Looking for new distros to try.

[SagaciousKJB]

I've been using Ubuntu for quite a long time, and to give you a little idea of what I want in a new distro, I guess I'd have to talk about what I don't like about Ubuntu.

The biggest thing about it that's been bothering me lately is that it has such a very fast and rigid release cycle. The upgrade tools that they offer generally work okay for your basic systems, but many packages that I've had installed from source wind up being broken because it doesn't address them.

The fact that they generally change to a new kernel with every release is somewhat annoying as well. The only reason I say so is because it tends to give a lot of compatibility problems as far as modules and drivers go. Just as an example, I'm running Kubuntu 8.04 with the 2.6.29 kernel. All of the modules available in the repositories are useless to me.

Then there is the reason that I'm using 8.04 in the first place: They broke support for KDE3, and I've really never been that impressed with their packaging support for KDE anyway. Not only is there not a legacy support package for kde3, it's not even that easy to get the latest edition of kde4 depending on what distro version you're using.


I've been looking at Arch linux. My friends say that they keep their software repositories very up to date, but I haven't tried it yet. I don't really like Fedora or Suse, and I'm actually thinking about Slackware because I'm starting to like compiling from source anyway. Gentoo crossed my mind, but I never could figure out how to install it.

Anyway, I'm basically just looking for a distro that I can easily keep up to date with "traditional" methods, i.e. compiling a new kernel and modules for it, rather than trying to figure out how to do it on a distro that was setup to use the apt repositories and very specific package releases.

[measekite]

I don't really like Fedora or Suse,

I am interested in knowing why you do not really like Fedora or Suse. Suse did not impress me but I sort of thought that Fedora was good. The only thing I am concerned about is stability since I read it is a test bed for RHEL.

[rokytnji]

Then SIDUX could be for you . Its Debians version of a rolling release distro.

[hazel]

Gentoo crossed my mind, but I never could figure out how to install it.

Well, I managed it so it can't be all that difficult. The trick is to do it in little bits, whenever you feel fresh and rested. But I know exactly how you feel about Ubuntu. I hate the Ubuntu update cycle too; it's too reminiscent of Windows. And Ubuntu altogether is a bit too tightly integrated, too "preconstructed" for my taste. I've been using Debian for half a year now and I'm very happy with it.