[ale] thinking about switching away from ubuntu

[Michael Trausch]

On Tue, 2010-04-13 at 22:58 -0400, adam wrote:
> Has anyone else felt the same at some time or another, and have you 
> looked for a similar solution? Any luck? Also, I've only ever used 
> ubuntu, but none of the other variants produced by canonical. I'm
> open 
> to try another 'buntu if it's worth it.

I have felt this way at some point or another no matter what system I am
using.  Some more than others.

When I started using GNU/Linux systems, I was using Slackware.  I nearly
_always_ felt like I wanted a system that did more for me---say, would
resolve dependencies while giving me the flexibility of building from
source if I wanted to.  I never really liked any of the add-on systems
that were created for Slackware that tried to perform those functions,
though.  So I just stuck to building things from source code.

I've always tinkered with other distributions to see what their upsides
and downsides are.  I ran Red Hat for a while (probably about a year) as
a primary system, back in the RH 5.2 days.  I've tinkered with Gentoo,
Debian, Arch, and others.  I very nearly switched to Debian several
years back because I found myself rather in awe of its package
management system.  Alas, I stuck with Slackware because I had a lot of
customization ("time investment") in my system and so I wasn't really
looking to switch.  Yet.

At some point not long after I moved down here, I had some issues with
my system, and I was actually in the middle of running a backup (or
maybe was just about to run a backup, I can't remember which) when its
hard disk died.  I had lost the last backup I made in my move to
Georgia, so I was fresh out of all my customizations to my system.
Fortunately, I did not lose much data.  But I was very sad, because I
really did spend a lot of time modifying that system to pretty much fit
me and my computing habits like a glove.

I was on the phone with a friend of mine from Toledo and he'd asked me
if I had heard of this Ubuntu thing.  I hadn't, so I tried it.  I saw
that it was built on Debian, and I tried it (the 4.10 release) for a
little while---probably a month or so---and I went back to Slackware.  I
quickly found that I would be spending far more time than I wanted
getting my system back where I wanted it, with GNOME and all just the
way I wanted it, and I realized that I was really way out of date
anyway, and I didn't want to go through all the fuss of upgrading from a
2.4 kernel to a 2.6 kernel.

So, I installed the 5.04 release of Ubuntu and I've pretty much run
Ubuntu ever since.  It's not perfect, but what is?  Until the end of
last year, I was running Ubuntu on x86, x86-64, and ppc32; Sony killed
my ppc32 system, though, and I don't think I even have any 32-bit CPUs
anymore.  Well, I take that back, I have a couple, but they aren't
active systems.

I _do_ get frustrated from time to time.  I do wish things were more
perfect.  But I am constantly reminded every time someone asks me to
install Windows on a system for them just how much trouble I *don't*
have with my Ubuntu system.  And then I realize that I'm just being way
too picky, since I still customize the heck out of my system and am,
overall, very happy with my system.  Almost as happy as I was using my
computer in the mid-to-late 1990s.  And I still use the command line
almost as much as I did then, just in GNOME Terminal instances instead
of having 24 virtual terminals on the console.  :-)

	--- Mike