A few years back I started messing around with another OS than Windows. I looked for one with lots of documentation and a strong passion for open-source software. After having looked at many Linux distro’s I actually decided on using FreeBSD 4. Their handbook was by far the easiest method of finding good documentation about the installation process and there were many, many applications I could install without too much trouble. However, I soon noticed that running a full graphical interface was not FreeBSD’s forte: things felt slow and it took a lot of time and effort to get things to work the way I wanted. I learned a lot but felt that things should be easier and faster, so I moved to Linux as most benchmarks showed me it would be faster for the Desktop.
At that time Debian was on version 4 (Debian Etch) and I was very impressed with the ease of installation and the overall speed of the desktop. Things just felt right and the apt package manager was very easy to use and also didn’t once cause problems for me. I ran Debian for quite some time, and in the mean time I started trying out other distro’s on a spare laptop I had laying around. Being a 500Mhz oldie it was the perfect test platform for performance: something which ran ok on that machine must fly on my main computer I figured.
Having tried many distros in a year’s time I became a bit envious of all the eye-candy a lot of other distros were showing. Most notably distros like Sabayon which came with instant support for Compiz, very impressive for a LiveCD. Another distro which then caught my eye was OpenSUSE, which looked very slick with it’s green theme and was also one of the first with Compiz support. The 3D square desktop was very impressive at that time and I just had to have it. I tried both distros for a few weeks yet I quickly figured out that I am not a fan of RPM based distros or source-based ones like Gentoo. OpenSUSE was also quite slow at the time and was extremely bloated. Sabayon was a LiveCD with an installer, yet because of it being source based I didn’t feel comfortable having to recompile packages with every update.
At that time I started to look for a Debian based distribution which had some extra features and then stumbled upon Ubuntu which was at 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) at that time (2006). Even though all the eye-candy software wasn’t installed/enabled by default it was very easy to do this manually. Since then I’ve been running Ubuntu, except for a small relapse to Debian when Lenny was still in beta. I quickly went back to Ubuntu though as it just had better support for a few apps I used regularly.
However, now comes the time again where I am looking to change and dip into unknown waters. This time my eye has landed on quite a unique distribution, namely: Sidux. After reading some things about Debian Sid (the name Debian gives to it’s testing version) and some problems I have encountered with Ubuntu Karmic I wanted to try it out. Sid was quite unstable at the time though and it wasn’t very reliable. I then stumbled upon Sidux, a rolling distro which always uses the latest Debian Sid packages but tries to ensure stability. A rolling distro means that you never have big version releases as seen in most distributions and OS’s.. Think of Windows: 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7.. Ubuntu: Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty, Karmic, Lucid.. And the list goes on.. Instead of these major releases a rolling distro always has the latest software in the repositories which means all you have to do is run the upgrade script once in a while and you’ll have the latest & greatest software. No more need to do a fresh install when a new version is released..
So far my experiments with Sidux in a VirtualBox VM have been quite succesful. Most of the packages are VERY recent and even doing a pretty massive dist-upgrade with apt didn’t give me any problems. It’s sporting a very recent kernel and feels very snappy indeed. I’m very close to reinstalling my homeserver with it, yet I have to wait till no one is using the TeamSpeak server I have running on it.
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