I'm sorry this has become a long post. You know how it is on choosing a distro... it's become more than that.

Years ago I remember first using Gentoo after coming from Mandrake ~6. It was brilliant in that it was well documented and the design was such that you know what's going on! A bit of a revelation! At the same time though it's quickens the process if you want to so it was great all round.

In the very early days things were unstable but everything was back then but the difference was that you could figure out how to fix it and you weren't learning out of date stuff like RedHat was doing back then.
Shortly later, Gentoo become really stable and I started using it more for use rather than learning. I loved being able to just emerge search and because there were so many ebuilds I could be sure that pretty much everything was in portage!
At some point though I didn't like the waiting to compile and moved to Ubuntu, which was very different and also a very exciting place to be. That was great and I liked the less extremism (for example leading finally to being able to watch movies more easily with these infernal codecs!) and more getting things done way that was grown in that stage of (non GNU)linux.

Eventually though I found every time I upgraded lots would break. Whereas before on Gentoo I had time as a teenager by this stage I had become to things 'just working'. One time I found something broken at sea behind satelite internet and therefore no bandwidth with which to fix it. Then also there has been the very non GNU linux Ubuntu has been going and of course Unity. Both of which wouldn't have been so bad but the upgrade bugs as well were too much.

So I moved to Sabayon.
Basically it's Gentoo with binary support. It's brilliant. A clear philosopy reminds me of Gentoo really early days. By basing itself on Gentoo so exactly and by having everyone running the same version of Gentoo (well, essentially) we have a system that is both uniform but also can be tailored if we really want to. Further, because of the commands designed to synchronise its Sabayoness to the Gentoo aspect of itself we can also refer to all those brilliant Gentoo resources for help. Generally I use the binaries for speed but if I want to I always have access to all the Gentoo portage stuff I used to love. I also loved the full disk encryption help on install which was really useful.

At first it was great but over time I noticed more and more problems, and all of them Gentoo is the underlying problem.
First, there is no monolithic portage tree anymore. Over time I'd stumble on an interesting little but interesting very useful project. Time and time again I found that while this was exactly the sort of thing I used to love finding in portage (and save my time and hassle in compiling myself - sometimes I'd be able to run things that before I could never get to compile!) - these projects just aren't being listed in portage anymore. Eventually, after this happened maybe 10-20x I posted online to say "what's going on here" and eventually some kind soul told me that there had been a policy change to remove unmaintained packages! Well, I thought - isn't that all the really good offline ones? I wish I'd been able to find that policy change in my searches...
There is then the option of overlays which of course is tidier technically but then you're into unstable dependencies and also strangely even adding a few overlays I still didn't seem to find packages like I used to 5-6 years ago.
Further, stability hasn't been improved by this. Once again I found that after a cycle of maybe as little as 3 or 4 upgrades things started breaking again. A sample of some of my current woes: "ata1.00: failed to get Identify Device Data" "xfce4-power-man[11543]: segfault at 42 ip 00007fd023132027 sp 00007fffb570dee0 error " "CONFIG_TIMER_STATS: is not set when it should be"
• and these are all Gentoo bugs of course, not Sabayon.

Since all this I've seen my parents using tablets and I've finally switched to an Android phone. I love the tablets in this regards because finally after years of people coming to me and saying "my computers broke I'm buying a new one" when all they need is a windows reinstall... people are finally using computers like they should be - no messing with installing and uninstalled, cruft left over and all that crud. Well... it's a lot better anyway.

So, I see all this and my heart just isn't into fixing linux problems. I don't mind fixing problems if I want to use something new but it really annoys me when I just want to continue using something and I feel I have to upgrade just to maintain basic security for network facing services or browsers (for example) for compatibility. That was initially what was good about Ubuntu - before I knew that only the distro upgrades were risky so only need to book a day off work once or twice every 6 months!

So...
what now for linux and the desktop? The reason this post is so long is that I'm using myself as a case study and I like a wider question. Could FreeBSD be the answer? - with it's completely different way of looking at things? Could Mint be what I'm looking for? Or do both have the usual upgrade woes? There was Gobolinux, which looked to sidestep the dependancies & packaging problem and bundle everything a lot more monolithically... could an approach like that be the answer now that we have Android?

Maybe there is a way to combine the ease of an Android like interface with the get-involved-if-you-want-to of linux?

Speaking of which... Android...
I was kind of hoping I would be able to use Android in a similar way to linux... perhaps beef it out with scripts and utilities so if I wanted to I could login remotely and the commandline wouldn't be so dissimilar to linux. But I've found it strangely hard to learn. I don't know why. I think I've missed the learning stage and also it's a lot of devs who have the knowledge I'm looking for (like the FS). Yes the docs are out there but they're a world away from those colour coded, unified Gentoo docs (for example). And besides.... Android just isn't linux, right?

All I'm looking for is something that is static and boring in terms of booting up, browsing the web, everyday tasks... but can also help me try out cutting edge stuff if I want to in a safe manner without breaking access to all that. It doesn't seem like a lot to ask.

related but different subject thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ld-4175452177/

A perscription for your ailment:

Do the following
1. Build an LFS by hand to remind you where things are. Feel free to stop and think about things as you go through. Use checkinstall(sp?) if you must have a package manager, but mind you there's no cruft in LFS. Proceed to BLFS if you want, but that's optional.

2. Promote yourself to Slackware. That's not a great amount different from LFS - you have to set it up the way you want, it presumes you know how to write a script, but things can be done, and tomorrow's update has never broken everything yet in Slackware.Then it stays put. There's no need for massive database rebuilds or rpm --middle-finger in slackware - /var/log/packages/ is all clear text and you can READ, or grep.

As for Android - it's a neutered busybox in disguise, no root user or su, and a massive java interpreter that does everything else. You need to root your Android system and install a mod, of which there are several, to get root. The GUI stuff is excellent - but it would want to be.

I gather X & graphics will never mix. Some one described programming graphics for X as being like calculating all the decimal places of pi using roman numerals :-/.

Is that all?
To me, it looks like another way of saying, "I want stability and cutting edge." Which is asking for a lot.

I am not sure what you mean by this.
No messing with installing applications? Why? Because the tablet has everything or because people are not able to install extra applications?
Or
No need to regularly re-install a system? I have not done that in a while and the last time was the result of a dual-booting accident.

Warning: opinion...

For some people the binary distros just don't cut it. Some will never be happy with the selection of, or versions of, binary packages in the main repository of any given distro. Unfortunately you are probably one of these people, yet you are not keen on compiling from source.

What you seem to want, correct me if I'm wrong, is a stable binary distribution which still enables you to install the occasional "new and shiny" and retain the stable base? The problem there is that stable and bleeding edge rarely mix and in most cases it will involve you, backporting and building from source anyway. This will likely involve backporting additional dependencies, which could potentially introduce bugs into the stable system, even breaking other programs in the process.

I may seem biased, but I have to agree with business_kid - in that Slackware is a good option. There are binaries, it is very stable and even though you will still be compiling software which is not in the repo from source, there are ready made build scripts available for many programs at slackbuilds.org, which build the binaries and package them for you to install - so not that hard.

As to *BSD, I'm not sure that would be any less headache and micro-management than Gentoo, but you could just give it a go?

/spouting heresy

Maybe he should just buy another ipad/iphone/mac and keep paying apple? Then you don't have a choice - one OS, one App store, one voice that knows what's right for you, as long as you keep paying them.