[ale] Need a better Linux distro

[Jeff Hubbs]

Gentoo's default init system remains openrc for now; systemd is an 
option and iirc was one of the first distros to support it through 
regular channels. I run three Gentoo desktop systems; two are KDE (one 
is rather abandoned-in-place-but-running in my office at GT) and one is 
XFCE, I think. I warn you: a default KDE rig needs at least 8GiB 
physical RAM to build a couple of packages, qtwebkit and qtwebengine, 
without deliberately throttling back the build's parallel threading. At 
8GiB I'm okay at -j3; you need -j1 at 4GiB and it'll take a couple days. 
As for your list, I can speak to Firefox/Firefox-bin, LibreOffice, 
Brother printers, and Hexchat.

I won't say that Gentoo is without issues or that it's easy, but I do 
know - having worked Red-Hat-alikes in the past - that there are simply 
whole classes of issues that most Linux folks seem to have all the time 
that are simply not part of my life.

Gentoo is essentially a frighteningly capable package management system 
that has been configured to generate a Linux platform. It will take a 
while to get really good at it (although I've been a Gentoo user for 
upwards of 20 years now and I *still* don't feel like I'm good at it). A 
fully working build system is implicit; at this point most packages 
require gcc but some require clang. The package management system 
(Portage) is Python-based. I run file and PostgreSQL servers; on desktop 
I'm usually on some combination of LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, RStudio, 
Firefox, Kate, pgadmin, and QGIS. I'm probably one of the few people who 
has gotten Hadoop up and running on Gentoo Linux; new worker nodes 
automatically set themselves up (plug 'em in, make 'em PXE-boot, stand 
back - new node after reboot).

On 5/30/20 8:56 AM, Leam Hall via Ale wrote:
> I can't remember what I was doing this morning, but I look at the 
> installed packages on my CentOS 7 box. I was surprised, and very 
> dismayed, that a few dozen rpms came from a repo in the former Eastern 
> Bloc.
>
> While I love my friends and neighbors of all shapes, sizes, and 
> cultural origins, my confidence in not getting a keystroke logger or 
> similar hit rock bottom. Who cares about virus protection if you 
> install the malware yourself?
>
> I've used Void in the past and will be trying to get the few things I 
> need onto it. Just wanted to see what other options were out there. 
> Here's what I'm using the computer for:
>
>     Nothing with systemd
>     Web, Firefox
>     E-mail, Thunderbird
>     git
>     Printing to a Brother printer
>     LibreOffice (mostly to manipulate and print DOCX, XLSX files)
>     IRC (Hexchat)
>     Ansible
>     GnuCash (no bank data)
>     Ruby and Perl development (C, libraries)
>     Calibre
>
>
> In the past I've done NetBSD, but their Package site has adware. Not 
> sure that speaks well of the project. I'm not quite ready for Linux 
> From Scratch, but the more I deal with commercial Linux, the more LFS 
> appeals.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Leam
>
>
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