Which OS for notebook

[Michel Talon]

Chad Perrin wrote:
>  Another thing to consider is the ease of maintaining the software on
> > the machine. My personal opinion is that Ubuntu (more generally
> > Debian)
> > is light years ahead of FreeBSD in this domain.
> 
> How is it "light years ahead" of FreeBSD for "the ease of maintaining
> the
> software on the machine"?  I'm curious about what you mean.

I mean that the concept of maintaining a full set of binary packages 
which has been verified by the distribution maintainers and remain
usable for an extended period of time, combined with an effective
binary upgrader (apt-get, aptitude), is light years ahead, for ease of
use and convenience, to a rolling release style "bazar" like FreeBSD
ports, combined with tools like portupgrade, which sort of work only 
when you spend all your time running them daily, after having sacrificed
a young virgin to the gods. I concede that the FreeBSD way allows to have 
very up to date ports, and to be in control of compilation options and
so on. Personnally i don't have much use for these benefits.

Of course i am aware that these assertions are quite heretic in this
community, however i remark that the above considerations have found
their way for the base system, since there exists definite releases,
thoroughly verified by the developers, and suffering only security bug
fixes, which moreover can be upgraded with binary tools. Even more,
there are ports freezes, during the preparation of these releases,
allowing to get a relatively coherent set of packages for the release.
One may imagine this is the first step in a similar strategy for the
ports as for the base system. But in this very thread, most competent
ports folks explain us that the first thing to do is throw away the
ports tree which has been used in the release and consequently the
packages which have been compiled with it, and preferably indulge in the
daily ritual of running csup, and invoking the manes of portupgrade
or portmaster, of course after having carefully read UPDATING.
Beleive it or not, i click on an icon of my Ubuntu laptop, and get the
same result without any further interaction.




-- 

Michel TALON