I'm still looking for my perfect Linux distro. I tried Gentoo, but the maintainance and unwillingless for stuff to work made me give it up. I tried Debian, but it's large size and general 'bloat' made me give that up as well. I tried Arch (which I like) but it was far too unstable for my use, and there arn't a great many packages for it. And I tried Frugalware, but It didn't want to go past the install stage. I don't like Ubuntu or Suse, and don't want to try Fedora. What I'm looking for is something that's as 'difficult' as Gentoo, with a package manager as simple as Pacman, but with as large a package base as Debian. Basically, it has to be fast, simple and easy to maintain, but it can be as complicated as Gentoo. Does a distro like that exist?
What's wrong with portage? Emerge, etc-update and revdep-rebuild are your 3 main tools of maintainance (updates). And what you mean by "unwillingness for stuff to work"? Maybe you were missing something? And how do you mean as complicated as Gentoo. Gentoo isn't at all complicating. It's just intimidating to get setup first, once you learn the power of the CLI, things are smooth as silk (only major updates change that... Like Xorg 7 did on my sytem for example). What you could try is Linux from Scratch. While I don't have it personally installed, I heard rumors that it's quite challenging too. Don't know much about it tough. Slackware is something you can try too. And weird enough maybe, Knoppix. While Knoppix is known most for it's LiveCD's, IIRC you can run it installed too, and it's a bit of a different kind of thing. Probably you'll be missing the feedback & packages Debian & Gentoo (and the likes) have tough. There are lots of choices tough, more unknown then known, just browse around an FTP server that offers Linux distro's, like Belnet (from Belgium) Whatever you do and try, will you share your experiences with us? And me specific, for the "Linux sticky" I've made? It's far from complete, and contributions are allways welcome and very much appriciated. EDIT: Since you are experimenting around, you could try Ark Linux (altough they claim to be for the masses, as found on /.. It appears to be RPM based, thus having a big package service (from RedHat/Fedora).
When I say Gentoo is complicated, I mean that it's generally harder for the user in most areas. I have no problem with it though, I love Gentoo, but I've never been able to get a few things working properly regardless of what I do. And maintainance in my world includes things like installing and configuring a package, configuring the way my desktop works, etc. LFS is still on my no list, becuase of the whole setting up stuff. Slackware isn't really current enough for me to work with. And as for Knoppix, I prefer a native Gnome distro, or one that doesn't come with an X server preinstalled. Now you can see my dilemma, i'm a picky *******.
I don't see what the problem with Debian is? If you just go from a netinstall, and only pick the packages you need, then there is no bloat. And besides taking out bloat (I assum by bloat you mean excess services running), is easy with sys-rc-config (or ksysv if you prefer GUI). Even if you don't want to do a netinstall, just grab CD1, it has everything you need on (maybe CD2 as well, for less popular packages).
Things that you got working on other distro's? That I find weird. Some hardware doesn't work on Linux due to lack of support, but if it runs on other distro's it should run on Gentoo too... Emerge for installing, vim for configuring... don't see what's that hard (or different) about that TBH.
It doesn't matter what I like or dislike about a certain distro. if there isn't one that fits my needs, I'll just use Windows. I'd jsut really like it if there is that perfect distro for me.
Maybe look into (Free/Open/Net)BSD? Choice of precompiled packages or compiling from source, plus you get extra geek points Don't know what it would be like on a desktop box, I only have an OpenBSD headless server. I hear up-to-date packages can be tricky to use, but you can also use Linux programs. I'd stick with Gentoo tbh. Ive never found the updates to be a chore, I sync once a week and have between maybe 5 and 10 packages needing updating. True if its a big package it may take a couple of hours to compile, but I can knock the nice level down and get on with other stuff in the meantime Maybe have a look through DistroWatch, there might be something there that suits your needs.
Use Windows? That's not the spirit! You'll never find one that's 100% to your likes... And there's allways the proces of learning the tricks within a certain distro, which may change the way you look at things, and make you like certain things you disliked earlier. Even when switching between distro's there's a learning curve. Just like there is when switching Windows versions. But if you want a distro that's just perfect for you, just create it J/K
I second the vote for Debian. The netinstall disc is 100MB and you install what you want from there. I think the bare install after you reboot is about 300MB.
