[ale] Recommendations for my next distro?

[Jeff Hubbs]

I work almost entirely with Gentoo now that I no longer run machines for 
other people; *my* standards tend to be higher ;) . I can and have done 
Gentoo on the desktop but my main eyeballs-on-screen relationship is 
with Apple OS X and most of the time, the machines I operate have Xorg 
going but are run pretty much headless and all X is remote.

I don't understand the comment "the maintenance cost is high;" the $ 
cost is of course zero and as far as the maintenance /effort/, you can 
be as assiduous as you want to be and you can also automate anything you 
want. In my experience, institutionalized Linux systems are only doing a 
relatively small number of things anyway and therefore the number of 
packages you really care about keeping current may be only a handful. 
The one fairly recent time I've dealt with CentOS and tried to do the 
same thing on Gentoo to see where the gotchas lay, I discovered that a 
nice feature in a major upgrade of CUPS that made life a whole lot 
simpler was simply ready and waiting for me in Gentoo whereas trying to 
surgically do the same thing in current CentOS, while achievable, would 
have been a supportability nightmare for me and any who came after me.

All I can say is that I build tough, fast, and highly controllable 
Gentoo machines. Life without Gentoo is not problem-free, but I recall 
vividly that there were /entire classes/ of problems encountered when 
trying to do real work with CentOS/RHEL that simply were not part of my 
world.

On 3/1/15 7:59 AM, Calvin Harrigan wrote:
> I can second Gentoo.  It's a great place to learn. But the maintenance 
> cost is high.  I currently only have one box running Gentoo.  I've 
> been using mint for about a year or so. Great general purpose 
> distribution, it's based on ubuntu.
>
> On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 5:49 AM, DJ-Pfulio <djpfulio at jdpfu.com 
> <mailto:djpfulio at jdpfu.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 02/28/2015 07:19 PM, Edward James Monson, II wrote:
>     > Hi everyone,
>     >
>     >
>     > I've been using various flavors of Ubuntu for about 5 years, and
>     I'm ready to
>     > try something new. I'm fairly comfortable with the command line.
>     I'm curious
>     > what distributions people on this list use, and how they rate in
>     difficulty
>     > compared to Ubuntu. I'd also prefer to use something a lot of
>     other people
>     > use so I have more people I can run to for help. :)
>
>     Depends on your goals for learning something new.
>     http://blog.jdpfu.com/2011/11/05/learning-linux-easy-to-hard
>
>     If you are in the US and want to be a Linux admin or programmer,
>     centos or
>     fedora would make sense.
>
>     If you want to be a kernel dev, gentoo.
>
>     If you want to learn the internals, just for fun, and constantly
>     tweak things
>     that break - arch.
>
>     If you just need a distro for online banking - TinyCore.
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