[TriLUG] Follow-up: why do you run multiple distros?

[Owen Berry]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 09:13:53AM -0400, Andrew Perrin wrote:
> All right, so I have a follow-up question. Why do y'all use different 
> distributions for different machines? Doesn't it get confusing?

I run Gentoo at home because my desktop is an 800 mhz P3 and I feel good
juicing it up as much as possible. :-) Also, Gentoo is great as a
development environment as it's already setup to compile virtually
anything, and it's integration with CPAN for Perl modules that aren't
already in Portage is *awesome*! I also like just keeping the box up to
date instead of that big upgrade once in a while. And I do love to
tinker. :-)

My media centre (mythtv) box at home is a slightly different story. It's
also running Gentoo but for slightly different reasons. It's not a
powerful machine (1Ghz Via Nehemiah) and appreciates the TLC that can be
applied via Gentoo, but also has some onboard hardware functionality
that seems to be relatively recently supported in Linux.  Not sure what
the support is like in the other distros, but it's handy to be able to
compile and install with little effort, and if it's not in Portage (or
not recent enough) I can create on overlay with my own ebuild. Gentoo is
a bit of a pain for this box as I don't like constantly keeping it up to
date, but I think the pros outweigh the cons. And I use distcc to keep
the compile time down.

At work I run Fedora. This is mainly because my desktop is my
development server and our "production" servers (I develop some internal
tools) run RHEL, and it's useful having the environments even slightly
similar. I have considered switching to Ubuntu with some kind of vm
running CentOS for development, but haven't had the time to put in that
effort yet.

As to the question of confusion, I only sometimes get a little confused
with package management, when I desperately want to run emerge on my
Fedora box, but that may be a little desire for more power, rather than
confusion. :-)

Owen