Hello everyone.

Well, i'll get right to it. I've been using Linux for some time now, but one thing i've had a hard time doing, is finding a distro for my desktop usage.

I've tried a lot of different distros and I run Red Hat on our company servers.

To be honest, I dont like Red Hat for a personal desktop, so that is out. I get tired of Red Hat not updating packages on a regular basis so I have to do it on my own.

But this is what im looking for:

I want something that, if I do decide to use a package system (apt, pkg, ports) keeps their packages up to date regularly.

I've come to the point where I prefer to download and install software from source. its the only way to make sure my software is up to date.

So, with that in mind, these are the following im looking at:

Debian
Slackware
*BSD

Anyone care to share comments and opinions?

Thanks

When you say RedHat does not update packages do you mean for bugs or security issues?

I though up2date was very good.

I think he means Red Hat aren't all that quick to pass on new versions of software.

If you're looking for a Linux distro that's releases new software versions quickly, compiles them from source and keeps them up to date with a Ports system then Gentoo is probably your best bet. New software releases make it into Portage (the name of Gentoo's Ports system) within hours of their release and are compiled from source to a set of compile and configure flags that are user specified. This link includes a little more information.

The other alternative, if you just want to build the packages and keep them up to date yourself is Linux from Scratch which as it's name implies, is built entirely from scratch with no overriding packaging system, nothing. It's best summed up but it's motton: Your distro, your rules.

Out of the choices you listed, FreeBSD would be what you'd want.

I beleave though that LSD's suggestion of Gentoo Linux is the best fit out there. It has pretty much exactly what you described you were looking for.

Thanks guys.

I'll take a look at Gentoo as well as FreeBSD.

The up2date is very good tool to use. As LSD mentioned, it gets hold when I cant update software to the latest version. For example, on RH 7.3, the latest package release is like 3.4.1 or something, when 3.7.2 is out...

I like the idea of having packages updated regularly. Whether I use a package system or compile from source.

Lately, i've become so frustrated with software being out of date for RH 7.3 and 8.0 (dont trust 9.0 at all on production servers), that I just started grabbing software from source and compiling it.

Looks like i'm going to be looking at Gentoo and FreeBSD or OpenBSD...

Good stuff though. I like finding out all the ins and outs of distros.

Thanks guys.

Cheers,

Tarballed