Does Red Hack suck?

[Stefan Bruda]

Hi all.

At 08:55 +0000 on 2004-11-7 Thierry de Coulon wrote:
 >
 > After several trials to get YDL 4.0 to work on my PB 12" 1GHz (fine
 > graphics but still no sound), I also gave Mandrake PPC 10 (beta) a
 > try - total disaster, the thing won't even find a usb mouse, not to
 > speak about no X at all.
 > Then , from some message on the web, I found out ubuntu
 > (www.ubuntu.org) and, while I was at it, I tried it as
 > well. Miracle: a fast, clean installation, sound, graphics...

Same goes here, though I am professor of computer science (thus a
geek) and went for (horror!) Gentoo instead of Ubuntu.;-) This being
said, the reason to switch was slightly different, as this happened
about one year ago (time at which 4.0 was only a project).  The reason
I switched was in fact three-fold:

First, and most important, YDL has been featuring a one-year
period--actually it could have been more than one year, not sure--of
no security updates whatsoever.  Mind you, not because the
distribution was fool-proof, there were at least two kernel-level
vulnerabilities in the 2.4 series, and many other in the user space.
Essentially Terrasoft forwent their own distribution *before* having
anything as a replacement and as far as I know without any notice.

Secondly, I ran--like everybody else sooner or later--into GCC
dependency hell.  I upgraded my GCC and all of a sudden the mozilla
plugin for Java refused to work--you see, the Java package was
compiled with a different GCC version.  This is just one example (to
which I will come back) and the RPM dependency hell also crept in
sooner rather than later.

Thirdly, I am not wild about the YDL Enhanced account model.
Strangely enough Mandrake (if memory serves me well) has been put
against the wall for limited releases of their beta versions but I
have heard nothing against what is essentially the same model used by
Terrasoft.  I don't blame Terrasoft for their model, don't get me
wrong, but I don't have to like it either so I don't and in my mind
(which is not necessarily correct) it violates the spirit (if not the
letter) of the GPL.  Whilst I would have bought the CDs in a snap
(after downloading their product and checking it out), I will never
subscribe to an enhanced account.

In the same line of thoughts, the 64-bit version of YDL seems to be
for sale only in the future.  As it happens, my
http://turing.ubishops.ca is a dual 2GHz G5 and I am also funded by
NSERC and the quebecois NSERC so I would not have a problem in getting
money for the said 64-bit version (when it appears), but I don't like
the idea so I will not--Turing and my other machine at school both
run, and will run for the foreseeable future Gentoo.

In any event, because all these issues I first switched to Gentoo on
my powerbook, it went amazingly well, so then I switched my wife's
desktop and our sound server so that we are now a purely Gentoo
family.  The GCC dependency hell went away all of a sudden, and as a
bonus I got GCC 3.4, NPTL, udev, and many other cutting-edge goodies.
The dreaded many-days compile time of Gentoo did not quite affect me
as I upgraded a live system (with appropriately re-niced emerges) so
my downtime was nil.  Security updates are now available with minimal
delay and the GLSA (Gentoo Linux security advisory) system is
amazingly active.

Oh yeah, and the G5s are notoriously slow when running generically
optimized code (as I found out first hand), so as opposed to YDL I do
get amazing speed out of my machine at the office simply by compiling
everything with the -mcpu=G5 set.

Speaking now of the Red Hat RPM system (from which the discussion
apparently started ;-) ), strangely enough I just installed Fedora
Core 2 on a friend's laptop which allows me to enter the more general
discussion.  So is it just me or is the said system converging towards
the same performance (if not security flaws--though in the YDL case
with all that update-less year one would have some doubts on the
matter) as Windows?  I find about all the Red Hat-based applications
(and especially interfaces) bloated and patronizing.  The latter is
probably necessary for newbies but in any effect patronizing brings
bloat in the Red Hat world, and overall the feel of a Red Hat system
is slow and the user experience if not far off from the experience
under Windows.  Add to that a lot of things that do not work out of
the box (they probably don't in any other distribution except the
amazing Knoppix live CDs, but Anaconda--with its bloated graphical
interface--is supposed to be an easy to use installer as opposed to
Gentoo which has no installer whatsoever) and one wonders what is the
benefit of switching from Windows.  Easy to use interface does not
necessarily imply bloat, as shown by all the Debian-based distros and
especially Ubuntu, but this seems to have escaped to the Red Hat
developpers.

Strangely enough, a Gentoo installation nowadays goes much smoother in
my experience than a Red Hat (Fedora Core, Mandrake, ...) one
(excluding the long time one does nothing awaiting for kdelibs to
compile).  The resulting system is *much* snappier too.

To conclude, in my mind Terrasoft people shot themselves in the foot
by foregoing their product before having a replacement for it and by
using a business model which I personally do not approve.  To add to
that, Red Hat-based systems leave a lot to be desired in terms of
responsiveness, and this appears to be a continuing trend.  The future
is thus--at least in my mind--Debian (and Gentoo for the technically
inclined).

In any case, this is my long-coming half-rant.  As with any rant, feel
free to do anything you want with the thing, from agreeing with it to
throwing it angrily into the garbage can.  All my Gentoo talk is in
need for a disclaimer too: I am a big fan of free software; I grew up
with Unix and I learned system administration on one of the first
Solaris out there (without a package manager and without GUI
configuration tools); I am one of those who adhere (in part) to the
saying that a GUI for administration tools are like air conditioning
for motorcycles.  In other words, don't take me more seriously than
necessarily.

Cheers,
Stefan

-- 
If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as
it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.
    --Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass