[ltp] Periodic distro question

[Tom Allison]

I guess this is really just a vent/rant but...

I am a current user of Debian.
I picked it from Slackware because I was in favor of a faster install 
process than slackwares.  Of course I had fewer questions in Slackware 
because I was always RTMing.  Debian makes it easier to not do that.

I also picked it because the defaults were more secure (than other 
options at the time) and it was an excellent choice for getting 
notebooks configured with apm & pcmcia.

But there are a few specifics that are really bothering me and now I'm 
wondering if there are not other distros which would keep me happy.

ALSA, or any realiable sound support is probably the one thing that 
has never worked on this IBM A21m.

At this point I'm actually thinking of going back to SlackWare or 
possibly looking into RedHat because of the extensive bloat that 
Debian has shown and the latency of the distributions.

One thing that I'm really frustrated in right now is that the Debian 
Stable is whoefully behind everything else on the internet. 
Technically, I cannot run the XFree 3.3.6 that is provided.

But migration to Testing has resulted in a cascade of updated 
packages, many of whom overwrite my existing configurations.  This 
really pisses me off to no end.  Combine this with the continued 
abstraction levels of Debian and it is now getting harder to use 
Debian and understand other distributions as well.  This niche 
specialization may have won arguements with Debian, but it's at a high 
price with respect to interchangeable configurations.  I may be able 
to fix something on Debian, but not on any other distro.

Is this a common digression between the distros?

I know that years ago, when I used Suse, I saw the same level of 
abstraction creeping in and promptly dumped it when I was unable to 
keep anything configured with the Suse Configurator.  I don't know how 
this has changed in the three years.

RedHat had a similar problem.  Slackware was just very hand-rolled.


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