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Review of Yoper Linux v2.1
Anonymous Coward writes "An interesting review of Yoper Linux has just been posted posted at linuxforums.org. Yoper Linux really does look like it could be the first serious competition Gentoo has had in a long time."
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The first serious competion for what? The coolest new distro? That statement seems to imply that Gentoo is clearly the best around right now. I really like Gentoo, but I don't think I could dismiss all the other distros that easily.
We don't need 100 distros. Damn, we don't even need 10.
Yes, we do need them.
The thing you're missing is (as Agent Smith would say) purpose. Many of these distros exist purely because they meet a specific purpose. For example, there are distros used for desktop computers, distros for firewalls, distros for embedded devices, distros for clustering, distros for servers, etc.
Put another way: choice is good!
Now, had you said "we don't need 100's of desktop distros" I might have agreed.
there's plenty of competition in the linux sector. Now if we could just get someone to make a distro that actually competes with windows we'd be all set. If you want to flame me, please include an answer as to why in the world I would have to edit my yum.conf file to install a dvd player and compare that to the difficulties of installing the same software on windows. If you are stumped as to why I ask this, then employ your sage wisdom and explain why the average user would be excited about spending hours on usenet trying to figure out how to accomplish the most mundane tasks on linux. I love linux - it's my swiss army knife of choice but a desktop replacement? Yeah, I'm off topic, bite me.
There's nothing wrong with variety here. The more diversity there is, the more likely natural consumer selection is to result in the dominance of truly better software for everybody.
Its funny - I haven't really tried open office at all lately, since I use Linux exclusively for server tasks (and we have full MSFT licenses), but this particular snippet caught my eye:
... pretty sad.
Yoper's speed is evident mostly in everyday functions, such a opening a OpenOffice document. I have always found OpenOffice.org to open painfully slowly, but the start time in Yoper was impressive. In most systems it can take 15-20 seconds to start the massive OpenOffice, Yoper manages this in about 10 (on my machine, these are not official numbers from OpenOffice, just mine).
His machine is a P4/1.8ghz/512mb box. Is it really noteworthy when an office suite opens in <sarcasm>about 10 seconds</sarcasm%gt; on a machine of that class? Really? Wow. That's
Other than that, the experience looked promising. Does anyone know if it works as well with apt as Debian does? Or as poorly?
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
I've been using Mandrake for over 1 year. But am happy I've changed completely to Yoper. It's much faster; no more 15 seconds waiting for an app to fire. Also being part of a constantly evolving new distro makes it all more personal and significant. Sure there are packages missing. So we always can learn to build our own and add it to Yoper's repository. Rather than just sit back and complain. It's a very friendly and welcoming community there, no power battles or l33t t4lk - pretty cool methinks.
> a) It's a copyright violation
True, but there's no down-mod for that.
> b) It's karma whoring
Maybe, but there's no down-mod for that either.
c) It's informative
"Personally, Gentoo is crap in my opinion.. Sure building from source is nice and all, but the speed difference is barely noticeable comparing between other distros."
I fail to see how that makes Gentoo "crap". I'd run Gentoo even if it ran exactly the same speed as other distributions. It has a lot of up-to-date software available, all of which is easy to install and upgrade.
How does that make it a crappy distribution?
For reference, I've taken my two year old Gentoo installation from running GNOME 2.0 on a 2.4 kernel with devfs to running GNOME 2.8 on a 2.6 kernel with udev. All without ever doing a reinstallation.
That qualifies it as at least a decent distribution in my book.
Something not mentioned in the review: you can also prelink in Gentoo. How do prelinked Gentoo systems stack up to Yoper? I got a big speed kick on startup times when I prelinked my Gentoo system.
Note also, performance != app startup time execlusively.
that is gpl compliant. It just dosn't contain 100% "free software"
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
This new distro looks interesting (runs KDE fast .. though I have long since switched to Mac OS X).
But I use gentoo on servers because of 1) the flexibility.. finally I can *remove* the crap dependencies like kerberos, etc, on package, and I can add the stuff I need (mbox vs. maildirs, etc).
and 2).. it is SO EASY to make ebuilds, and they really do keep track of the files correctly because of the sandbox concept. On our servers we use custom ebuilds to keep versions stable, we deploy apps to remote sites as ebuilds that automatically pull in dependencies, etc. I'm always amazed at how simple it is to whip up an ebuild. Just write a shell script that installs the files, basically. Compared to the bloated overengineered hell that is RPM, I was quite please.
I think people who think of gentoo as "that distro that lets you choose CFLAGS" are totally missing the point.. it's about flexibility and ease of building distros (i.e., a "meta-distro").
Because they aren't building their own prelinking software. They're just running prelink on the binaries before distributing them.
Here's the "homepage" according to Gentoo
Here's the Debian package page
You can run prelink on Gentoo or any other distribution, too. Just install it, tell it where to look for your binaries, and do soemthing like 'prelink -amfR'
You won't get a general 50% performance boost though, no matter what anyone says.
As to why the prelink people don't improve gnu ld, you've got me.
It is faster out of the box. At least, that is the claim.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
You know, NOT ONE of these "Corel links" has worked that I've seen.
:P
If you are going to post a mirror, post something that works, okay?
Yoper is faster because you don't need to compile it.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
making all kinds of comments about Gentoo without understand what it's purpose even is.
We know what the point of Gentoo was supposed to be. We're also aware of the numerous side-by-side benchmarks that've shown Gentoo machines to run slower than Fedora and Debian, on the same hardware.
Clearly you joke.
Gentoo users pride themselves upon the fact that there is no installer for gentoo.
But they will insist that the documentation is very nice.
That is --- when they're not compiling. A decent installation (comprable to a stripped-down Fedora/Debian/Knoppix) took about a week to compile on a Duron 800 I used for the experiement.
I think that was what made me convinced that PC users truly are insane and got a mac.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
the documentation is good as long as things don't go wrong. when things go bad there's nothing that points what you need to do. configuring xorg? good luck. hope you have plenty of hardware manuals around and access to plenty of time to spend in the forums/irc.
I think you've misunderstood what Gentoo is really about(*) : USE flags. Just try implementing something like that in a binary distro -- it would cause exponential growth of the number of packages. This is the #1 reason I use Gentoo.
(*) Forget the speed difference some people try to claim, it's a red herring -- like you said, nobody really notices the difference either way.
HAND.
It's more like what work it's keeping me from being able to do.
:)
Let's say I want to evaluate several large programs.
I can emerge/use ports for all of them, or I can pkg_add -r and play with them now. All the builds in the package repository are well-tested and I can be sure if the program is going to work at all, it's going to work with pkg_add installation.
I can't recall a time where I've been prompted for interaction with pkg_add, but I'm sure it's possible.
OTOH, with a minimal freebsd install I can configure the machine with a base system already installed and pre-configured while I'm adding any other software.
Another good example:
Shit has hit the fan/boss is hanging over my neck/whatever. I need to install program X to get my work done, money is being lost, customers are frustrated, whatever.
Do I want my program 2 hours from now? No. I want it yesterday. pkg_add/apt/yast/any other binary package installer that resolves dependencies gives me that power, and it's guaranteed to work.
And like I said, twiddling every bit to get your whopping 5% performance increase or less really means jack squat when you're doing a server build. Heck, for all the time your boss spent paying you to tweak gentoo to get that performance boost, he could have spent a 1/4 of that on more ram, faster drives/processor, whatever. Besides, real performance comes from properly architecting your farm, if you're relying on that 5% boost to serve more pages/process more mail/whatever, you're going to be surprised when it really hits the fan.
A binary/source based distro (I know of no package format these days that is binary-only, unless slackware still uses pkgtool and tar.gz packages) has more benefits than just quick installation, as well.
Need to roll out a custom version of package X? Compile once/package/distribute.
So tell me again how this causes YOU anymore work? It doesn't it simply takes advantage of your (probably) mostly idle system, and does a little more than copying files from a CD/ftp mirror to your hard disk.
I apologize for my laughter.
You do know that compiles take processor time, right? Generally they peg the processor for a good deal of time and in many cases, use a good deal of memory. Hope you're not doing anything important when that's going on.
Really though, if gentoo is good for you, great. Enjoy playing with use flags with experimental compilers on your overpriced workstation while I get real work done.