[kwlug disc.] All of you Ubuntu people

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

On Friday 09 February 2007 1:52 pm, Raul Suarez wrote:
> I'd say "it depends". Here is my stance on this:
>
> - When you use things like Ubuntu or Mandriva. Those
> systems are designed to have the most number of users
> up and running. That means that there are going to
> include a lot of things that not every one needs but
> that "someone may need". That definetivelly result in
> a more complex and slower system: e.g. The boot script
> will have to check for things that you may not care
> less about, There will be daemons on the background,
> more tasks will be automated, etc.

While this is true, take a look at the actual resources used for this.  Your 
system may be wasting a few billion clock cycles, but you'll never notice.  
The autoloading of modules and smarter and smarter PCI device scanning takes 
a LOT of the hard work out of "what to load", and things like 
kbluetoothdaemon and CUPS and the like generally get swapped out as soon as 
possible if they're not being used.

The system will boot slower, yes, but it doesn't make the system any less 
powerful.  Bloated, perhaps, but I've been finding that the friendlier 
distributions are actually pretty smart about this kind of thing, by and 
large.

> - When you have control building your system you will
> know it better but you may fall for the "do not
> invented here" syndrom. Of course if you build it
> yourself you will feel more control because you
> already understand what you did and it does not
> include things you don't need. BUT, it would be
> illusory to pretend that you will know as much as all
> the experts that created one of the end-user distros.
> Here the key work is "collective expertise".

Absolutely; I agree.  I used to install minimal libraries and applications 
with Slackware because I didn't like having all that crap in there.  While I 
still select an expert install and choose not to install certain packages 
(emacs and a half dozen other editors, mysql, inetd, info pages, 
documentation, and all the various alternative X servers and windowing 
systems), I typically just install all the libraries and the support utils.  
They're not hurting anything, I'm not hurting for disk space and sometimes I 
actually use them.  :-)

> It all depends on how much time you want to put
> optimizing your system and how much time you want to
> put USING it.

Agreed; I'm actually liking this Kubuntu thing on one of the fileservers.  I 
don't think I'm ready to give up the Slack just yet, but I'm getting a better 
understanding of Debian, and that can never hurt.

It's funny; most people get frustrated at their systems because they don't 
know how to do something complex; they've been hamstrung by the installers 
and configuration utilities.  I get frustrated because I don't know 
the "approved" method for doing these things when presented with a system 
that has configuration facilities available.  :-)

-A.