Curious of who uses what Distro wand why

[energyman]

and many people think arcg is crap, because of lack of good version support and other shenanigans.

Distrowatch does not count users. It counts clicks on the links on their website. Not surprising that an arch user doesn't know that or doesn't understand the difference.

[deanjo]

OpenSUSE is interesting, mainly due to the build service, but a) its package manager is still awful as of version 11 and b) it still manages to lag behind pretty much everything else in performance. Fedora fails pretty much everywhere (sorry).

Best way to improve it is to set the backend to zypper instead of PackageKit. You can also enable the aria2 feature that makes it extremely robust when mirrors may be down. As far as speed goes I can't say I share your experience when compared to other distro's except for the fact that on a Ext3 file system barriers are enabled by default where as most others default to barriers off.

There is also a strong possibility of specific kernels being made for role types which should improve the performance further in the future releases.

[Wyatt]

Q. What distro do you use?
A. I use Gentoo Linux

Q. Why?
A. I like the flexibility of the system that allows me to choose what I want and do not want. I like the package manager represented by scripts that emulate how a human builds software. I like the sense of community and the people I've met. I like the documentation that generally shows a high degree of polish and demystifies arcane concepts like configuring a kernel. I like the emphasis on a user-driven duality of purpose, with gradations of "stable" versus "unstable."

Please, can not we just agree to disagree, guys? This is embarrassing to watch.

[deanjo]

I like the documentation that generally shows a high degree of polish and demystifies arcane concepts like configuring a kernel.

This is one thing I can absolutely agree on. The documentation on gentoo is simply awesome (and often resolves issues with other distro's as well). The unfortunate part is that the documentation is needed for even the most basic of configuration most times (ie tvcards, dmraid, etc).

[Adarion]

Very sadly the Gentoo Wiki was lost. I hope Gentoo will make it an official project with in and out of house backups. Of course the wiki is not all the documentation.

And yes, it's getting warm here over all that flaming. Stop it please folks or I'll call the firemen.

If someone likes to use a binary distribution, well, why not. It's way less work for them and if they can accept the lack of configurability and individuality etc. that a precompiled system causes, well, good for them.

But I think that a lot of bug feedback comes from gentoo cause of all the people compiling and using most various versions of software and hardware architectures. Others will notice at max some runtime issues.

[deanjo]

Very sadly the Gentoo Wiki was lost. I hope Gentoo will make it an official project with in and out of house backups. Of course the wiki is not all the documentation.

And yes, it's getting warm here over all that flaming. Stop it please folks or I'll call the firemen.

If someone likes to use a binary distribution, well, why not. It's way less work for them and if they can accept the lack of configurability and individuality etc. that a precompiled system causes, well, good for them.

But I think that a lot of bug feedback comes from gentoo cause of all the people compiling and using most various versions of software and hardware architectures. Others will notice at max some runtime issues.

The wiki lives http://www.gentoo-wiki.info

[BlackStar]

Distrowatch does not count users. It counts clicks on the links on their website. Not surprising that an arch user doesn't know that or doesn't understand the difference.

I never claimed it counts *users*. The fact remains that distrowatch claims a relative user count of 2:1 in favour of Arch.

Note they key word: *relative*. It doesn't matter if it counts unique visitors (which it doesn't), clicks (which it also doesn't) or hits (which it does). The relative difference remains a valid metric.

To get back on topic, both Arch and Gentoo are - and will probably remain - fringe distributions in the large scheme of things, both Arch. The fact is that relatively few users are willing to invest in the skillset and time necessary for either of these distros. They have their purpose; they are great for those who want something more out of their OS (but are not willing to invest into LFS); they won't ever achieve "mainstream" status in the way Ubuntu has.

Edit:

Best way to improve it is to set the backend to zypper instead of PackageKit. You can also enable the aria2 feature that makes it extremely robust when mirrors may be down. As far as speed goes I can't say I share your experience when compared to other distro's except for the fact that on a Ext3 file system barriers are enabled by default where as most others default to barriers off.

Thahks, this will come in handy (I keep an openSUSE VM around for testing my apps).

[deanjo]

Thahks, this will come in handy (I keep an openSUSE VM around for testing my apps).

No prob, as a side note you might find this interesting. I've been using it for a while now and it makes creating appliances extremely easy. Once it goes public it will be nice but lots of features are still being incorporated.

http://www.linuxhaxor.net/2009/04/04/first-look-at-suse-studio/

[Adarion]

The wiki lives http://www.gentoo-wiki.info

Nah, that's more a zombie. Yes, there were several backups by people who cad either used Go*gle cache or similar archives or people that had just backuped the whole thing on their hdd but the real wiki still needs to be rebuilt.

[Ant P.]

Q. What distro do you use?
A. I use Gentoo Linux

Q. Why?
A. I like the flexibility of the system that allows me to choose what I want and do not want. I like the package manager represented by scripts that emulate how a human builds software. I like the sense of community and the people I've met. I like the documentation that generally shows a high degree of polish and demystifies arcane concepts like configuring a kernel. I like the emphasis on a user-driven duality of purpose, with gradations of "stable" versus "unstable."

Please, can not we just agree to disagree, guys? This is embarrassing to watch.

This. I can't comment on the community side since I've never got involved with it, but it's got the best package manager out of any distro I've used so far... shame it's not the default one