Coming back from Debian and gotta say I'm impressed.

I was a Mandrake evangelist up to the whole Mandriva debacle. I could never wrap my mind around the process of rolling Conectiva into Mandrake and changing the name. In all actuality I could not really see what the Conectiva acquisition brought to Mandrake to make it better. It just seemed the distro was getting too overblown. I had started using Texstar's packages when it was...what was it, the PLF or something. Really nice. But Debian turned out to be a more efficient distro than Mandriva after 2006. I had tinkered with Mandriva a couple times but just couldn't find a reason to leave Debian.

Then came KDE4.

Now though I tinkered with Mandriva I had largely ignored PCLOS. I'll admit I just thought it was a fork of Mandriva and I usually try to stay with the original (I know, I know, Mandrake started as a derivative of Red Hat) But Debian's apt was a strong pull for me. Also the shear number of packages at my disposal and ease of adding more. There didn't seem anything I couldn't do in Debian. Up until Squeeze.

Now I've been fighting with Debian since last December to put together a system that was usable and stable as previous versions. I tried keeping lenny and using KDE4 from backports. I tried other Frankenstein systems that weren't pure Debian. I gave Mepis a run. It's still on my laptop. But I was running into one continuing them when it came to updating, my older hardware was increasingly loosing support, for one reason or another. Now I was never one to follow the "politics" of Debian's policies (removing packages for copywrite clearance, which is what killed Debian on my Thinkpad due to the sound module being removed). But it seemed with every update of the upcoming Squeeze release, software became less usable and performance worse. OK I'll admit my poor Radeon 9000 was older. but it worked good for me. And if it weren't for Starcraft2 I would have stuck with it rather than picking up a used Radeon 9800pro. I thought finally upgrading the video would solve a lot of my performance problems. Well, again, a new upgrade and performance is in the toilet.

Now I'll be honest with you guys. If it weren't for reading about Mandriva's imminent demise I would not have thought of PCLOS. But it was a perfect storm. Me looking for a distro that fit and perusing my old stomping grounds at Mandrivausers. So I actually hopped over here and gave it a look. It is true that I was impressed with the distro's shine and performance. It is clean, it is easy to get everything I needed loaded (something that kept me from coming back to Mandriva, never could get the hang of urpmi). But there was another thing wrattling around in my brain.

Here we've got a clean distro, along the lines of Mepis, that is packaged and developed by a relatively small community. Well since January I've had many talks directly with the Debian developers about issues with Squeeze. What gets me is how they have SO many developers (as they say) working on Debian and yet they can't get things working anywhere near as smoothly as PCLOS. I mean they STILL don't have a way to get administrator mode for the login manager to change the images you have next to your user name at login. It's not a big deal. I can live without it. but I have a wife and kids who use this machine too who like having the ability to personalize it. And it was there in KDE3.5. And here I come over to PCLOS and guess what? I can modify my login manager again. It's not a big deal but something as small as this should not be such a big issue to fix. I just seemed to get nothing but political redirection (Debian policies) or excuses for not seeing Squeeze not progress but in actuality fall. All this for a system that will be poorly out of date when it is stable. Now for Debian in the past, Stable meant stable. But Texstar and Neal have done more over here than all the developers in the Debian community. And when I start getting responses that echo windows mantra of "upgrade your hardware to get around the performance issues" I know it's time to look for other options. See another thing I always used as a selling point when I tried to convert a Windows user was the community. But lately I have felt less and less that it was a community and you had to take what was given to you and like it even if it didn't work.

Now I have NEVER been a big fan of KDE4. and even now it still leaves a little to be desired to me. Now Texstar and Warren over at Mepis have done a great job of working out the worst kink. But if I had a way to keep 3.5 going I would. I was even seriously considering loading Squeeze and experimenting with the Trinity desktop (KDE3.5 forked and sort-of continued). But when things just don't work on a kernel level I can't justify giving my loyalty to a distro in turmoil. Now 5 years ago I might have been more adventurous and dug in and rolled my own kernel and tinkered more under the hood. But after all these years of Linux distros "maturing" I just don't have the stomach for getting down and dirty anymore. Especially after living with a distro that was as close to perfect as I could get (Debian Lenny). If I didn't have an actual need for updated software I would just happily left Lenny running for years.

Sorry if this seems a little rambling and ranty. It's just these thoughts have been eating away at me for months. And this feels just like transfering to another school for a number of years and moving back home at the beginning of high school. (and yes I do know just how that feels) All I can say is a heartfelt kudos to Texstar for what you've built. Keep up the great work. And looks like I'll be hanging my hat over here for a while. I just hope I'll be able to give constructive feedback for y'all.

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