I notice anything different when I finally upgrade.

This is perhaps the biggest problem I notice with some of these decentralized projects. A lot of small changes but no real direction. The same problem plagues Gentoo to a certain degree, and even KDE’s minor releases aren’t terribly exciting. Oh well, maybe KDE4 or GNOME 3.0 (if it ever even gets off the ground) will show some real innovation. Until then, I’ll just continue using my “functional” desktop.

Yet another salvo has been fired in the constant battle between Microsoft and the major Linux companies as to which operating system better fits the bill for business purposes. In this case, Novell has set up a web site that compares SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop to Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Vista. I took a gander at the white paper, and here’s what I found:

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I was recently attempting to set up a video conference between me and a friend. Of course, the biggest problem that came up was that I use Linux and she uses Windows. For standard instant messaging, this poses no problem. There are many excellent cross-platform clients, such as Gaim, that interoperate with a variety of networks. In addition, there are numerous clients for a single operating system that also interoperate. Adding voice and video to the equation presents an entirely new problem…

Perhaps the most common networks for these activities are Yahoo! and MSN. Yahoo! has an abysmal client for Linux that supports neither voice nor video. MSN has no Linux client at all. Clients such as Kopete and aMSN support the video aspect of one or more of these services, but don’t support voice. So much for that idea.

Next, we look at the wide array of SIP clients. While, in theory, different SIP clients are compatible with each other, this falls short due to lack of common support for the various video codecs. The most promising solutions on Linux, Ekiga and Linphone, are either difficult to install or crash-prone on Windows. Similarly, programs that work on Windows, such as WengoPhone, are crash-prone or buggy on Linux.

At this point, I’m down to walking my friend through installing Ekiga on Windows and hoping it works or simply running MSN Messenger in a VMWare instance (it doesn’t seem to want to work properly in Wine). Has anyone out there managed to connect the Linux and Windows worlds? Am I missing something, or is it just going to take time for the various clients to develop?

I’ve used a number of GNU/Linux distributions over the last few years. Going back a few years, I experimented with both Debian and (the now defunct) Corel Linux. More recently, I’ve used Gentoo, Arch, and Ubuntu. I even briefly installed Fedora Core on a test machine. I’ve also experimented with some other distributions, primarily in virtual machines. The short of it is that I have used to some degree or another a moderate number of distributions.

However, the vast majority of my GNU/Linux experience has been confined to machines running Gentoo. I have run it as my primary operating system for over two years, excepting the week a few months back when I briefly ran Ubuntu. The only other distributions I consider myself moderately familiar with are Debian and Arch. I ran Debian for a week or so in 2002 before switching back to Windows so I could use some software for a course I was taking at the time, and Wine was nowhere near as useful as it is today. I’ve also played with it sporadically on various machines (physical and virtual) since 1999. Arch is a simple and easy-to-understand distribution, and I’ve used it enough in a virtual machine to feel moderately comfortable with it. Even with all this experience, however, I can’t seem to shake my Gentoo installation. It simply seems to fit my needs and usage patterns the best so far.

Before you read on and proceed to dissect my arguments, keep in mind what I’ve said above about my experience, and also that as much as I am telling the world why I use Gentoo, I’m asking for information about other distributions in the following areas, and reasons why people use a particular distribution.

With that in mind, no other distribution has managed to stay installed on my computer as long as Gentoo has, and no other distribution has struck the same chord in my mind. I know some of you in the back are shaking your heads now, thinking to yourselves, “Oh geez, not another ricer. I wonder what kind of ridiculous flags he’s passing to GCC.” I know this might disappoint some of you, but my CFLAGS are rather mundane. So in the spirit of dispelling any assumptions you may have made, I’ll open this post with a list of things that aren’t reasons why I use Gentoo.

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