[wellylug] Ruminations

[David Antliff]

On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, Damon Lynch wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-04-14 at 10:57, David Antliff wrote:
>
> >
> > I can recommend Gentoo - forget these bloated not-really-free
> > distributions like Mandrake
>
> Please explain.  Mandrake never contains non-free code in any of its
> main or contrib package directories, despite pressure from the
> proponents of Flash and NVIDIA / ATI proprietary graphics drivers (for
> instance).  Also what do you mean by "bloated"?  Is having 8,000
> packages available bloated?  I think of it as convenience.

Correct me if I'm wrong please (I haven't used Mandrake for years) - my
understanding is that Mandrake actually consists of two different versions
- a 100% 'free' version (the online downloadable edition) and the
commercial distribution, which contains non-free code. I was referring to
the commercial version.

Non-free programs are also available for Gentoo/Debian etc of course, so I
should not lump 'free' Mandrake in with Xandros/SuSE, which do contain
closed-source programs as part of the base installation (there's no option
to leave out these components when installing, as far as I know).

Gentoo is certainly not as 'free-fixated' as Debian, I agree. But you do
have complete control over what you install, so a perfectly 'free'
installation is definitely possible.

As for the bloat comment - this followed on the heels of another
conversation I was having about emacs. Some people claim emacs is bloated
- the truth is, emacs isn't bloated, but a lot of distributions install
emacs with a whole lot of extensions. Therefore, to a lot of people, emacs
appears bloated with lots of unnecessary features in many installations.
Other programs suffer similar perception problems. Having 8,000 packages
available is great for any system - however one reason I like Gentoo is
that it gives you much finer-grained control over what you have installed.
This fits my own personal definition of 'bloat avoidance' and why I find
Mandrake and many of the 'desktop' distributions 'bloated'.

I tried installing a usable desktop configuration of Mandrake 8.0 once in
less than 1GiB. It was quite hard to do, because the package selection is
quite coarse. I don't recall the details, but it was tight.

I hope this makes my comments clearer.

-- 
David.