Re: Highly OT, but the party's over

On 2009-11-09, Mark <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm being a bit of a snob, really, but with some real (work) issues.
Ubuntu was originally designed to appeal to home users, and the design
decisions are largely* fine for that market. They, however, have pushed
quite hard into the commercial market, and haven't (yet) convinced me
that they've properly addressed that market.

* 'sudo bash' should be forever banned in every distribution everywhere,
and certainly not encouraged. I won't bore you with why.

No need, I don't like it either, I think it's easy to sort out though,
some quick editing of the groups or PAM files, although where they are
these days I don't know... I tried editing grub.conf recently only to
find that it's now grub.cnf and is auto-generated from
/etc/default/foo/bar/ftang/mcguffin/asdasd.conf every time you boot,
ditto the init.d scripts, can't touch a thing any more without it
changing under your feet ;-) I think that's all debian trickery though.

Despite that, I am periodically plagued with DIY "experts" who try to
pin me into a corner to explain how Ubuntu is going to save the
universe and how I should migrate everything to it immediately. It used
to be the Debian crowd who would also treat me to the "Not only is Free
Software better than everything, but anyone who uses something non-Free
is a baby-killer" discussion.

Yes I've seen that kind of thing, the only reason I'm using
debian-based systems is that it was recommended by some people I know
in my industry and also some commercial packages I'll need to use are
available as debian packages.

I want a system that works, and which does the job. Sometimes, that
means (particularly in the more obscure areas researchers delve into)
using proprietary software and libraries or using binary drivers. I
don't even have a problem with proprietary OSs. In my time, I've used
many. I still do.

This is why I'm fed up with gentoo, if I want to upgrade one package I
frequently have to re-compile a whole load of other unrelated
packages, and for some reason openoffice gets its oar in everywhere
and that takes 12 hours to compile! It gets to the point that when
I'm in a hurry I botch things to make it work, and that just makes
matters far worse.. It was a nice idea but too much effort to keep a
few systems going, and hell when you depend on the machine in order to
pay the mortgage.

So, to get back to Ubuntu... It feels a little like a home edition, no
matter how much they harden it for business. Not like XP Home, but not
really "full fat" either.

Not too bad for me, I don't have multipe machines to admin, well, not
more than about 6 or so, for me it's mostly about 2 laptops, one of
which is running backtrack 4, the other gentoo, while my lounge
machine is the ubuntu testbed right now.

Last year, we decided that CentOS was good enough and are standardising
on that.

Frankly, pretty much any of them are good enough these days (which
wasn't always the case), but things like Spacewalk makes CentOS
attractive because of the ease of management.

Yes if I had a lot of machines to manage I'd look into it more, but as
I only have a few and am just dipping my toe in the non-gentoo pool, I
thought I'd try the easiest one first ;-)

The professional hacking crowd (of which I'm part) seem to favour
debian variants though so I'll probably stick with one of them.

--
Blast off and strike the evil Bydo empire!
http://youtube.com/tarcus69
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tarcus/sets/
.

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