> The essentials: > 1) Easy package management (a yum alike would be fine) > 2) Minimal dependency hell > 3) Wireless support (I don't want to have to compile the drivers every > time I upgrade the kernel) > 4) Sensible file system format (Gnome is not part of the OS and belongs in > /opt not /usr godsdammit!) > 5) No crap packages (e.g. isdn, ppp ad nauseam) As I see it, Gentoo ticks 4 out of 5 boxes - the one it doesn't is your notion of 'sensible file system format', which is not shared by the majority of distro builders. Easy package management: # emerge gnome (wait a few hours) done! Minimal dependency hell: Well, there can be some dependency hell at times, but mostly in my experience it's much harder to break than anything Red-Hat-ish. Wireless support: If your card's got the right hardware, then absolutely supported, although if you use like I do the ipw2200 package, or a similar external wireless driver package, you do need to recompile that for a new kernel. Don't really think there's any way around that, although using in-kernel wireless drivers is going to avoid that nicely if you can do it. No crap packages: Set your use flags right and it'll never install them. The downsides are of course that it's slow to install due to having to compile everything (unless you use the GRP that is), and that the installation process isn't particularly automated either (but they're working on that). In the office I use CentOS, not by choice, and it's dreadful. Really really dreadful. It's quite capable of breaking itself just doing a yum install from the core package set. I really don't get how anybody can use an RPM-based distribution without going mad.
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