Re: Linux Vs. FreeBSD

"Daveman750" <dsimcha@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

>> This admittedly was probably a softball example. Firefox is perhaps one of
>> the most widely used open source apps out there, and the Mozilla foundation
>> has made a lot of effort towards making it easy to install.
>>
>> Not every app has the same level of refinement as Firefox though, and a lot
>> of them usually just release sources and let the distros pick and choose.
>> This approach typically is a lot more fragmented than say, the BSD's (and I
>> never thought I could bring this one back to full circle), but that's
>> where the distros come into play. If you're not fond of you're distribution's
>> system of package management, toss it and get another one.
>
> Very interesting, thank you for the information. I guess what I really
> dislike is a certain aspect of the Linux *philosophy*, not a certain
> aspect of the Linux *operating system*. Maybe I'll try using a Debian
> install with Yast on it. I use suse now only because I love Yast as a
> configuration tool, although its package management sucks, more than
> anything because not everything is pre-packaged for suse. I actually
> had a Knoppix Debian-like install, but ditched it for lack of GUI
> configuration tools before I realized that Yast (by far my favorite GUI
> configuration tool) had been ported to Debian.

Debian's not a bad distro. I'd go with Ubuntu or the etch net install though,
unless you've got 14 beer coasters and a lot of time on your hands.

As for YaST, whatever trips your trigger. I prefer editing .conf files
myself.

>>
>> > This is my idea of a good method of program installation, assuming I
>> > understand it correctly. It works on any distro, has no dependency
>> > hell, does not rely on any form of a centralized repository, does not
>> > take forever, and installation can be done either by a simple command
>> > or a few simple GUI actions in Nautilus or Konqueror. It wastes a
>> > little disc space and RAM by bringing things that may already be there,
>> > but who cares? Simple economics dictates that the resource that is
>> > most plentiful should be most exploited, and in this case, RAM and hard
>> > drive space are much more plentiful than the user's time and
>> > willingness to put forth effort to conserve RAM and hard drive space.
>>
>> Another possible reason for Mozilla's releasing in this manner is that most
>> of their codebase is somewhat difficult to compile from source (speaking from
>> experience here; y'all can go ahead and laugh at me).
>
> Even moreso for Windows. I've tried several times because I wanted an
> optimized build that would be more responsive to run on some old
> hardware. It left me with a very bad taste for compiling, and I
> eventually gave up. I'm gonna definitely sympathize with you here.
>
>> For something like
>> Fluxbox, where it's just a manner of ./configure, make, make install, packaging
>> like this is a waste of time.
>
> You're right, although packages like this are few and far between. I
> have a success rate of well under 50% getting things to compile and
> install by doing untar, ./configure, make, make install *without*
> reading documentation, fetching dependencies, manually configuring
> build environments, or doing anything else I shouldn't have to do just
> to install a package. Also, being somewhat knowledgeable, this
> procedure seems fairly obvious to me when installing a package from
> source. For simple source-only packages, it would be nice for true
> novices if Gnome and KDE had some little GUI program that did this for
> you, although it would be even nicer if they were offered in binary
> tar.gz form, since the binary dependencies certainly wouldn't be any
> worse than the source dependencies, and preferably with all non-trivial
> (i.e. dependencies that are not included in almost every distro
> out-of-the-box) dependencies included even if that wastes a little
> bandwidth, disc space, etc.
>

KDE, IIRC, has a shell scipt that downloads and compiles the entire
desktop. I don't recall it being particularly foolproof, though.

I personally use Gentoo, where everything's compiled from source using a
handy-dandy Python script. It handles dependencies about as well as apt
(i.e. a hell of a lot better than anything else), and has a *lot* of
packages available (even quite a bit of closed source stuff and custom
installers for proprietary stuff). It does take a while, though. KDE takes
something like 12 hours to build from scratch, and when I upgraded to GCC
4.0, it took ~36 hours to recompile my entire system.

>> And lord knows what the hell would happen if
>> kernel org starts putting out binaries.
>
> This is a totally different animal. When I speak of packages, I mean
> userland desktop packages. All but the most advanced users will
> install a ready-made distribution with all the low-level stuff
> basically done for them. The point I was trying to make is that they
> should not be dependent on the whims of their distribution maintainer
> for the ability to obtain easy-to-install versions of userland desktop
> apps.

Sadly, that's the way it is, and that's likely the way its going to be.
On top of the usual RPM/DEB stuff and the handful of BSD-inspired source-
based distros, it seems like every couple of months, another pissant Mickey
Mouse distro decides that everybody else is doing it all wrong and they've
got the answer everyone is looking for. At least it's not as annoying as
paying Linspire 20 bones a year for a dumbed-down synaptic with pretty
pictures.
.

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