From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-06-11T09:26:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Serious danger of being impressed

Chad Perrin wrote:
> If you like Ubuntu's repositories, you should check out Debian's -- much
> more extensive, and generally conducive to a more stable system, too.
> 
> Similar in extensiveness is FreeBSD's ports collection -- and even *more*
> conducive to stability than Debian's repositories.  That's hard to beat.
> 
> Both Debian and FreeBSD tend to work best for people who are willing and
> able to make their own decisions, however, more than people who want
> something "easy".  Ubuntu is far more suited to the average MS Windows
> transplant, I suppose.
> 
> The above is just one curmudgeonly free unix hacker's opinion, of course.
> 

And Gentoo Linux is a good compromise between FreeBSD's ports and
Debian's repositories. Gentoo's Portage actually descended from ports.

As far as stability is concerned, Debian stable (currently called Etch)
is probably as stable as FreeBSD and I think *more* stable than Red Hat
Enterprise or the RHEL clones.

But I will stick with Gentoo for Ruby. Except when the Gentoo devs don't
get prodded from the Ruby community, a Ruby release shows up in Portage
within a day or so. They have jRuby 1.0 RC1 the last time I synced,
which was yesterday, for example. And they have more gems than Debian, I
think.