[ydl-gen] YDL vs Debian based distros

[Christopher Murtagh]

On Tuesday 27 May 2008 01:40:25 pm yavin at gmx.com wrote:
> I'm an old Debian user and I wonder which benefits YDL (Red Hat based)
> provides in comparison with other distros. A friend of mine installed a
> ppc build of Ubuntu on his PS3 and as I'm used to Debians apt I think
> about to give it a try. The problem is I don't know if there are other
> reasons like hardware support issues which are pro YDL.
>
> May be a developer/maintainer of YDL or a experienced user can compare
> YDL to "normal" distros. Why should I use YDL instead of Fedora or Ubuntu?

 Well, IMO these are all fine distros, so it really comes down to a matter of 
choice and how you want to use the software. You might want to keep in mind 
that Ubuntu officially ditched PPC support:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2007-February/000098.html

 Fedora is fine for desktops (it's what I run on my x86 box), but I would 
definitely stay away from it for server use. 

 From my experience (and I work for Terra Soft, so you might want to take that 
into consideration), Yellow Dog Linux offers a nice balance of stable 
packages (taken from Red Hat Enterprise) along with some newer things that 
most PPC users need - like a more recent kernel, or some desktop 
applications. All this without running bleeding edge software in it's core 
(which is what Fedora is).  Also, my experience has shown that what 
is 'stable' in the x86 world is often buggier in the PPC world, mostly 
because the x86 bugs get reported sooner. So, there are advantages of being a 
bit more conservative in PPC distros. 

 Since YDL is CentOS/RHEL based, it will get supported for a longer period. If 
this isn't an issue for you, and you really want bleeding edge, then by all 
means Fedora might be the distro for you.

Cheers,

Chris