Everyone knows there are a million distrobutions of linux out there. Each offering their plusses and minuses. I work at a computer tech shop which basically means all my coworkers are geeks -- having said that, 90% of them have ~tried~ linux but hated it with a passion.. Why? RPMs. Simply put.. they had no problems setting up their machines, but when they wanted something from sourceforge or to upgrade to the latest and greatest.. package/source complications pushed them back to the microsoft platform.

I have found in general that if you use a package-based distro, you are limited to packages. Which is bad because you must doownload the package for your exact version of your distro.. and any upgrades have a possibility of damaging entire trees of packages, creating conflicts in the whole system.. This alone pushed me away from linux sometime..

Enter Gentoo.. After spending 3 days setting up the system, using linux went from a nightmare to a dream.. I could download anything's source, compile it, and install it -- everything would work just fine -- upgrading was a simple and painless matter.

The problem is, gentoo is ~not~ newbie friendly. And RPMs seem to have been Linux's answer to getting "my grandma" onto linux; this obviously is not the holey grail we were looking for..

Will there ever be a source-based distro that seemlessly integrates installation like Mandrake, yet uses pure sourcecode to install the system? Like instead of installing RPMs it compiles the source, and configures all your files and such?

99% of the time, installing a program requires simply:
- ./configure
- make
- make install

Is there no way to automate this in a newbie-friendly way?

Anyone have any other comments or suggestions in this nature? I am getting sick of distros like Mandrake and RedHat killing off all the potential linux users.. Every friend I've talked to about linux has been extreamly impressed with linux when I show them my gentoo setup -- Every problem they had was virtually gone -- but the gentoo install procedure itself kept them from trying it.

This'd all be fixed if someone took the RH installer (can't remember the name now, some kind of snake) and adapted it to install Gentoo. let's face it -- while the Gentoo install is not newbie friendly, it's incredibly robotic. I've done it a couple times, and there's almost no thinking involved. Simply follow the steps verbatim and it's working.

Well if you install gentoo on the same system yes.. But some things aren't so robotic.. My machine is compiled for Athlon-XP for example -- the same settings would not work on a HT P4 or AMD64 machine. Also theres the issue of graphics drivers (although amazingly, now the nvidia drivers work perfectly with my FX 5700 -- 2,900fps on glx gears woo!). Then you have the issue of multiple eithernet cards and such which are normally configured manually with console text editors and such.. But since this information is indeed auto-detected, there SHOULD be a way to create a dropdown of eithernet devices and such.

Apples to oranges.

You talked about how otehr distros sucked, when you tried to download RPMs from the project pages.

Then you talked about how gentoo rocked, when you used gentoo's own method of getting the software.

How about trying those other distos, using those distro's methods of getting software.

I'll save you the trouble. I'm using debian, and it's jsut as easy.

"You talked about how [other] distros sucked, when you tried to download RPMs from the project pages."



I'm not just talking about RPMs, I'm also talking about the source releases -- which is the main style linux projects use on sourceforge. Besides -- of course i'm going to download projects from other sites besides the distro's site..





"Then you talked about how gentoo rocked, when you used gentoo's own method of getting the software."



Actuially my kernel was installed from the sources of kernel.org, not gentoo's automagic build. Besides, that statement seems wholely unrelated to anything.





"How about trying those other distos, using those distro's methods of getting software."



Yeah thats a real 'neat' way to get projects.. especially the up-to-the-day ones; or the ones that aren't recognized by the distro.

Quote:

Original post by Dreq Yeah thats a real 'neat' way to get projects.. especially the up-to-the-day ones; or the ones that aren't recognized by the distro.

Good luck finding a package you use regularly that isn't in debian unstable with the latestish version (lag of more than a couple weeks).

Just curious -- what desktop manager do you use?

manager? enviroment you mean? GNOME.

Yeah.. you seemed like a gnome user to me ;)

and this is relevant because.....

(and so what? "predicting" that after the fact isn't much of a feat)