[LAD] (Somewhat OT) Advice needed on distro choice

[hollunder at gmx.at]

On Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:15:36 +0800
Ray Rashif <schivmeister at gmail.com> wrote:

> Indeed, sounds like Arch. And it's not a bad thing that you can't
> fall back to older versions if you keep the cache. I mean in this age
> of cheap storage, who wouldn't?
> 
> About the rt kernel, I don't think it'll ever be maintained in the
> official repos. But at the same time, a lot of good packages will not
> either. That is why we have the AUR, and third-party binary
> repositories. If you see faults or would like something added with
> regards to rt/kernel/audio packages, do chat with the archaudio guys.
> 
> But if you feel you have grown accustomed to Red Hat or Debian
> systems, then go for one of the other suggestions here. Arch has got
> a BSD-style init; 1 file for runlevel config (inittab), 1 file for
> global config (rc.conf), 1 dir for init scripts (rc.d), 1 dir for
> optional init scripts config (conf.d). As such, it's simpler to
> administer and maintain without having to go through a maze of
> symlinking.

Oh, yeah, this brings me to a point that I forgot to mention previously:
The package management tool, pacman, is really just that. It doesn't do
any system administration for you, you have to do that yourself.
This is mainly merging of config files and somesuch, it hasn't been a
lot of trouble for me so far.
For really big changes that affect many there's some advisory on the
website and on some ML, but that's it, so it's a good idea to check
that before doing updates.

About the rt kernels:
We don't have as much experience as Fernando, so the rt kernels
are probably not as tuned yet, but since it's trivial to make config
changes and compile/install kernels that could change quickly. The
current rt kernels are based on the vanilla kernels and unpatched
(except for some ATI graphics compatibility), which is a little plus I
guess.

Well, that's all I can think of for now.
Hope that helps,
Philipp