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Review of Yoper Linux v2.1

Posted by timothy on from the what-you-want-it-to-be dept.

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."

2 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yoper suspicious by pnot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I looked into it when it made its debut a couple of years back. Several things made me uneasy. IIRC:

    1. It seemed to launch with huge fanfare and hype, and there was a bit of a backlash when it turned out to be just another "generic distro plus knoppix hardware detection" deal.

    2. Source wasn't originally available, so it was infringing on the GPL.

    3. They were very reticent about acknowledging the work they'd built on, and responded quite violently to any criticism.

    I had a poke about their website recently, the things that now make me uneasy are:

    1. Package availability -- according to this declaration, you can only install Yoper-packaged RPMs ("The ones for other distros have to probably be installed with rpm -Uvh --force --nodeps and might break apt.").

    2. Lack of decent documentation -- lots of important information seems to be squirreled away in the forums.

    3. Amateurish website ("Yoper is one of the most standardised Linuxes that you will find and hardware performancetries to be better better than that of any commercial OS." -- http://www.yoper.com/about.html )

    3. Responses to criticism still seem pretty belligerent, not to mention self-contradictory. A forum post from March 2003 says:

    We are not a one man distro. Currently we have hundreds of users and several people on the development team and also a new commercial team that does the commercial side here in NZ. ( original post )

    Then, in October 2003:

    Some of you compile quite a few packages, which is great!!!! The base Yoper is done by ONE person and this person (ME) has a distro which is now fairly well known even though it is only version 1. Just think of this. Yoper is a one man distro and so many have an opinion on it. ( original post )

    So, is it a one-man distro or not?

    Still, it seems they're no longer trying to flog it for 99 USD, which makes me think a little more kindly of it :-).

  2. Does this person know how to use Gentoo? by gipsy+boy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "The boot time is a tricky one to measure, but if you clock the time taken to reach a login prompt, Gentoo wins but not buy much, about a 7 second difference in my test. But once you go to starting X, Yoper leaps ahead and can have me browsing the web, editing an office doc, and chatting in the IRC before Gentoo got me into a GUI."

    I'm not sure what this person is talking about here. Is he talking about KDE again? Well, I use fluxbox and it takes under 2 seconds to get into my X system after typing "xinit". (most of which goes to driving my nVidia card)

    I run Gentoo and I don't see where the 'competition' lies, exactly.. I'm sure you can make Gentoo's KDE as 'fast' as Yope's since it can do all those things Yope does with gcc, when you emerge the KDE package. I feel this article misinformed some people really, this distro looks pretty weak in my opinion.