Good bye old friend.
After much hemming and hawing over the past few weeks, I’ve decided that it’s time to get rid of Gentoo on my laptop. All along I knew that keeping a system that was completely user configurable up and running would be a pain. I personally didn’t need that level of user control, but at the time it was one of the best distros out there. Don’t take that the wrong way either… it’s still one of the best out there, just not one of the best for me.
One of the things that led to this decision is the problem with keeping the system updated. Portage is a great package management system, and having the ability to run one command to update the system is great. However, I’ve found that it’s almost never that easy. Every time I’ve upgraded my server, something happened to crash it. Either a package failed to install, a configuration file needed to be reconfigured or was simply moved to a different location messing up my other configuration files, a program was buggy for some reason, or it installed the package older than the one I had already configured.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that I need to make sure that Portage is doing it’s job and not just let it’s business, but having to make sure every little thing was working the way it should just got to be too stressful and time consuming. Because of this my server is in dire need of an update. I’ve been putting it off for months just so I didn’t have to deal with downtime and lost information.
So… that being said, I’ve decided to switch to Ubuntu on my desktop to see how it works and if it’s stable enough for my server environment. So far, I really like what I see! Everything works so nicely on it. I can remove and reinstall my mouse and still have it work, USB Flashdrives work without any problems. The Synaptic package manager seems to keep everything pretty clean.
I want to spend time working with my operating system, not on my operating system, this is why I’ve chosen to switch.
