just brew it! wrote:There's a fine balance between getting the latest and greatest, and being too bleeding edge. The non-LTS Ubuntu releases push that envelope already...
Turns out that the Ubuntu repository tracks the Chrome betas pretty closely; I had installed from the .deb available on Google's site as of about a week ago; today Ubuntu's update tool pulled in and installed a new version already. There have been other occasional printing issues on 8.04 LTS, so I suspect this problem is more with the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS release than with Chrome.
While I might be willing to give Gentoo a try at home, cutting over to it at work is probably not going to happen. All of our non-Windows systems at the office are Debian or Ubuntu (which is a Debian derivative); introducing another distro into the mix is probably unwise. Corporate IT is iffy enough about us using Linux in the first place!
The issues I experienced with Ubuntu Linux when I used it usually fell into two categories, which generally hold for all binary distributions. The first is that the software it provided, even the popular software such as Firefox, was out of date by the time they provided it. Because of this, it often contained bugs that had long since been fixed. That forced me to fix the issues myself which usually involved compiling my newer versions of the software because the issues I encountered were issues that I never would have encountered had Ubuntu made an effort to keep the software they provided up to date, instead of waiting for someone to report some serious issue in the current version to them to get them to "back-port" upstream updates that had long since been declared stable by upstream.
That lead to the second problem. When you compile software, there is a very important concept known as binary compatibility and ensuring binary compatibility is always a problem when you make new packages. Binary compatibility is complicated by the fact that software has dependencies, where they rely on x version of y software and if that requirement is not met, then things will break and when you graph the tree of software dependencies, you need to consider this issue for each and every piece of software you have to update. This can very quickly make the life of someone who needs 1 thing updated hell on earth, because Ubuntu makes no effort to help you with this and their community actively discourages using anything other than their package manager. While this is the case for all Linux distribution communities, the glacial pace of Ubuntu software updates made this a particularly vexing issue.
The reason for the backports being done on a case by case basis is because of issues that usually manifest themselves in configuration file changes, which are expected to be handled automatically by Ubuntu's package manager, so a minor change that alters a configuration file in a way that is not compatible with how it worked before cannot be done without testing and validation. Doing this yourself is a nightmare because there is nothing to tell you that things changed aside from the changelog and the source code.
Gentoo does all of the dependency resolution for you so anything that would break is queued to be recompiled along with your updates when you do them. Any caveats, such as configuration file updates, are usually presented to you (configuration file updates are always presented) for you to fix after the updates are finished and fixing them requires doing extremely simple things (like running the tools they give you) that are difficult to automate with scripts because the scripts do not know what your intentions are for how things should work.
Furthermore, Gentoo is not bleeding edge as far people involved with it are concerned. The upstream developers consider all software Gentoo has in its stable and testing trees to be stable software and not much software exists for Gentoo that is masked (although there are overlays to get around this) because Gentoo's developers do not have the time to keep up with beta versions of more than ten thousand packages. In addition, the Exherbo Linux distribution was made by people who believed Gentoo was too mainstream, which is contrary to the notion that it is bleeding edge.
With that said, I really recommend that you try Gentoo Linux at home. Once you try it at home, you will want it at work. Not to mention, although I do not recommend it, if you installed GDM and Gnome on Gentoo, it could take years before corporate IT realizes you switched distributions.
Disclaimer: I over-analyze everything, so try not to be offended if I over-analyze something you wrote.
