dgoodwin's blog

I got my first Linux distribution online from my dorm room in the fall of 1999. Since that night Linux has meant a lot, an endless source of entertainment, a liberating tool for learning during my computer science degree, and a big factor in bringing me to my current position of employment. I've toyed with Red Hat, Debian, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and most recently Fedora. This post is a little background on those travels and why I'm starting to think about Debian once again. If I had children I'd subject them to this long boring story with no point instead, but I don't.

My actual journey to Linux started years before. After the age of 15 I practically grew up on IRC, and it was there I first heard of Linux and started to get interested. (you can only get click.exe'd so many times) Unfortunately my hardware and bandwidth resources back then were not quite what they are today. I had a single family computer at my disposal, two parents terrified I would break it (I actually did once, a botched Internet Explorer upgrade that cost us a fortune to get fixed in that day and age, perhaps the starting point for my feelings towards Microsoft), and a 14.4 windows only modem with 30 hours of dial-up access a month. Somewhere during those years my folks picked up a Linux book for me with an enclosed Red Hat CD, which I actually had installed and dual booting at one point. Unable to get it online however, I wasn't really sure what to do with it and mostly just left it be.

I left for university in '98 and soon found myself surrounded by people with knowledge and more bandwidth than I previously would have imagined existed. Before long I started thinking Linux again. It took a lot of poking around, many questions, endless reboots to try new settings, but finally one night I got the right kernel modules loaded for my network card and found myself connected. As sad as it may be, I can still remember that feeling.

I was running Red Hat initially, but friends of mine were adamant that Debian was where it's at. A few months into 2000 I made the switch. While Debian wasn't exactly user friendly back then, I managed to get it stable after probably a dozen attempts. I could always get it installed but would end up breaking something afterward, not know how to fix it, and would just feel better starting from scratch. Odd behavior I'm sure, but it got me very comfortable with Linux installs. Debian remained my primary operating system for a good five years. I did develop my obsessive habit of installing and reinstalling various Unix operating systems during this time, but most of this took place on my secondary/junk hardware.

Fast forward to 2005 when my online poker obsession earned me enough to buy some new hardware. With a shiny new 64-bit machine I decided to try putting it to use and installed Gentoo at the recommendation of some friends at work. That lasted for a few months but eventually the endless compile times and constant unmasking of packages got to me, life is too short to run Gentoo. Planning to return to Debian, I figured I'd give Ubuntu a try first.

At this point I realized how hard I'd always made my life with Linux. I'd been compiling my own kernels for years, fighting with every piece of new hardware, using all kinds of unfriendly applications and window managers. Ubuntu blew me away, the install was incredibly smooth, my hardware and devices all just worked out of the box. I wrestled with compiling my own kernels for some nitpicky reasons for a few more Ubuntu releases until finally Dapper came out and all the performance I wanted was there by default. I ran Ubuntu happily until late last year and to be honest, it's probably the most polished and impressive distro I've ever used.

Along came the Red Hat job offer. Never one to back away from a chance to try out a new distro, Fedora suddenly had my attention. The install was a little rocky, but I was steadfast and learned the ropes to the point where I was comfortable with the OS and could get what I needed to done. Fedora is very much like Ubuntu, a highly polished distribution which they somehow manage to pull off with really bleeding edge software. All my hardware and peripherals just work, and most of the apps I want are easily available. After two months however, I still don't quite feel at home for a couple likely reasons.

• Firstly I think I miss apt and synaptic, easily my favorite package management tools I've ever used. I'm not real comfortable with an RPM based distro yet, mostly because I haven't used them much, .deb is what I came up on.
• Yum is cool, but it's dog slow. I seriously takes me up to 64 seconds to search for a non-existent package with yum. With apt, 1.2 seconds. Fortunately there are some talented people working on that problem as we speak. It's really not that big a deal as you don't have to install that much software after the first couple days, but it does grind on my nerves.
• I do find Fedora slightly slower overall. I'm obsessive compulsive with this, but I am under the impression that Fedora is just slightly less responsive than my previous Ubuntu install was, and I suspect it's because they use a slightly different kernel preempt option. There's also the possibility I'm completely out of my mind.
• Fedora doesn't really have the same wealth of software in their repositories as Debian. I'd be curious to see the actual numbers. Admittedly there does seem to be much better coverage if you go out and do a little web searching for a particular RPM you can't find in the repositories.
• After a recent conversation about one of the very few restrictions around Fedora I started doing some reading on the philosophy behind some of the distributions I've used in the past. I firmly believe Red Hat's doing great things with Fedora, Canonical with Ubuntu, yes probably even Novell with Suse when they're not too busy signing deals with Microsoft. After doing a little research though I just find myself admiring Debian for always being there, without corporate backing, completely committed to freedom and open source, and one of the most recognized, respected, stable, and widely used flavors out there. Their beliefs have caused no shortage of controversy, and yet I can't help but respect them for it.

So yeah, I'm starting to wonder what the Debian experience would be like today, especially after a couple years with the user friendly glory that is Fedora (or Ubuntu). I have no interest in returning to Debian if it means custom kernels and hours of customization to get into a workable desktop state. I wouldn't hesitate to install or recommend it for a server, but I'm curious how the experience would be on a desktop today with a recent version.

I have absolutely no intention of ragging on Fedora or Ubuntu, both are superb distributions that have pushed user friendly Linux to a whole new plateau. They're also both nothing but committed to open source, each group just has it's own slight philosophical subtleties. Fedora's running great on my laptop and I plan to keep it that way. I am however too curious and nostalgic stay away.

I think I'll soon make use of the spare partition I keep lying around for just this purpose and see how Debian Etch RC1 stacks up after a couple years with Ubuntu/Fedora. If the process is unpleasant I'll just boot back to my Fedora install. If not, I might consider returning to the distro I loved for so long on my personal machine and keep using Fedora on my laptop and RHEL (hopefully Fedora someday) on my work machines. Sounds like a good lead in to another post to me.