Hi, 2009/6/20 Antony Jepson <anton...@gmail.com> > I'm not sure if this has been asked before (although I did do a quick > search of <d...@suckless.org>) but what distributions do you guys use on > a daily basis? I recently built a new computer and I'm looking for a > good OS to install on there. > > I've been eyeing Crux lately but maybe Gentoo would be a better choice? > If it makes a difference, I currently use Arch. > > Comments or suggestions for a (quality|suckless|KISS) distribution > (doesn't matter if *BSD or *NIX) would be appreciated. I read about > pancake's distribution [1] and it definitely sounds interesting.
I started with FreeBSD, tried Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, went to NetBSD and later OpenBSD, tried CRUX and early versions of Arch, and settled with Ubuntu at some point, which I'm using for several years now. This voyage has several reasons: the first one is that initially I was a desktop/server user only, I didn't own a notebook until 2003 or so, so using the BSDs and testing some Linux distros like Gentoo and CRUX was quite straight forward on proper desktop hardware. Setting these systems up on a notebook by that time was usually a nightmare apart from the basic usage (mostly no power management was working, trouble with sound and video etc). That doesn't mean that it used to be impossible to get a cool BSD or from scratch distro running well on a notebook, but it took a magnitude of time to get it right... Another reason is that I was a student until 2006 and had a lot more time to spend at my computers. Since I joined the daily profession life time is more rare, so I don't really want to get into that configuration nightmare ;) Finally I'm a notebook only user nowadays -- aparat from some hosts I keep running. Due to the relationship of Ubuntu to Debian I choose Debian for severs nowadays though -- if I knew that there'd be an easy way to setup FreeBSD or NetBSD on these servers I'd probably would do so... >From all distributions/BSDs I came across I found that Ubuntu is the only one that just works out of the box, even if it comes packed with tons of crap (which I usually remove right after the installation). But I save the time in figuring out which binary driver needs to be downloaded from somewhere in order to make WiFi work etc. This doesn't mean that I'm happy with Ubuntu from a technical perspective, more the opposite. But what I wanted to say is, that I experienced a personal shift towards that a system has to just run and good if I can be stripped somehow. I don't want to get into the configuration hell again ;) That way I can set up a system in a matter of 2 hours and get back to work again, which I want to spend my time with, mainly st and dwm nowadays. Kind regards, Anselm
