Folks,

I hope nobody would consider this trolling, but I have some feelings and I would like you to tell me I am wrong, or to give me a clue (if any).

I am currently using SL5 on both my old laptop and my desktop PC at home (at work, it's Windows, Solaris and Debian) for the simple reason that SL5 has an installable LiveCD, whereas CentOS has not. Also, SL5 has for the very lazy people those 3rd-party repo clones already configured. While it does not have something like "centosplus" and whatever else CentOS adds, it's worth mentioning that there isn't much "extras" available for CentOS5 as of yet. (Note: maybe you should add by default the EPEL repo, and possinly Karan's.)

The main criteria for choosing a distro are in my case: (1) stability; (2) package management.

Before RHEL5 was released, the most stable experience I had was with CentOS4. (Second-best in stability was Sarge. Of course, Slackware never crashed on my hardware in recent times, but let's talk about enterprise-grade distros. )

Now with RHEL5 & clones, I simply didn't want to D/L 6 CDs, neither from CentOS, nor from SL, and I can't burn DVDs -- plus, my laptop can only read CDs. So the SL5 LiveCD was the best choice to start having working SL5 installations right away!

My problem now in RHEL5 clones is the speed of the GUI package management tools.

I have no problem with the speed of yum at the CLI. My problems are with YumEx and Pirut.

When I had CentOS4, I was pretty happy with Yumex 1.0.2. With CentOS5, they haveYumex 1.2.2, but SL5 preferred the "new generation" Yumex 1.9.5.

Yumex 1.9.5 and 1.9.6 are slow, buggy and unstable in whatever distros I've tried them: FC6, F7, SL5. Should you take Yumex 1.9.7 from the EPEL repo, you'll find it more stable, but still slow to populate the view.

I honestly believe that Tim Lauridsen has simply screwed YumEx with the 1.9.x series. 

So I was forced to switch to Pirut -- another bad joke in programming, with no ergonomics at all: I often see two identical packages in name and version, and there is no way to tell which one is from what repo, and generally speaking, there is so few info to see about a package; and you can't enable/disable repos from Pirut's GUI. 

Yesterday, I selected some 40 packages to add in Pirut; click on Apply. Nothing happens for about 1 minute. Clicked on Apply one more time. Nothing. In the next 2 minutes I clicked a few more times. At some point it started to calculate dependencies, just to tell me after some more 7 minutes(!) that there is a conflict! Utterly unacceptable on a Celeron/2.4GHz!!!

Question #1: Am I the unique person pissed up by Pirut? Is it anything else but one of the crappiest package manager GUI ever? (Has anyone at Red Hat ever *seen* Synaptic? Or at the very least, YumEx?)

Question #2: Are you really finding YumEx 1.9.x really usable? Don't you think that maybe there is a reason for CentOS to stick to Yumex 1.2.2?

I know SL's mailing lists are with one of the lowest OT and trolling rates, so don't shoot me dead if I add some more rants and questions.

As I have to focus on work and learning, I can't possibly waste my time with trying of different distros several times a year (I've tried dozens of them in the last couple of years, and I've found a very poor quality, not much better of what I've experienced back in 1995-1996), so I _need_ a stable distro to upgrade to, with a decent package management.

Thinking of the flexibility and the speed of the package management system, I tried Etch, although I can't stand "IceAnimals". To my surprise, Etch was unstable on my hardware: a few crashes and system freezes, starting with the installer and going through the regular X usage! Something like this was unthinkable with Sarge.

It's even worse: the ever-crappy Kubuntu Feisty proved to be more stable than Debian Etch on the same system! (The installed hanged in the partitioner, I had to use F7 to manage partitions before I could install Feisty.)

OK, so Debian is out of the question anyway, and Ubuntu is only a joke. 

The very first time in my life, I seriously considered the risk of going with Fedora 7, being it only because I know Max Spevack is a good and honest guy. As you might know, there are some serious problems with yum in F7 (uninstalled dependencies, for one), and YumEx and Pirut are even harder to work with when you have larger repositories (not to say that Livna and Freshrpms are so incompatible that Pirut wasn't able to install many things), and the F7 repos were so busy that it took me a very long while to add what I wanted (I also started from an installable LiveCD).

Fedora will never be an option unless I want to do system maintenance instead of what I want to do. (DaveJ here <http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/79957.html>: "Looking at the first round of bugs that came in during the first week
after F7's release, it's pretty horrific. The vast majority seem to be
from libata (something of a mix of SATA and PATA bugs). [...] The overall quality of 2.6.21 is pretty horrific. It saw the
introduction of a lot of new code fundamental to the operation of the
kernel (the tickless stuff for eg), massive updates to areas such as
ACPI, and just to mix things up, we switched from a
known-crap-but-tried-and-tested IDE system to
a-bleeding-edge-but-hopefully-with-signs-of-promise libata based system." I personally really, really miss the stable kernel 1.2.13 and the "unstable" kernel 1.3.18 which gave me some 142 days uptime a decade ago.)

I skipped CentOS5 this time not only because I don't want to D/L 6 CDs just for an initial install (we're in 2007 and still you can't tell yum in a simple way that you want the installation media to be a repo), but also because CentOS is so conservative that 5.0 doesn't include any errata released in the meantime by TUV!

Compare this to the add-ons included with SL5 and you'll understand why I have chosen SL5 over CentOS5 (although the artwork is worse in SL).

After 12 years of Linux, I am now terribly disappointed and confused about what distro to stick with: I simply want a system that would work, but as it's for home use, I will also need a good package management, since I'm going to play with it a lot.

And RHEL5 clones (SL5 actually) seem to have screwed up completely the GUI (pirut), whereas yumex is suicidal itself!

Not to speak that I will never understand how nobody can add Firefox2 not even in 3rd party repos (dag, dries, atrpms, karan, centosplus, EPEL, whatever)! It's by no means a "system critical component", as there are Epiphany and Konqueror too as a reserve! I *never* ever wanted the "latest and greatest" version of a software (so I will *not* need FF3, FF4, FF5), but FF2 has something extremely useful: (1) saved sessions that can even recover _everything_ from a FF crash; (2) spell-checking! (So I wonder what kind of user community is this, when nobody cares about FF2.)

I know you are already using SL5 (or SL4) for good reasons, but maybe you could give me good reasons (not Prozac!) to see how I can be happy with SL5! (Or you may shoo me.)

I don't want to downgrade to SL4 or CentOS4! (Actually, CentOS 4.5 has Oo.0 2.0.4 in updates...)

As in the meantime I have converted myself from GNOME to KDE (I simply hate the way Mono contaminates everything, and I have in my agenda to learn Qt4 programming, so it's more natural to use KDE even if it's Qt3-based), I also have the feeling that KDE is neglected in RHEL5 more than it was in RHEL4. For instance, nobody (not even EPEL) ever considered to build an updated Kaffeine (there is an antique kaffeine-0.7.1 rebuilt for EL5 by Dries I guess, but it's uninstallable!) so I'll use the classical gxine, nobody considered to build KPowersave, nobody considered to build PyQt4 for EL5 (apt.kde-redhat.org has it for EL4 only), etc.

I am currently avoiding the computers at home, since I am not satisfied anymore with what I can have installed on them. It's unacceptable to have the quality and the consistency
of the Linux distros going that low (I am that idiot who wrote a thing called "The Sorry State of the Open Source Today", and that was even before FreeBSD 6.2 updated X.org from 6.9 to 7.2 only a few months after the release of 6.2 and made 90% of the packages in "-stable" dependent of X.Org 7.2, which led me speechless!).

As satisfied users of SL5, could you give me a hint so I could fall for it?

Thank you,
R-C

P.S. Shooing me is still a valid option.






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