Re: The future of Porteus
Posted: 06 Jan 2016, 07:17
Actually I think the question should be more vague and say based over any other distro?So what would the advantages be of an Ubuntu based Porteus over arch?
And here the plot thickens.
generally we agree that the reasons to change away from Slackware are threefold or more?
1) lack of ready made packages off the shelf so a newbie says I want X and can get it
------so distros based not on Slackware feature strongly here such as Debian Ubuntu etc
2) Difficulty in maintaining the base
Has many causes of which at least one relates to what is commonly called dependency issues.
Below is just a hypothetical example can be true quite often
--if upstream maintainer for (say) glibc updates and downstream distro maintainer updates but other downstream maintainers don't update there can be breakage for some software
Debian has a stable, testing and unstable branch. "Most" experienced Debian users tend to opt for either a mix of stable and testing or go whole hog and go unstable.
unstable is of course a rolling release.
*Ubuntu is mainly a type of Debian stable distro.
3) An off-shoot of this chat is those wanting less frequent updates would want a base that is NOT rolling. But then suffer some pain just as some Debian software might take 2 years to get from unstable to stable.
I fall into the camp of wanting frequent updates and so don't really care how out-of-date the iso is, as long as on my hd install I can update it.
*Ubuntu offers Long Term Support releases versus short term with the obvious comment that LTS generally has less frequent updates and are mainly security related rather than feature related. Rolling releases are generally moving targets so tend to have few security updates and nearly all are feature updates (software upsteam updates)
4) Flogging a dead horse? some people appear to believe if a distro has a certain init style they won't use it.
I am not sure if that is any clearer but let me digress into our modules talk.
Lets say a person one year ago downloaded and accepted combined modules to allow them to get software X.
Lets pretend today they want new software Y and accept combined modules.
--lets pretend that X has old dependencies and Y has new dependencies for sofware called Z.
This can lead to a new dependency issue. In some ways me thinks it might be better not to combine any modules. But I firmly believe we will have more issues of this type if we choose a distro with a rolling release base.
cheers